6 ms·

Mix of Bacteria in Gut May Depend More on Diet Than Genes

77 points by Multics 12y ago

md2be 12y ago
Here is a case where the research is lagging the knowledge base. Every holistic MD has, for decades, preached eating foods enriched with healthy bacteria. What we need now is research that looks at outcomes.
- cing 12y ago
  These results indicate that you can eat anything, not just foods enriched with bacteria like probiotic yogurt (which has questionable benefits in itself http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/6180/do-probiotics-have-health-benefits http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/6180/do-probioti...), and observe a change in gut microbiota. "Turnbaugh’s team found that switching mice to a high-sugar, high-fat diet reshaped the abundance of the community of microbes in the gut to a new, stable makeup within three days, in a reproducible manner that was largely independent of genetic differences among individual mice."
  - blacksmith_tb 12y ago
    Not sure I follow - is there a suggestion that you can only eat 'foods enriched with bacteria like probiotic yogurt'? I would think the less questionable benefits of eating yogurt would be calcium and protein, at the very least. This study didn't try to feed any sort of special 'probiotic' foods to the mice.
    - kolev 12y ago
      Yogurt is a great, but greatly overlooked source of many other nutrients such as iodine.
  - kolev 12y ago
    The real yogurt is the Bulgarian yogurt, not low-fat high-sugar ones sold at store in the States. Only an idiot will eat a probiotic "yogurt" with 30g of sugars in the small container and think they are doing good to their health! Fortunately, there are two brands [0] of the original sold at Whole Foods today (one, unfortunately, available only on the East Coast [1]), but they are too sour for the American to like. Does it have questionable benefits? Maybe you should try to research how yogurt got the attention of medicine. It was eaten by my predecessors for centuries and the benefits are without doubt. When babies are born, their gut is sterile before it gets colonized from outside. The diet definitely can affect which strain will outgrow others, but all gut bacteria is exogenous. [0] http://www.whitemountainfoods.com/YogurtProductPage.html http://www.whitemountainfoods.com/YogurtProductPage.html [1] http://www.trimonayogurt.com/ http://www.trimonayogurt.com/
    - bch 12y ago
      If one is sufficiently motivated (and can utilize all the product), it's not hard to make ones own yogurt, with starter. For that case, you could find your favourite local milk and make yogurt who's ingredients you are certain of, because you put them in. http://www.wikihow.com/Make-Yogurt http://www.wikihow.com/Make-Yogurt
      - kolev 12y ago
        This is true and might be surprising that Bulgarians are not accustomed to make their own yogurt, because stores are full of high-quality one that's cheap (unlike the $6-7/jar in the States). Kefir is also great and can also be made at home. My favorite is Lifeway [0]. [0] http://www.lifeway.net/Products/OrganicKefir/WholeMilkKefir/OrganicWholeMilkPlain.aspx http://www.lifeway.net/Products/OrganicKefir/WholeMilkKefir/...
- wdewind 12y ago
  > Every holistic MD has, for decades, preached eating foods enriched with healthy bacteria. The problem with this is that they are frequently wrong. Many people respond poorly to these type of probiotic diets, and holistic medicine has observed outcomes in a small portion of the population and thus encouraged us to generalize them. All we really know about the gut is that it is extremely complicated and that in terms of gut conditions' ("IBS") relationship with gut microbiota they run the gamut. Many of them are either not directly affected by microbiota population (ie: nerve damage, circadian rhythm ), or gut microbiota are part of a multi-causal problem. We need more science like this, that reaffirms what we "know," not more holistic bullshit. Source: IBS sufferer who has spent years talking to GI specialists and reading research papers about this stuff. It's hard, and as soon as you think you have it figured out it smacks you in the face with another factor you haven't considered.
- zzzeek 12y ago
