https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lacticaseibacillus_casei is another interesting one that got split into a separate genus. No direct action has so far been found for this genus of bacteria, but it makes the GI tract more hospitable for a large number of probiotic species and less hospitable for others like C. difficile, which is one of the nastiest post-antibiotic infections one can get. So nasty it has the French word for “difficult” in its name.
Found in cheddar cheese and yogurt. Any time I have problems or have to take antibiotics I make sure to line up some of both for recovery.
Makes me wonder how much of the positive research on fermented foods generally has to do with liver function improvement, since the organ is crucial to the health of most of the body.
We’ve mostly studied gut health. Something about modern diets is messing that up substantially. Some think it may be Roundup, others dish detergent, others some microbe we can’t culture on Petri dishes.
I find the dish detergent hypothesis more compelling than I used to - before moving to Australia. Here, I've noticed that almost nobody rinses the dishes after washing them (something I have always done). Curious what others do in different locations/cultures. Seems pretty obvious that consuming surfactants, triclosan, phthalates, alkaline agents, synthetic fragrances and dyes is not a great gut health strategy.
Not food but we definitely grew up in Australia with drinks that tasted a little of detergent from a generation of families that never had a dishwasher.
Far less common now as dishwashers became cheaper and more ubiquitous.
Why assume it's the diets rather than antibiotics? Your gut microbiome develops during the first ~3y of life(including partial heritability from your mother), after which the total set of microbes in it remains approximately constant throughout your life, with only the relative proportions of them shifting with diet changes.
In contrast, antibiotics often kill a strain of a few off completely, while suppressing everything else except for a few strains that resist the antibiotic, which also creates a massive opportunity for new bacteria to colonize. And these deficits are partially heritable.
The incidence of crohn’s, IBD, celiac, etc going on out there. Some people want to throw obesity into that ring as well. Inflammation certainly causes weight gain.
Ah ok, well, obesity incidence is probably almost entirely explained by the amount of sugar and fats in modern diets. I wouldn't have thought of it as pertaining to gut health specifically, but no doubt there can be relationships there.
The other things seem more plausible. Purely anecdotally, my step-dad always thought he was intolerant to gluten because of his reactions to British bread, but when he spent a lot of time in France and tried bread there, he was fine.
Could be there's something about the production process of the standard British "Chorleywood loaf" that aggravates some bowels.
In general, I find it quite easy to believe that a lot of mass-produced foods contain what are essentially poisons, but I'm curious about evidential links (and I'm also aware that lots of naturally-occurring foods can be poisons if eaten too much, but that's a different question)
> Purely anecdotally, my step-dad always thought he was intolerant to gluten because of his reactions to British bread, but when he spent a lot of time in France and tried bread there, he was fine.
The American equivalent of this (people who go to Europe and think the bread is healthier because it's easy to digest) is because we fortify wheat and the extra nutrients esp. iron cause stomach discomfort.
You need to define "spent some time". Was he working? On sabbatical or holiday?
"I travelled somewhere and things improved" has the serious complication that you changed almost everything at once and possibly removed major stress sources. You were even outside of your own home - and buildings have ecosystems themselves anyway as well as just systemic faults.
I believe that ultraprocessed foods are recognized as borderline poisons. Esp if they contain trans fats or hydrogenated fats, which arw described as "slow acting poisons" - but the same goes for "extruded foods" - stuff that is processed to the point where it can be molded or squeezed into funny looking shapes.
there is a sort of concept that states "you are your biome", and no end of evidence to show that poor gut and other flora causes disease, with many ways to get there, diet bieng one
there are many tribal groups that fair exceptionaly poorly on modern wester diets, with well documented cases of plains indians haveing spontainious remission of diabetes when going to the much leaner diet of there ancestors.
this ties in with another sort of concept that there are no true racial or tribal differences, but there are enzymatic adaptations in population groups that are tied to environments and food sources that tend to get inherited, the upshot for many modern people is that it's a semi random crap shoot, as there are prople who go ahead and outlive all of there peers, and do whatever they feel like, smoking ,drinking, junk food eating octogenarians, not many, but some
There are so many interesting metabolites that the gut microbiome produces that modulate the immune system. My former startup (Interface Biosciences) was trying to develop a process for identifying and developing these as traditional pharmaceuticals (e.g. small molecule drugs).
