I always find these articles about "the microbiome being the key to a healthcare revolution" to be kind of annoying and just repetitive info.
If a person's diet consists of Diet Coke, high carb/fat/sugar processed foods, 14 servings of bacon or beef a week and alcohol every other day with no exercise _they are going to feel like shit_. Leafy greens, fruits, less meat and less breads with some exercise would do anyone wonders - especially for their microbiome.
These articles and ideas on the microbiome have been coming out for at least 10 years and the realistic takeaway from the research has always been _make healthier decisions and you'll be healthier_. It's just never seemed _that_ revolutionary, aside from the microbiome and mental health connections, which are interesting but still the same message.
There is a study that would really annoy you then, the subjects were pairs of identical twin children throughout Africa. They would find twins where one was perfectly healthy and the other was malnourished. The reasoning is both nature (genetics) and nurture (diet) were nearly identical. The difference is nearly all cases was the makeup of the microbiome leading to one child being healthy & the other malnourished with all other things being equal. Per your comment it would seem no amount of dietary changes would makeup the difference, plus it probably also highlights a possible bias that a bunch of malnourished kids around the world can simply make “healthy” dietary changes.
10 years really isn’t a significant period of time to study something as complex as the microbiome. Don’t be surprised if it continues to be studied for decades, just as we have been studying genetics for decades and despite all the incredible advancements and understanding we still have more questions than we have answers.
That's interesting--it's certainly plausible, even probable, sense that good diet is necessary but not sufficient to ensure that the microbiome is in a personally-optimal state. Please give a citation if you can!
Reading a second study a bacteria was present in the malnourished twin but not in the healthy twin. I’m not certain but it seems the bacteria was just an unfortunate roll of the dice.
_make healthier decisions and you'll be healthier_
aside from the microbiome and mental health connections
Conjecture: If our microbiome has the ability to impact our mental health, then it most certainly is possible for an unhealthy microbiome to rob individuals of the willpower necessary to maintain the discipline for their healthier decisions to bear fruit; a kind of self-preservation, perhaps.
The behavioral changes of toxoplasmosis-afflicted individuals suggests to me that these little buggers can effect complex change.
I agree that it's being touted as a panacea and The One Cause. But I think that you can do all those things and still have life suck. For instance, Crohn's and celiac both look similar to the untrained eye. You have digestive trouble. And some generic "just eat healthy" advice won't have worked properly. Literally cutting out gluten would instantly work wonders for celiac, not "less bread, less meat". Literally just "no bread from sources with gluten". So, we just go through and find causes and more precisely intervene.
And the worst thing is that someone would have gotten a bit better with celiac's if they eat less bread, but the problem will have been unsolved. Way better to identify precisely and they can do all these other things and just avoid bread with gluten and can enjoy the occasional matcha mochi waffle.
What interests me is the possibility that over time you can cause certain strains of beneficial bacteria to go extinct in your gut, so you can't repopulate it by correcting your diet. And if that bacteria is initially populated by the mother, if she already has some of those strains go extinct when she has children, they could be born without those strains at all. But that's all a wild guess on my part.
You are being a bit reductive. For understandable reasons: the articles actually are repetitive and not terribly information-dense. This is because most of what sciences has uncovered about the microbiome so far does not translate well to journalism even when it's directed at a semi-technical audience.
The microbiome is insanely complex. In some ways I believe the GI tract is a more complex system than the brain (in terms of more variables all cross-interacting which has significant and sometimes severe influence on health outcomes). We are a long way away from fully understanding any single aspect of it, let alone how multiple aspects of the GI or microbiome work in concert.
The microbiome is insanely important in human health. It is the absolutely critical foundation of our entire immune system, for one thing. Yes, a good diet is foundational to health. But if you encounter enough microbiome research, it becomes quite clear that a proper diet is not a magical cure for a whole lot of severe diseases and disorders in which the microbiome is moderately to strongly implicated. And various extreme and fad diets don't really bear out in the research to cure many let alone most diseases in large populations (aside from the few obvious ones, type II diabetes, obesity, lower risk of heart disease, etc). Eating well is better than eating like crap just like not slamming heroin is better than becoming a junkie.. but that is not where insights from microbiome research begin nor end.
If you get impatient with the slow pace of actionable results, do keep in mind that researchers are only looking closely at only a fraction of the 1,000 or so species that make up the 100 trillion bacterial cells in it, and almost none of the fungi and yeast nor the viruses that also compose it (the latter of which are now believed to vastly outnumber the 100 trillion bacteria!). All of these critters produce side effects - whether good or bad (eg bacterial and fungal metabolites, many of which are critical to host immune signaling and other essential aspects of human health).
Until I stop getting surprised looks when I explain that probiotics and proper dietary fiber effectively stop bad bacteria from eating your gut lining, causing bowel (and often systemic) inflammation, I hope one of these posts makes it to front-page weekly.
I mostly agree, but I think we need to start discussing/researching the effects of nuking our gut bacteria with antibiotics and the herbicides like Roundup which are present in our food.
The latter is obviously pretty tough because you risk upsetting the ag industrial complex who would like to continue spraying everything with Roundup and claiming it has no harms whatsoever.
Comments
I always find these articles about "the microbiome being the key to a healthcare revolution" to be kind of annoying and just repetitive info.
If a person's diet consists of Diet Coke, high carb/fat/sugar processed foods, 14 servings of bacon or beef a week and alcohol every other day with no exercise _they are going to feel like shit_. Leafy greens, fruits, less meat and less breads with some exercise would do anyone wonders - especially for their microbiome.