  It's too bad you're being downmodded. I'll state what I think you're getting at: "holistic MDs have, for decades, hypothesized that the link between foods and gut bacteria is much more important than the scientific community yet realizes". Everything else they did from that point, yes you can call it "bullshit" because it was conjectural/anecdotal/etc, so downmod away for daring to suggest that such a morally bankrupt bunch as the holistic community might have had the faintest conjecture about something that turned out to be scientifically significant.
- jerf 12y ago
  If you put a chip down on every number at a roulette wheel, you can experience the joy of winning with nearly every spin! Yet, strangely, the stack of chips dwindles instead of grows....
jobu 12y ago
Study seems to follow common-sense - change the nutrients ingested and different gut bacteria will flourish. What I'm really interested in is which types of bacteria create a feedback loop by releasing chemicals/hormones to increase hunger or cravings for specific foods. Definitely not an easy thing to determine given all the variables, but it seems very likely based on the other studies showing bacteria can promote fat or thin mice: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-gut-bacteria-help-make-us-fat-and-thin/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-gut-bacteria-h...
- derekp7 12y ago
  Which means that a cure for obesity (or at least one of the components of a cure) can be as simple as an antibiotic that targets the "bad" gut bacteria. Very interesting.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
aroch 12y ago
Eh, as a researcher at the periphery of the Human Microbiome Project and American Gut project this has been the accepted (and already shown, experimentally) conclusion for quite some time.
- wdewind 12y ago
  This study examined two new things: 1. The speed at which the microbiome can change (<3 days) 2. The permanence of such changes (some of them are more permanent than others)
  - aroch 12y ago
    Those aren't particularly new things to study. We have tons of murine data on the subject and quite a few PhD students over the last 4-6 years have done their PhDs on microbiota and diet with themselves as the guinea pig, so to speak (2-4 year longitudinals). There are a couple mouse papers out that don't directly address the issue in 2, but that permanence (or lack thereof) played prominent roles in their findings.
    - wdewind 12y ago
      Yeah, you know what, you're right. Did a bit more googling around and there's tons of stuff on both. Sorry!
scotch_drinker 12y ago
It would be interesting to hear both why the chose a "high fat-high sugar" diet and to see further research that did more isolated tests in the vein of "high carb", "high fat" and "high protein" instead of combinations of them. Also, what are the implications of altered gut makeup after adopting these diets? Surely we could come up with experiments to measure metabolism and behavior as a result of the altered gut bacteria. It will be fascinating to see how our understanding of nutrition and diet changes as science finally catches up. Studies like this are just the beginning.
- shaneofalltrad 12y ago
  It does seem like a very simple study, that we would have guessed the results. Seems like a study like this would be to help facilitate laws or actions rather than finding the really important answers you are suggesting. I hope one day we come up with a model to fund research for the people, and not wait for larger organizations to fund, typically for selfish reasons. I think if we could find this model science will not only catch up, but trail-blaze new findings.
presidentender 12y ago
Given the evident link between gut bacteria and mental health, it may be that we'll see diet as a component of psychiatric care in the future. (http://www.nature.com/news/gut-brain-link-grabs-neuroscientists-1.16316 http://www.nature.com/news/gut-brain-link-grabs-neuroscienti...)
- matt608 12y ago
  Indeed, which adds to the argument that so called "mental" health problems are not actually mental. Many diseases cause some mental symptoms and get wrongly labelled as mental illnesses, when I dispute that there is such a thing.
  - Jgrubb 12y ago
    You dispute that mental illness is a thing that exists?
    - d0mine 12y ago
      It is known that the reliability of psychiatric diagnoses is non-existent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenhan_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenhan_experiment Edit: It is ok to downvote if you disagree. But think what it says about you if you are downvoting facts.
      - Jgrubb 12y ago