One of the big problems with most of these metabolites is that they work better in preventing the emergence of disease pathology than they do in ameliorating it. In other words, they aren't super reverse causal for disease. You'll note that in this study, the design was pretreatment with the beneficial metabolite to prevent injury, rather than rescue once injury occurred ([0], [1]).
It's difficult to make a prophylactic pharmaceutical/intervention - the market is smaller, the therapeutic index must be larger, and the insurance reimbursement is harder to get. I hope that someone smarter can break this open at some point. Natural products are the source of over 50% of approved drugs (though weighted heavily towards antibiotics), and the gut microbiome has really not been explored enough for its natural products.
As a note on the probiotics - be very skeptical of probiotic claims. Even if the microbe actually engrafts in your GI tract (a very big if), the probability that it is producing a given 'good' metabolite is unclear. Microbes have thousands of genes and they are constantly changing metabolism (=the metabolites they excrete) as a function of an innumerable array of factors including: energetic (what food sources are in the GI at that moment?), competitive (what competitor species are they sensing?), immune (what is the host immune state?), and physical (do I sense a high diffusion environment?) factors.
[0] From the abstract: "Here, we report that oral administration of 10-HSA prevented AFB1-induced gut epithelial barrier disruption and preserved mucosal T cell populations.
[1] From the methods: "Mice were randomly assigned into three groups. One group (n = 6) was pretreated with 10-HSA (AstaTech A10837) at 100 mg/kg/day in vehicle for one week and then aflatoxin-β1 (Sigma-Aldrich A6636) dissolved in DMSO (final concentration in water was 0.1%) was added to their drinking water for 21 days at a concentration of 5 mg/L. Another group (n = 6) was pretreated with the vehicle control for 1 week and then aflatoxin-β1 was added to their drinking water for 21 days at a concentration of 5 mg/L. The third group (n = 4) served as the negative control group and received vehicle for 1 week prior to DMSO addition to drinking water for 21 days.
The paper has a critical statistical flaw buried in the methods: when their gut RNA-seq data showed no significant changes after proper FDR correction for multiple testing, they simply abandoned the correction and used P≤0.01 instead. This is textbook p-hacking.
While the multi-organ approach is interesting, this reads more like a fishing expedition that found patterns in noise rather than robust biological findings.
yes, this is what's done with tributyrin which is a triester of butyric acid. You want to ingest either a butyric acid salt or an ester of butyric acid, since the butyric acid itself is really stinky.
yeah Davis is agriculturally oriented. Because this microbe grows in cows stomachs it is added to silage (feed) - so dairy products have this metabolite.
Amazing finding. The statistics on liver damage from aflatoxins said to affect potentially 5 billion people. And of course in the US, with its high incidence of obesity has liver issues due to NAFLD. Then of course the heavy drinkers are all at risk.
It seems that the powers that be decided lactobacillus was getting a bit crowded and decided to split it into separate genuses.
From the article we are talking about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactiplantibacillus_plantarum and it’s apparently the most common fermenting bacteria for silage, and shows up in sauerkraut and kimchi.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lacticaseibacillus_casei is another interesting one that got split into a separate genus. No direct action has so far been found for this genus of bacteria, but it makes the GI tract more hospitable for a large number of probiotic species and less hospitable for others like C. difficile, which is one of the nastiest post-antibiotic infections one can get. So nasty it has the French word for “difficult” in its name.
Found in cheddar cheese and yogurt. Any time I have problems or have to take antibiotics I make sure to line up some of both for recovery.
Makes me wonder how much of the positive research on fermented foods generally has to do with liver function improvement, since the organ is crucial to the health of most of the body.
We’ve mostly studied gut health. Something about modern diets is messing that up substantially. Some think it may be Roundup, others dish detergent, others some microbe we can’t culture on Petri dishes.
I find the dish detergent hypothesis more compelling than I used to - before moving to Australia. Here, I've noticed that almost nobody rinses the dishes after washing them (something I have always done). Curious what others do in different locations/cultures. Seems pretty obvious that consuming surfactants, triclosan, phthalates, alkaline agents, synthetic fragrances and dyes is not a great gut health strategy.
