Whats residing in your gut? Disease fighters? Disease promoters? NPR correspondent Rob Stein found out. Michael Pollan found out, too. Will you be loaded with the bad guy PROTEOBACTERIA? Or the good guy ACTINOBACTERIA? Are you ready to shell out $99 to swab your stool & participate in the American Gut Project humanfoodproject/americangut/ to find out what kind of bacteria resides in your gut, skin, or mouth? I am! Absolutely! The project is affiliated with the University of Colorado & run by Jeff Leach. IRB-approved. BTW: They can use some plant-based folks to help with their research. PRIVACY ISSUES? In spite of yesterdays NPR piece on possible privacy issues surrounding participation in a study such as this one, Im not worried. This project is approved by the Institutional Review Board of the Univ. of Colorado & all participants are anonymously coded. IRBs are serious business, & privacy rules. GOOD & BAD BUGS: Why should you care? According to Jeff Leach, & many other researchers, they may play a big role in our susceptibility to disease. Leach believes our microbiome changes everything. And so he thinks its a watershed moment for human health. PROTEOBACTERIA - What’s that?: Proteobacteria is a group of bacteria that includes a lot of your bad guys, like E. coli and salmonella and so on and so forth, the ones that are associated with inflammation. And inflammation is associated with an increased risk for all sorts of diseases, including heart disease and cancer. So its probably not good news to find out youve got too much proteobacteria. ACTINOBACTERIA - Whats that? : Those are typically considered good bacteria. So the more actinobacteria you have, the better. These are healthful. Theyre anti-inflammatory. They basically wage war, if you will, for the lack of a better term, on proteobacteria. So, those are often known as probiotics. You see them a lot in yogurts. And people who typically eat a lot of onions, garlic and leeks will have higher levels of beneficial actinobacteria. WHOLE GRAINS, LOTS OF FIBER, LOTS OF RESISTANT STARCH - Why theyre important: Thats the only way for the good bug food to REACH THE COLON. Its all about providing an indigestible substrate of fiber for the good bacteria residing in the colon. The bugs need to feast on a fermentable substrate. Thats why gas is good. According to Jeff Leach: The Quality of your CARBS COUNT! That said, even though someone who eats as much as 200-500g of CARBS a day can still be starving their guts bugs if those foods contain little to no indigestible substrates (fiber), a generic rule of thumb (albeit an ugly measure) is less overall carbohydrates – especially when you start dropping below 75-100g a day – translates into a dramatic drop in the amount of food reaching your colon where the vast majority of your intestinal microbial community resides. When it comes to the health and well being of your gut microbes, nothing matters more than fermentable substrates! Which is why Leach recently wrote, Sorry low carbers, your microbiome is just not that into you! tinyurl/q3zv8su Whole grain fiber rules!
Posted on: Tue, 05 Nov 2013 12:56:54 +0000