        That links to an experiment that -proves- suggests it's possible to game psychiatric diagnosis, not that mental illness doesn't exist. edit: btw the way, I've been here for like 5 years now and I still don't know what flavor of Markdown is used here.
        jonah 12y ago
        Linked from the FAQ at the bottom of the page: https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc
mercurialshark 12y ago
Can someone speak to my theory (that's based on limited knowledge), that if we wanted to "reset" the gut, we could deliberately take antibiotics to wipe out good/bad colonies of microbes and tailor a hyper-specific diet for sought after results. The hypothesis being that if certain microbes flourish for years and that if it is impractical to genetically map the gut biome to identify which are thriving in every patient, this could help us get to a clean slate before therapy is attempted.
- beltranrm 12y ago
  IMHO, that seems like a bad idea. Two thoughts (these are only very overly generalized opinions, biology is a little bit complicated): 1) You might not get them all, and the ones that survive might transfer the traits of antibiotic survival and pathogenic-ability (if present) to the new population. 2) You would need to ensure that your hyper-specific diet contains the right mixture of microbes, say, you would need to avoid irradiated food, and a bunch of other things. "Bad microbes" coming into an empty gut seems to me like a bad thing.
  - mercurialshark 12y ago
    Thanks, both are good points! I assumed there were downsides to if you weren't able to wipe out the robust bad microbes but that's even worse than I had expected. Perhaps I'll wait on self-experimentation. The possibility of nefarious and now genetically enhanced microbes reigning supreme in my body is not cool.
- acomjean 12y ago
  Antibiotics don't wipe out all the bacteria, just some of them. Its a bit of a problem because if some are effected less by the antibiotic, you can change the balance when the bacteria populations bounce back. The bacteria that are there do set up shop and don't like others crowding in. We don't really enough enough about what should be the optimal mix of bacteria to make someone healthy. They do "fecal" transplants to help people get back bacteria that are missing. There was a graduate student talk (an hour) about some of this stuff last spring. slide decked linked to the right. http://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/seminars/2014/in-the-loop-with-poop-intestinal-microbes-in-health-and-immunity/ http://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/seminars/2014/in-the-loop-with-p...
kaitai 12y ago
This complements other research that has been done on gut bacteria across cultures -- in different places we humans eat different prevailing diets: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2012/05/09/three-nations-divided-by-common-gut-bacteria/ http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2012/05/0... http://www.wired.com/2014/04/hadza-hunter-gatherer-gut-microbiome/ http://www.wired.com/2014/04/hadza-hunter-gatherer-gut-micro... The second link is particularly interesting, as the Hadza hunter-gatherers have a lot of gut bacteria that cause disease in the west. So it seems that gut bacteria aren't the whole story. Something to complicate the story for people who want to cure mental illness or create skinny people via manipulating gut bacteria.
zach 12y ago
We're slowly coming to understand that antibiotics are very unkind to our gut flora and are a prime suspect in subsequent weight gain. Post-antibiotic diet could be a critical intervention to keep patients from falling into the grasp of obesity. A NY Times article earlier this year gives a background on how the rise of antibiotics has been accompanied by a rise in weight among animals and humans alike: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/09/opinion/sunday/the-fat-drug.html http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/09/opinion/sunday/the-fat-dru... Kids in particular seem to be at risk. A recent study of 64,000 kids has associated repeated antibiotic exposure before age 2 with early childhood obesity: http://archpedi.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=1909801 http://archpedi.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=19098... It's good we're investigating diet-based therapy, so patients can someday hear their doctors say "after finishing this broad-spectrum antibiotic prescription, you [or your child] should eat like this for this amount of time to restore digestive health."