Doesn't that make the next serving of food taste like soap?
Not food but we definitely grew up in Australia with drinks that tasted a little of detergent from a generation of families that never had a dishwasher.
Far less common now as dishwashers became cheaper and more ubiquitous.
Worthy noting not rinsing in Australia is almost certainly a regional | family habit.
Sixty plus years here and four generations of our family and most people we know rinse off plates and glasses and vigorously dry with a fresh towel.
Why assume it's the diets rather than antibiotics? Your gut microbiome develops during the first ~3y of life(including partial heritability from your mother), after which the total set of microbes in it remains approximately constant throughout your life, with only the relative proportions of them shifting with diet changes.
In contrast, antibiotics often kill a strain of a few off completely, while suppressing everything else except for a few strains that resist the antibiotic, which also creates a massive opportunity for new bacteria to colonize. And these deficits are partially heritable.
What's the evidence that modern diets are substantially messing up gut health? (just curious, not (necessarily;) sceptical)
The incidence of crohn’s, IBD, celiac, etc going on out there. Some people want to throw obesity into that ring as well. Inflammation certainly causes weight gain.
Ah ok, well, obesity incidence is probably almost entirely explained by the amount of sugar and fats in modern diets. I wouldn't have thought of it as pertaining to gut health specifically, but no doubt there can be relationships there.
The other things seem more plausible. Purely anecdotally, my step-dad always thought he was intolerant to gluten because of his reactions to British bread, but when he spent a lot of time in France and tried bread there, he was fine.
Could be there's something about the production process of the standard British "Chorleywood loaf" that aggravates some bowels.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chorleywood_bread_process
In general, I find it quite easy to believe that a lot of mass-produced foods contain what are essentially poisons, but I'm curious about evidential links (and I'm also aware that lots of naturally-occurring foods can be poisons if eaten too much, but that's a different question)
> Ah ok, well, obesity incidence is probably almost entirely explained by the amount of sugar and fats in modern diets.
The obesity epidemic started rapidly around 1980, but it's unlikely diet changed for the worse since then.
Also, it happened to lab animals and pets as well.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/abs/10.1098/rspb.2010...
Also, it appears to be correlated with low altitudes and interventions that cause you to move to higher altitudes cause weight loss.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
> Purely anecdotally, my step-dad always thought he was intolerant to gluten because of his reactions to British bread, but when he spent a lot of time in France and tried bread there, he was fine.
The American equivalent of this (people who go to Europe and think the bread is healthier because it's easy to digest) is because we fortify wheat and the extra nutrients esp. iron cause stomach discomfort.
You need to define "spent some time". Was he working? On sabbatical or holiday?
"I travelled somewhere and things improved" has the serious complication that you changed almost everything at once and possibly removed major stress sources. You were even outside of your own home - and buildings have ecosystems themselves anyway as well as just systemic faults.
Yeah ok, but it's just an anecdote so it doesn't count as generalisable evidence in any case.
I would just add that when he got back to Britain and tried baguette style bread there he found that he could tolerate it in Britain too.
Again, I'm just reporting a story as it was told to me because I was reminded of it in response to the previous comment.
I believe that ultraprocessed foods are recognized as borderline poisons. Esp if they contain trans fats or hydrogenated fats, which arw described as "slow acting poisons" - but the same goes for "extruded foods" - stuff that is processed to the point where it can be molded or squeezed into funny looking shapes.
there is a sort of concept that states "you are your biome", and no end of evidence to show that poor gut and other flora causes disease, with many ways to get there, diet bieng one there are many tribal groups that fair exceptionaly poorly on modern wester diets, with well documented cases of plains indians haveing spontainious remission of diabetes when going to the much leaner diet of there ancestors. this ties in with another sort of concept that there are no true racial or tribal differences, but there are enzymatic adaptations in population groups that are tied to environments and food sources that tend to get inherited, the upshot for many modern people is that it's a semi random crap shoot, as there are prople who go ahead and outlive all of there peers, and do whatever they feel like, smoking ,drinking, junk food eating octogenarians, not many, but some
Koreans live off of fermented kimchi, something like 80+ pounds per person every year. Do Koreans have lower incidence of gut complications?