These articles and ideas on the microbiome have been coming out for at least 10 years and the realistic takeaway from the research has always been _make healthier decisions and you'll be healthier_. It's just never seemed _that_ revolutionary, aside from the microbiome and mental health connections, which are interesting but still the same message.
There is a study that would really annoy you then, the subjects were pairs of identical twin children throughout Africa. They would find twins where one was perfectly healthy and the other was malnourished. The reasoning is both nature (genetics) and nurture (diet) were nearly identical. The difference is nearly all cases was the makeup of the microbiome leading to one child being healthy & the other malnourished with all other things being equal. Per your comment it would seem no amount of dietary changes would makeup the difference, plus it probably also highlights a possible bias that a bunch of malnourished kids around the world can simply make “healthy” dietary changes.
10 years really isn’t a significant period of time to study something as complex as the microbiome. Don’t be surprised if it continues to be studied for decades, just as we have been studying genetics for decades and despite all the incredible advancements and understanding we still have more questions than we have answers.
That's interesting--it's certainly plausible, even probable, sense that good diet is necessary but not sufficient to ensure that the microbiome is in a personally-optimal state. Please give a citation if you can!
I don’t think this is the study I was referencing but it’s on point (317 pairs of twins 1-3 yrs old, 1 healthy & 1 malnourished)
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1229000
Did the study suggest what had damaged one of the twins biome? I can only assume it was antibiotics.
Reading a second study a bacteria was present in the malnourished twin but not in the healthy twin. I’m not certain but it seems the bacteria was just an unfortunate roll of the dice.
Starvation can severely alter the microbiome in a negative way.
Haven't read much into the how. Acids and such possibly.
I haven't been able to track this study down, do you have a link or a name?
There must be another, but this one is dominating my search result
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1229000
Conjecture: If our microbiome has the ability to impact our mental health, then it most certainly is possible for an unhealthy microbiome to rob individuals of the willpower necessary to maintain the discipline for their healthier decisions to bear fruit; a kind of self-preservation, perhaps.
The behavioral changes of toxoplasmosis-afflicted individuals suggests to me that these little buggers can effect complex change.
I have run into a previous report of a temporary reversal of autism symptoms from an antibiotic.
I agree that it's being touted as a panacea and The One Cause. But I think that you can do all those things and still have life suck. For instance, Crohn's and celiac both look similar to the untrained eye. You have digestive trouble. And some generic "just eat healthy" advice won't have worked properly. Literally cutting out gluten would instantly work wonders for celiac, not "less bread, less meat". Literally just "no bread from sources with gluten". So, we just go through and find causes and more precisely intervene.
And the worst thing is that someone would have gotten a bit better with celiac's if they eat less bread, but the problem will have been unsolved. Way better to identify precisely and they can do all these other things and just avoid bread with gluten and can enjoy the occasional matcha mochi waffle.
What interests me is the possibility that over time you can cause certain strains of beneficial bacteria to go extinct in your gut, so you can't repopulate it by correcting your diet. And if that bacteria is initially populated by the mother, if she already has some of those strains go extinct when she has children, they could be born without those strains at all. But that's all a wild guess on my part.
You are being a bit reductive. For understandable reasons: the articles actually are repetitive and not terribly information-dense. This is because most of what sciences has uncovered about the microbiome so far does not translate well to journalism even when it's directed at a semi-technical audience.
The microbiome is insanely complex. In some ways I believe the GI tract is a more complex system than the brain (in terms of more variables all cross-interacting which has significant and sometimes severe influence on health outcomes). We are a long way away from fully understanding any single aspect of it, let alone how multiple aspects of the GI or microbiome work in concert.
The microbiome is insanely important in human health. It is the absolutely critical foundation of our entire immune system, for one thing. Yes, a good diet is foundational to health. But if you encounter enough microbiome research, it becomes quite clear that a proper diet is not a magical cure for a whole lot of severe diseases and disorders in which the microbiome is moderately to strongly implicated. And various extreme and fad diets don't really bear out in the research to cure many let alone most diseases in large populations (aside from the few obvious ones, type II diabetes, obesity, lower risk of heart disease, etc). Eating well is better than eating like crap just like not slamming heroin is better than becoming a junkie.. but that is not where insights from microbiome research begin nor end.
If you get impatient with the slow pace of actionable results, do keep in mind that researchers are only looking closely at only a fraction of the 1,000 or so species that make up the 100 trillion bacterial cells in it, and almost none of the fungi and yeast nor the viruses that also compose it (the latter of which are now believed to vastly outnumber the 100 trillion bacteria!). All of these critters produce side effects - whether good or bad (eg bacterial and fungal metabolites, many of which are critical to host immune signaling and other essential aspects of human health).
Until I stop getting surprised looks when I explain that probiotics and proper dietary fiber effectively stop bad bacteria from eating your gut lining, causing bowel (and often systemic) inflammation, I hope one of these posts makes it to front-page weekly.
Hopefully daily.
I mostly agree, but I think we need to start discussing/researching the effects of nuking our gut bacteria with antibiotics and the herbicides like Roundup which are present in our food.
The latter is obviously pretty tough because you risk upsetting the ag industrial complex who would like to continue spraying everything with Roundup and claiming it has no harms whatsoever.
The correlation you presented is obvious, but there ia also a question of what causes what.
Speaking for the devil, there might be a case when biome makes people irresistive to Coke, sugar and bacon, through, say, depressive/impulsive shots.
Fortunately, unlike astronomy, we can test it, e.g. by injecting a different biome without touching anything else, and see what happens on its own.
They find it easier to directly monetize a pill for a chronic condition, instead of preventing the chronic condition.