Why Is There So Much Soluble Fibre In Human Breast Milk?

[Stuart]

@ Sea
You didn't answer my question. Why do you think You were born with a microbiome? What is it's function do you think? Don't worry about answering for every other animal on the face of the earth from insects up - who, odd as it seems, also have one. Just yours.

I thought I explained that I think bacteria infect humans. I think that the function of bacteria are to eat and reproduce. In humans I think that bacteria slow our metabolic rates down which makes it easier for them to expand and eat more of our food. Some bacteria are known to lower our stomach acid and use other tactics so that we digest less food and they get more leftovers. I think they slowly kill the human and have a big feast once the human dies and loses its defenses against bacteria.

Fair enough :)

 

[Stuart]

You really should take yourself back to a paleo/kruse discussion board where you can indulge your irrational fascination with the microbiome without critical thought.

Are you asking me to leave? Because I don't agree with you?

But before you do..
I do think that considering the evolutionary forces that shaped us is actually a very reasonable way to arrive at a sensible way to nourish ourselves optimally. But I do respect you having a contrary opinion. You do seem a bit angry though. Why is that? Are you saying you are right and I am wrong or just that you don't agree with me?

Evolution is a VERY slow process by its very nature, and humans (in advanced countries with access to advanced medical treatments that keep people alive who would not otherwise survive have effecively made it even slower.
So you have a microbiome which you do seem to realize was designed by that evolutionary process to be an integral part of keeping you well and most likely to survive and prosper. Because if it didn't, you'd be more likely to die. A simple and elegant mechanism. Perhaps you agree. But you and many others often remind me that part of Peatarian dietary theory is that a fully functioning microbiome is incompatible with optimum health. But if this was true it would have a pronounced selective disadvantageous effect. We just wouldn't be the microbiome equipped animal we are today.
You also gave me a list of things which would make a microbiome redundant.
Two things are relevant here. A stereotypical Peatarian diet supplies plenty of fermentable fiber in fruit , vegetables and animal connective tissue to keep your gut microbiota ticking over nicely. And all the digestiblle carbohydrate (also in the fruit and vegetables) supplies a lot of mucus/mucins for them to survive on anyway. Fermentable fiber and mucus. Your gut microbiota will be fine Cantstop_ - even if the very notion seems to annoy you a bit.

Also, I think paleo dietary philosophy is anything but. Humans have always eaten a lot of carbohydrate.
Who's 'Kruse' btw. ?

 

[EnoreeG]

I thought I explained that I think bacteria infect humans. I think that the function of bacteria are to eat and reproduce. In humans I think that bacteria slow our metabolic rates down which makes it easier for them to expand and eat more of our food.

Sea, you've made your point. You think bacteria occupying an human are an infection. One word of advice. Be aware that your life may depend on you considering the other side of this, that bacteria are part of your immune system.

Especially if you ever have to head into a hospital (even to visit someone).

In case you don't read much on health, and the effect that hospitals have on health, there is starting to be a huge backlash of bacteria against antibiotics. There are drug resistant strains of many of the most pathogenic species. Drug companies have given up the battle. You can get the drugs that are out there, but the companies know they can't develop anything new that will do any better than what they've already developed. In the hospital, or actually anytime you're given a course of antibiotics, you are essentially tossed to the dogs. If you don't have drug resistant bacteria in you now, you will in the future. The last thing you want to do is be exposed to these new strains of pathogens. Antibiotics can hardly save you. Even if you're in the hospital when the infection is detected, say after an operation, the hospital may not be able to save your life, with all the antibiotics they have to try on you:

Of the 1.7 million Americans who are infected in hospitals each year, at least 99,000 of them die from those infections....

from: Hospital Acquired Infections (HAI)

Insurance companies are starting to end coverage on HAI. It's their way to save money in hopeless situations.

The estimated 100,000 deaths per year associated with HAIs rank this as the sixth leading cause of death in the United States.3–5 In a recent study capturing additional underlying expenses, the excess hospital cost of HAIs across the nation was estimated to be between 28 and 45 billion dollars annually.6

from: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2881841/

If you read articles on HAI, you may see that one way you may be protected is to have a healthy immune system. Unfortunately, you may have to rethink your path to health if you are to survive any hospital stay. The side that you are NOT taking is trying to tell you that your resident microbes are 80% of your immune system.