They have a much higher stomach cancer rate.
They also drink like fish and eat hot foods. Both of those are known contributors.
I bet they've got lower rates of hep than America, but that probably doesn't have anything to do with the kimchi.
There are so many interesting metabolites that the gut microbiome produces that modulate the immune system. My former startup (Interface Biosciences) was trying to develop a process for identifying and developing these as traditional pharmaceuticals (e.g. small molecule drugs).
One of the big problems with most of these metabolites is that they work better in preventing the emergence of disease pathology than they do in ameliorating it. In other words, they aren't super reverse causal for disease. You'll note that in this study, the design was pretreatment with the beneficial metabolite to prevent injury, rather than rescue once injury occurred ([0], [1]).
It's difficult to make a prophylactic pharmaceutical/intervention - the market is smaller, the therapeutic index must be larger, and the insurance reimbursement is harder to get. I hope that someone smarter can break this open at some point. Natural products are the source of over 50% of approved drugs (though weighted heavily towards antibiotics), and the gut microbiome has really not been explored enough for its natural products.
As a note on the probiotics - be very skeptical of probiotic claims. Even if the microbe actually engrafts in your GI tract (a very big if), the probability that it is producing a given 'good' metabolite is unclear. Microbes have thousands of genes and they are constantly changing metabolism (=the metabolites they excrete) as a function of an innumerable array of factors including: energetic (what food sources are in the GI at that moment?), competitive (what competitor species are they sensing?), immune (what is the host immune state?), and physical (do I sense a high diffusion environment?) factors.
[0] From the abstract: "Here, we report that oral administration of 10-HSA prevented AFB1-induced gut epithelial barrier disruption and preserved mucosal T cell populations.
[1] From the methods: "Mice were randomly assigned into three groups. One group (n = 6) was pretreated with 10-HSA (AstaTech A10837) at 100 mg/kg/day in vehicle for one week and then aflatoxin-β1 (Sigma-Aldrich A6636) dissolved in DMSO (final concentration in water was 0.1%) was added to their drinking water for 21 days at a concentration of 5 mg/L. Another group (n = 6) was pretreated with the vehicle control for 1 week and then aflatoxin-β1 was added to their drinking water for 21 days at a concentration of 5 mg/L. The third group (n = 4) served as the negative control group and received vehicle for 1 week prior to DMSO addition to drinking water for 21 days.
The paper has a critical statistical flaw buried in the methods: when their gut RNA-seq data showed no significant changes after proper FDR correction for multiple testing, they simply abandoned the correction and used P≤0.01 instead. This is textbook p-hacking.
While the multi-organ approach is interesting, this reads more like a fishing expedition that found patterns in noise rather than robust biological findings.
That doesn't sound good at all. :(
10-HSA is a fatty-acid metabolite produced by Lactobacillus bacteria
Lactobacillus Plantarum is a super common probiotic that produces 10-HSA and other important metabolites
its commercial name is also known as lp299v which has been studied for decades, tons of studies
for example: https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4344/10/2/154
lp299v is extreme safe and can be taken in mega-doses however it will not colonize in the GI so would have to be taken routinely
Wouldn’t it be easier to just take a gram of the metabolite itself vs hoping for long term colonization?
yes, this is what's done with tributyrin which is a triester of butyric acid. You want to ingest either a butyric acid salt or an ester of butyric acid, since the butyric acid itself is really stinky.
Supported by grants from NIH/NIAID Grants and the University of California Davis.
yeah Davis is agriculturally oriented. Because this microbe grows in cows stomachs it is added to silage (feed) - so dairy products have this metabolite.
Amazing finding. The statistics on liver damage from aflatoxins said to affect potentially 5 billion people. And of course in the US, with its high incidence of obesity has liver issues due to NAFLD. Then of course the heavy drinkers are all at risk.
https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-appr...
I'll drink to that!
kefir has that microbe. So drink some kefir
and eat a kraut dog. Or a Ruben. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactiplantibacillus_plantaru...
Makes me wonder whether Makgeolli (a low alcohol fermented traditional Korean beverage) contains this too.
Sure, or kombucha?