- Shivetya 12y ago
  Cipro did wonders on my intestinal tract, effectively killing everything including the good. Had nine days of that to fight an under the skin infection/etc. Months after I started having problems with food, restrooms were becoming my second home and my commute was planned around easy access to them. You never want to experience life where one bit of food can send you off. Six doctor visits, stool and blood tests later, the doctors found what moved in. New antibiotics and replenishment medicines, diet with lots of probiotics, and within a few months I was back to mostly normal. My story is simple, if you end up on harsh antibiotics it can change your life. Plan for it.
  - seekingtruth 12y ago
    >Six doctor visits, stool and blood tests later, the doctors found what moved in. Something other than C. Diff? Would you mind sharing what it was?
- refurb 12y ago
  If you look at your JAMA article, you'll see that the connection between antibiotic use and childhood obesity is pretty small. My question would be, we've had broad-spectrum antibiotics around since WW2 (broad spectrum being the one the paper flags), yet obesity is a relatively recent phenomenon. Also, they also found a connection between obesity and "Steroid use, male sex, urban practice, public insurance, Hispanic ethnicity, and diagnosed asthma or wheezing were also predictors of obesity; common infectious diagnoses and antireflux medications were not."
viewer5 12y ago
So do we know yet what sort of diet cultivates a microflora biome that encourages healthy weight loss? I'm asking for a friend... It's easy to find diets for losing weight in general, but I'm curious if we know enough to create a diet to make a microflora composition that can help the weight loss process along. I keep seeing mentions of the microflora factor influencing weight gain, so I'm assuming there's a way to cultivate it to help with loss as well.
- toomuchtodo 12y ago
  http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=gut+bacteria+obesity http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=gut+bacteria+obesity
- Mz 12y ago
  There's no contact info in your profile. You can email me if you want to chit chat.
- beltranrm 12y ago
  Turnbaugh was also an author on http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v444/n7122/abs/nature05414.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v444/n7122/abs/nature05... (looking at parts of that question on mice) and also on: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21543530 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21543530 (looking at parts of that questions on humans). The answer in humans does not quite match the answer in mice so far. Possible reasons to explain this discrepancy : might be the lack of a large enough group to study, or a local variation in the groups that does not generalize to mice.
ratsmack 12y ago
I know that antibiotics are a significant factor in the loss of gut bacteria, but another factor is all of the preservatives that pervade the manufactured food most people eat every day. I've often wondered what percentage of the loss is from these substances.
dschiptsov 12y ago
Ask like this: Is it a mere coincidence that so many of poorest tropical and subtropical (hot and humid climate) populations traditionally use highly spiced food? Does it strictly a tradition of making a "poor" food taste hot, or there is a connection with bacteria population?
- Havoc 12y ago
  Spicy food was historically used to mask food that had gone off (e.g. meat in hot climates). I doubt that has been a relevant consideration for many decades though, so I'd attribute it to culture/tradition.
  - dragonwriter 12y ago
    > Spicy food was historically used to mask food that had gone off (e.g. meat in hot climates). Spicing food has a preservative effect, which is probably a more important factor in the spread of the practice than masking food that has already gone off.
- Aloisius 12y ago
  > Ask like this: Is it a mere coincidence that so many of poorest tropical and subtropical (hot and humid climate) populations traditionally use highly spiced food? Does it strictly a tradition of making a "poor" food taste hot, or there is a connection with bacteria population? Tradition? Capsicums are a new world crop. They didn't make much of a dent in cuisines outside of the Americas until the 18th century.
  - dschiptsov 12y ago
    India? Sri Lanka? Thailand?