Try to minimize them, take some antibiotics occassionally, and you are taking chances with getting an overgrowth of one of the new "superbugs". These are species that a healthy human has resident all the time but which are dominated by beneficial species in your gut, whether you wish to have these beneficial species or not. But it happens that antibiotics take down the numbers of ALL species in the gut, or on the skin, or whatever. The healthy commensal species will lose far greater numbers in a course of antibiotics than will the pathogens. This may even out the odds in the bacterial competition. This may make a takeover by pathogens much easier, as the beneficial germs are all that are keeping the pathogens in check. You don't have to believe this. Just be aware there are lots of studies going on regarding this.

Here's a recent article by the largest internet presence on alternative health, published just today. This is not some hair-brained idea that one mad scientist came up with:

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/a...n=20150713Z1&et_cid=DM79483&et_rid=1030805975

 

[Such_Saturation]

Ah, Mercola. Finally

 

[EnoreeG]

Ah, Mercola. Finally

When Dr. M's got it you know it's been around the block. It may have a few new wrinkles too, that he hasn't covered. Where better could I start someone who's never looked at the subject? Those who aren't yet saturated?

 

[Such_Saturation]

Ah, Mercola. Finally

When Dr. M's got it you know it's been around the block. It may have a few new wrinkles too, that he hasn't covered. Where better could I start someone who's never looked at the subject? Those who aren't yet saturated?

But why did it take us 34 pages?

 

[Nicholas]

Stuart - the big issue seems to be for me that i simply don't crave vegetables.....and i used to be very comfortable eating them - all kinds. however i do regularly crave onions, root vegetables, and zucchini. yesterday i ate some broccoli and it made me want to gag - not the taste, but just this feeling of "this is not food".....not saying it didn't benefit me in some way....but.....
perhaps my diet of fruits, root vegetables, zucchini, and lots of onions is sufficient.

 

[narouz]

@ such, narouz...
A good scientific hypothesis is usually as simple and elegant as is consistent with the available data - does that count as elegance?

Yeah, but in some cases the available data may be mistaken.
Like for instance with the case of sugar these days.

I think sometimes attunement to the elegance of a hypothesis
might offer a counter-balance to available (but mistaken) data....

 

[Stuart]

@ Sea
You didn't answer my question. Why do you think You were born with a microbiome? What is it's function do you think? Don't worry about answering for every other animal on the face of the earth from insects up - who, odd as it seems, also have one. Just yours.

I thought I explained that I think bacteria infect humans. I think that the function of bacteria are to eat and reproduce. In humans I think that bacteria slow our metabolic rates down which makes it easier for them to expand and eat more of our food. Some bacteria are known to lower our stomach acid and use other tactics so that we digest less food and they get more leftovers. I think they slowly kill the human and have a big feast once the human dies and loses its defenses against bacteria.

This probably does present us with an opportunity. I deliberately asked you such a straightfoward question because I did suspect your answer would be very revealing . Which indeed it is.
IMHO it clearly demonstrates an abiding - almost breathtaking actually- ignorance of basic human physiology.
It was actually Tara who first floated the notion that your microbiota are really a kind of parasite. But the way you express it Sea gives it a sort of medieval cachet.
And the wonderful thing about the notion you are expressing is that it is either profoundly mistaken , or spot on.

And who better to cast the stern perspective of some common sense onto this than Dr. Peat himself. There's even a possibility that he might think the reason that we have a microbiome that Sea expressed is not complete, almost superstitious nonsense. If that's the case - if he thinks there's even an iota of truth to it - then I clearly don't belong here. I suspect there's a few people here who already think that.

So let's put the same question I put to Sea to Dr. Peat, and also show him Sea's answer. I'm sure you're all more likely to listen attentively to his reasoning than mine. Maybe he'll tell you want you want to hear. 'And maybe he will reveal that his attitudes have changed somewhat now that we know so much more about the human microbiome and its function in human health.
The moderators will know how to get in touch with him.
So let's make it so. Hopefully you are as keen as I am to get this finally resolved.

 

[cantstoppeating]

So still nothing from Stuart apart from 'bacteria is good because we evolved with it'.

I wonder how many more pages he'll keep this going.

 

[tara]

@Stuart,
I reckon the reason we all were born with and still have a microbiome is not because our forebears with a microbiome survived better to reproduce than those wthout one, but because it has always been unavoidable for larger (than microbes) animals to have a microbiome. There have never been any sterile competitors. Microbiota are everywhere. We may have evolved to have some influence over the species we harbour, but it is far from perfect, and it does not include the possibility of a sterile gut.