77 points by Multics 12y ago

md2be 12y ago

Here is a case where the research is lagging the knowledge base. Every holistic MD has, for decades, preached eating foods enriched with healthy bacteria. What we need now is research that looks at outcomes.

cing 12y ago
These results indicate that you can eat anything, not just foods enriched with bacteria like probiotic yogurt (which has questionable benefits in itself http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/6180/do-probiotics-have-health-benefits http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/6180/do-probioti...), and observe a change in gut microbiota. "Turnbaugh’s team found that switching mice to a high-sugar, high-fat diet reshaped the abundance of the community of microbes in the gut to a new, stable makeup within three days, in a reproducible manner that was largely independent of genetic differences among individual mice."
- blacksmith_tb 12y ago
  Not sure I follow - is there a suggestion that you can only eat 'foods enriched with bacteria like probiotic yogurt'? I would think the less questionable benefits of eating yogurt would be calcium and protein, at the very least. This study didn't try to feed any sort of special 'probiotic' foods to the mice.
  - kolev 12y ago
    Yogurt is a great, but greatly overlooked source of many other nutrients such as iodine.
- kolev 12y ago
  The real yogurt is the Bulgarian yogurt, not low-fat high-sugar ones sold at store in the States. Only an idiot will eat a probiotic "yogurt" with 30g of sugars in the small container and think they are doing good to their health! Fortunately, there are two brands [0] of the original sold at Whole Foods today (one, unfortunately, available only on the East Coast [1]), but they are too sour for the American to like. Does it have questionable benefits? Maybe you should try to research how yogurt got the attention of medicine. It was eaten by my predecessors for centuries and the benefits are without doubt. When babies are born, their gut is sterile before it gets colonized from outside. The diet definitely can affect which strain will outgrow others, but all gut bacteria is exogenous. [0] http://www.whitemountainfoods.com/YogurtProductPage.html http://www.whitemountainfoods.com/YogurtProductPage.html [1] http://www.trimonayogurt.com/ http://www.trimonayogurt.com/
  - bch 12y ago
    If one is sufficiently motivated (and can utilize all the product), it's not hard to make ones own yogurt, with starter. For that case, you could find your favourite local milk and make yogurt who's ingredients you are certain of, because you put them in. http://www.wikihow.com/Make-Yogurt http://www.wikihow.com/Make-Yogurt
    - kolev 12y ago
      This is true and might be surprising that Bulgarians are not accustomed to make their own yogurt, because stores are full of high-quality one that's cheap (unlike the $6-7/jar in the States). Kefir is also great and can also be made at home. My favorite is Lifeway [0]. [0] http://www.lifeway.net/Products/OrganicKefir/WholeMilkKefir/OrganicWholeMilkPlain.aspx http://www.lifeway.net/Products/OrganicKefir/WholeMilkKefir/...
wdewind 12y ago
> Every holistic MD has, for decades, preached eating foods enriched with healthy bacteria. The problem with this is that they are frequently wrong. Many people respond poorly to these type of probiotic diets, and holistic medicine has observed outcomes in a small portion of the population and thus encouraged us to generalize them. All we really know about the gut is that it is extremely complicated and that in terms of gut conditions' ("IBS") relationship with gut microbiota they run the gamut. Many of them are either not directly affected by microbiota population (ie: nerve damage, circadian rhythm ), or gut microbiota are part of a multi-causal problem. We need more science like this, that reaffirms what we "know," not more holistic bullshit. Source: IBS sufferer who has spent years talking to GI specialists and reading research papers about this stuff. It's hard, and as soon as you think you have it figured out it smacks you in the face with another factor you haven't considered.
zzzeek 12y ago
It's too bad you're being downmodded. I'll state what I think you're getting at: "holistic MDs have, for decades, hypothesized that the link between foods and gut bacteria is much more important than the scientific community yet realizes". Everything else they did from that point, yes you can call it "bullshit" because it was conjectural/anecdotal/etc, so downmod away for daring to suggest that such a morally bankrupt bunch as the holistic community might have had the faintest conjecture about something that turned out to be scientifically significant.
jerf 12y ago
If you put a chip down on every number at a roulette wheel, you can experience the joy of winning with nearly every spin! Yet, strangely, the stack of chips dwindles instead of grows....

jobu 12y ago

Study seems to follow common-sense - change the nutrients ingested and different gut bacteria will flourish. What I'm really interested in is which types of bacteria create a feedback loop by releasing chemicals/hormones to increase hunger or cravings for specific foods. Definitely not an easy thing to determine given all the variables, but it seems very likely based on the other studies showing bacteria can promote fat or thin mice: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-gut-bacteria-help-make-us-fat-and-thin/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-gut-bacteria-h...

derekp7 12y ago
Which means that a cure for obesity (or at least one of the components of a cure) can be as simple as an antibiotic that targets the "bad" gut bacteria. Very interesting.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

aroch 12y ago

Eh, as a researcher at the periphery of the Human Microbiome Project and American Gut project this has been the accepted (and already shown, experimentally) conclusion for quite some time.

wdewind 12y ago
This study examined two new things: 1. The speed at which the microbiome can change (<3 days) 2. The permanence of such changes (some of them are more permanent than others)
- aroch 12y ago
  Those aren't particularly new things to study. We have tons of murine data on the subject and quite a few PhD students over the last 4-6 years have done their PhDs on microbiota and diet with themselves as the guinea pig, so to speak (2-4 year longitudinals). There are a couple mouse papers out that don't directly address the issue in 2, but that permanence (or lack thereof) played prominent roles in their findings.
  - wdewind 12y ago
    Yeah, you know what, you're right. Did a bit more googling around and there's tons of stuff on both. Sorry!

scotch_drinker 12y ago

It would be interesting to hear both why the chose a "high fat-high sugar" diet and to see further research that did more isolated tests in the vein of "high carb", "high fat" and "high protein" instead of combinations of them. Also, what are the implications of altered gut makeup after adopting these diets? Surely we could come up with experiments to measure metabolism and behavior as a result of the altered gut bacteria. It will be fascinating to see how our understanding of nutrition and diet changes as science finally catches up. Studies like this are just the beginning.

shaneofalltrad 12y ago
It does seem like a very simple study, that we would have guessed the results. Seems like a study like this would be to help facilitate laws or actions rather than finding the really important answers you are suggesting. I hope one day we come up with a model to fund research for the people, and not wait for larger organizations to fund, typically for selfish reasons. I think if we could find this model science will not only catch up, but trail-blaze new findings.

presidentender 12y ago

Given the evident link between gut bacteria and mental health, it may be that we'll see diet as a component of psychiatric care in the future. (http://www.nature.com/news/gut-brain-link-grabs-neuroscientists-1.16316 http://www.nature.com/news/gut-brain-link-grabs-neuroscienti...)

matt608 12y ago
Indeed, which adds to the argument that so called "mental" health problems are not actually mental. Many diseases cause some mental symptoms and get wrongly labelled as mental illnesses, when I dispute that there is such a thing.
- Jgrubb 12y ago
  You dispute that mental illness is a thing that exists?
  - d0mine 12y ago
    It is known that the reliability of psychiatric diagnoses is non-existent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenhan_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenhan_experiment Edit: It is ok to downvote if you disagree. But think what it says about you if you are downvoting facts.
    - Jgrubb 12y ago
      That links to an experiment that -proves- suggests it's possible to game psychiatric diagnosis, not that mental illness doesn't exist. edit: btw the way, I've been here for like 5 years now and I still don't know what flavor of Markdown is used here.
      - jonah 12y ago
        Linked from the FAQ at the bottom of the page: https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

mercurialshark 12y ago

Can someone speak to my theory (that's based on limited knowledge), that if we wanted to "reset" the gut, we could deliberately take antibiotics to wipe out good/bad colonies of microbes and tailor a hyper-specific diet for sought after results. The hypothesis being that if certain microbes flourish for years and that if it is impractical to genetically map the gut biome to identify which are thriving in every patient, this could help us get to a clean slate before therapy is attempted.

beltranrm 12y ago
IMHO, that seems like a bad idea. Two thoughts (these are only very overly generalized opinions, biology is a little bit complicated): 1) You might not get them all, and the ones that survive might transfer the traits of antibiotic survival and pathogenic-ability (if present) to the new population. 2) You would need to ensure that your hyper-specific diet contains the right mixture of microbes, say, you would need to avoid irradiated food, and a bunch of other things. "Bad microbes" coming into an empty gut seems to me like a bad thing.
- mercurialshark 12y ago
  Thanks, both are good points! I assumed there were downsides to if you weren't able to wipe out the robust bad microbes but that's even worse than I had expected. Perhaps I'll wait on self-experimentation. The possibility of nefarious and now genetically enhanced microbes reigning supreme in my body is not cool.
acomjean 12y ago
Antibiotics don't wipe out all the bacteria, just some of them. Its a bit of a problem because if some are effected less by the antibiotic, you can change the balance when the bacteria populations bounce back. The bacteria that are there do set up shop and don't like others crowding in. We don't really enough enough about what should be the optimal mix of bacteria to make someone healthy. They do "fecal" transplants to help people get back bacteria that are missing. There was a graduate student talk (an hour) about some of this stuff last spring. slide decked linked to the right. http://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/seminars/2014/in-the-loop-with-poop-intestinal-microbes-in-health-and-immunity/ http://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/seminars/2014/in-the-loop-with-p...

kaitai 12y ago

This complements other research that has been done on gut bacteria across cultures -- in different places we humans eat different prevailing diets: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2012/05/09/three-nations-divided-by-common-gut-bacteria/ http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2012/05/0... http://www.wired.com/2014/04/hadza-hunter-gatherer-gut-microbiome/ http://www.wired.com/2014/04/hadza-hunter-gatherer-gut-micro... The second link is particularly interesting, as the Hadza hunter-gatherers have a lot of gut bacteria that cause disease in the west. So it seems that gut bacteria aren't the whole story. Something to complicate the story for people who want to cure mental illness or create skinny people via manipulating gut bacteria.