You seem to be referring to the microbiome as a cohesive whole, and maybe this can be meaningful in some ways. At this level, it demonstrably can have both costs (eg endotoxin, sometimes excess serotonin) and benefits (a good balance has some protective effects against particularly pathogening species), as discussed at length. It can also be thought of as a multitude of species with complex relationships with each other and us, sometimes competitive, sometimes symbiotic. I wouldn't have thought it would be controversial that at least some of it, some of the time, is parasitic?

 

[Stuart]

@Stuart,
I reckon the reason we all were born with and still have a microbiome is not because our forebears with a microbiome survived better to reproduce than those wthout one, but because it has always been unavoidable for larger (than microbes) animals to have a microbiome. There have never been any sterile competitors. Microbiota are everywhere. We may have evolved to have some influence over the species we harbour, but it is far from perfect, and it does not include the possibility of a sterile gut.

You seem to be referring to the microbiome as a cohesive whole, and maybe this can be meaningful in some ways. At this level, it demonstrably can have both costs (eg endotoxin, sometimes excess serotonin) and benefits (a good balance has some protective effects against particularly pathogening species), as discussed at length. It can also be thought of as a multitude of species with complex relationships with each other and us, sometimes competitive, sometimes symbiotic. I wouldn't have thought it would be controversial that at least some of it, some of the time, is parasitic?

I would have thought that one of the reasons you have a microbiome is to protect you from parasites. And the world isn't sterile. No amount of antibiotics can change that. Our bodies are elegantly ( love that word ) equipped, refined and perfected by millions of years of evolution, with an extensive microbiome to resist challenges that the non sterile world constantly assaults us with.
The immune system functions of your microbiome are only one of its many jobs. Mineral absorption, neurological enhancement, vitamin manufacture etc. It seems to have so many strings to its bow.
You do seem very resistant to thinking about your microbiome as an organ of your body. Perhaps that is one reason why you are able to see it as a parasite.
If it had ANY disadvantages at all, don't you think that the individuals with a slightly better microbiome with fewer disbenefits (or even some other kind of organ that did the jobs the microbiome did without those disadvantages) would have done a little better in the gene pool going forward? Remember, tiny tiny incremental change over millenia - eons before primates appeared. Yet this planet stuck with microbiomes. Making them better and better in the process. It does seem odd to me to question that inexorable logic.

It's also worth mentioning that when I first started reading about Ray Peat, and quickly realized that although he has some wonderful ideas, I had already been consumimg prodigious amounts of fermentable fiber for over a year. It seemed long enough, given that I wasn't just eating a bit more fermentable fiber. I was seriously going all out. Don't you find it strange that I've never detected any symptom of the problems that promoting colonic microbiota are purported to cause? ALL, and I really do mean all the health problems which have plagued me from childhood on were resolved. I didn't even know about the Peatarian body temp and pulse diagnostics. but I discovered I was a poster boy there as well.

One of the other things that red flagged Dr. Peat's microbiome musings to me was that he doesn't seem to make any distinction between colonic microbiota and those in other parts of your digestive tract. The ideal numbers of bacteria you want in your S.I. are overwhelmingly less than those you want in your colon. It's a bacterial frenzy in your colon Tara. From about 2 days after you are born. However many courses of antibiotics you take. Your colon is a bag of bacteria. It's meant to be. It has NO other function. But the bacteria it contains contribute in a vast range of ways to your health.
And if these endotoxins posed such a risk, I would have thought that the amount of fermentable fiber I was consuming - and no carrot salads etc to ameliorate them - my state of health would have reflected them, It just seems a bit odd that I've never had any sign whatsoever. Wonderful sleep, intoxicatingly better memory (across every time frame) than I've ever had in my life. No biohacking at all. No caffeine, aspirin methylene blue etc. I do take some caffeine and aspirin now though. Can't hurt. But there wasn't anything I was trying to fix.
The Peatarian caution against fermentable fiber just didn't add up. Particularly when a Peatarian diet contains plenty of it if you eat a lot of fruit and vegetables. Nicholas said he craves onions. Alliums are a very rich source of inulin.
But that's just my n=1. It's not persuasive. I'm only too aware of that.