zach 12y ago

We're slowly coming to understand that antibiotics are very unkind to our gut flora and are a prime suspect in subsequent weight gain. Post-antibiotic diet could be a critical intervention to keep patients from falling into the grasp of obesity. A NY Times article earlier this year gives a background on how the rise of antibiotics has been accompanied by a rise in weight among animals and humans alike: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/09/opinion/sunday/the-fat-drug.html http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/09/opinion/sunday/the-fat-dru... Kids in particular seem to be at risk. A recent study of 64,000 kids has associated repeated antibiotic exposure before age 2 with early childhood obesity: http://archpedi.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=1909801 http://archpedi.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=19098... It's good we're investigating diet-based therapy, so patients can someday hear their doctors say "after finishing this broad-spectrum antibiotic prescription, you [or your child] should eat like this for this amount of time to restore digestive health."

Shivetya 12y ago
Cipro did wonders on my intestinal tract, effectively killing everything including the good. Had nine days of that to fight an under the skin infection/etc. Months after I started having problems with food, restrooms were becoming my second home and my commute was planned around easy access to them. You never want to experience life where one bit of food can send you off. Six doctor visits, stool and blood tests later, the doctors found what moved in. New antibiotics and replenishment medicines, diet with lots of probiotics, and within a few months I was back to mostly normal. My story is simple, if you end up on harsh antibiotics it can change your life. Plan for it.
- seekingtruth 12y ago
  >Six doctor visits, stool and blood tests later, the doctors found what moved in. Something other than C. Diff? Would you mind sharing what it was?
refurb 12y ago
If you look at your JAMA article, you'll see that the connection between antibiotic use and childhood obesity is pretty small. My question would be, we've had broad-spectrum antibiotics around since WW2 (broad spectrum being the one the paper flags), yet obesity is a relatively recent phenomenon. Also, they also found a connection between obesity and "Steroid use, male sex, urban practice, public insurance, Hispanic ethnicity, and diagnosed asthma or wheezing were also predictors of obesity; common infectious diagnoses and antireflux medications were not."

viewer5 12y ago

So do we know yet what sort of diet cultivates a microflora biome that encourages healthy weight loss? I'm asking for a friend... It's easy to find diets for losing weight in general, but I'm curious if we know enough to create a diet to make a microflora composition that can help the weight loss process along. I keep seeing mentions of the microflora factor influencing weight gain, so I'm assuming there's a way to cultivate it to help with loss as well.

toomuchtodo 12y ago
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=gut+bacteria+obesity http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=gut+bacteria+obesity
Mz 12y ago
There's no contact info in your profile. You can email me if you want to chit chat.
beltranrm 12y ago
Turnbaugh was also an author on http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v444/n7122/abs/nature05414.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v444/n7122/abs/nature05... (looking at parts of that question on mice) and also on: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21543530 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21543530 (looking at parts of that questions on humans). The answer in humans does not quite match the answer in mice so far. Possible reasons to explain this discrepancy : might be the lack of a large enough group to study, or a local variation in the groups that does not generalize to mice.

ratsmack 12y ago

I know that antibiotics are a significant factor in the loss of gut bacteria, but another factor is all of the preservatives that pervade the manufactured food most people eat every day. I've often wondered what percentage of the loss is from these substances.

dschiptsov 12y ago

Ask like this: Is it a mere coincidence that so many of poorest tropical and subtropical (hot and humid climate) populations traditionally use highly spiced food? Does it strictly a tradition of making a "poor" food taste hot, or there is a connection with bacteria population?

Havoc 12y ago
Spicy food was historically used to mask food that had gone off (e.g. meat in hot climates). I doubt that has been a relevant consideration for many decades though, so I'd attribute it to culture/tradition.
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > Spicy food was historically used to mask food that had gone off (e.g. meat in hot climates). Spicing food has a preservative effect, which is probably a more important factor in the spread of the practice than masking food that has already gone off.
Aloisius 12y ago
> Ask like this: Is it a mere coincidence that so many of poorest tropical and subtropical (hot and humid climate) populations traditionally use highly spiced food? Does it strictly a tradition of making a "poor" food taste hot, or there is a connection with bacteria population? Tradition? Capsicums are a new world crop. They didn't make much of a dent in cuisines outside of the Americas until the 18th century.
- dschiptsov 12y ago
  India? Sri Lanka? Thailand?