What do you think of my idea of seeing what Dr. Peat has to say about Sea's answer? Can't hurt can it? Could be very instructive for us all don't you think? Her response really did seem to encapsulate the very worst anti - microbiome silliness of this entire thread. Pboy's included. He seems to dress his up in a lot of feel good - poetic almost - decoration. Sea kept hers very matter of fact. It's refreshingly brief and to the point.

 

[Stuart]

@ Tara
You mentioned 'excess' serotonin. Most people on this forum always seem to refer to 'minimizing' serotonin. So is there some ideal amount of serotonin? Also if every time you recall a happy memory your brain is flooded with a surge of serotonin, isn't that a good thing?

 

[Kasper]

@Stuart

It is very refreshing to see someone with knowledge about this talk about the microbiome here at raypeatforum.

I don't have very much knowledge about this, but I've been convinced that many of my issues are more related to my microbiome than to my metabolism or thyroid levels. Just my gut feeling !

I've been adding boabob powder to my diet now. And increasing my intake of potatoes coconut chips. For the dutchies, check this brand: https://webshop.ekoplaza.nl/nl/voorraad ... 02191.html) Let's see how this experiment goes.

Have you read the gaps diet book @Stuart ?

Also if every time you recall a happy memory your brain is flooded with a surge of serotonin, isn't that a good thing?

Do you have any evidence for this claim ?

 

[EnoreeG]

@ Tara
You mentioned 'excess' serotonin. Most people on this forum always seem to refer to 'minimizing' serotonin. So is there some ideal amount of serotonin? Also if every time you recall a happy memory your brain is flooded with a surge of serotonin, isn't that a good thing?

This question is common throughout Peatdom apparently. "Minimize PUFA" but no "minimal requirement"; "minimize estrogen" but no "minimal requirement"; "minimize microbes" but no "minimal requirement"; "minimize fiber" but no "minimal requirement".

http://www.raypeatforum.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=677&hilit=HDL/triglycerides

Where we find:

One thing that has always bothered me about Peat is he always talks hormones and substances in a way that suggests either its good and more is always better, or its bad and you always want to try and reduce it. He doesn't speak much at all about optimal ranges or having too much of a normally good thing, or too little of something that can be harmful.

Estrogen is one of those things. Has peat ever mentioned a range of serum estradiol levels he finds optimal? say 25-35 pg/mL for a male?

No wonder people continue to hunt and not find. Its seems many people here refuse to search for answers outside of Peat's quotes, yet the quotes don't provide the answers people seek. I love this forum. A marvelous merry-go-round of questions, answered only with unacceptable answers. A cybersideshow. Visit, indulge, enjoy!

 

[Such_Saturation]

estrogen

minimal requirement

Ah yes, that terrible issue that is destroying our collective health

 

[oxidation_is_normal]

I don't know why we're continuing to let cantstoppeating being an ***hole to everyone he disagrees with in these threads. Moderators? What kind of forum do you all want to run?'

"I have answered this question for you. I will oblige you again. It's very simple. Try to read carefully, and follow along, I'm about to drop some serious knowledge:"

Just disgusting...

 

[Kasper]

It is disgusting and only proves that she doesn't understand the fundamental massage that ray peat is trying to put across.

 

[Stuart]

@Stuart

It is very refreshing to see someone with knowledge about this talk about the microbiome here at raypeatforum.

I don't have very much knowledge about this, but I've been convinced that many of my issues are more related to my microbiome than to my metabolism or thyroid levels. Just my gut feeling !

I've been adding boabob powder to my diet now. And increasing my intake of potatoes coconut chips. For the dutchies, check this brand: https://webshop.ekoplaza.nl/nl/voorraad ... 02191.html) Let's see how this experiment goes.

Have you read the gaps diet book @Stuart ?

Also if every time you recall a happy memory your brain is flooded with a surge of serotonin, isn't that a good thing?

Do you have any evidence for this claim ?

Thanks Kasper. Actually many people do seem to get very defensive. But that's human nature. I think the increasing understanding of the role of a healthy microbiome in maintaining optimum health can only enhance the effectiveness of reducing pufa etc. And although when you think about it, it's clearly a good idea to not just eat muscle tissue, it wasn't till I started reading Peat that eating gelatin was the obvious way to go. In my experience actively fostering microbiome health (fermentable fiber SBO's) will get results, eventually. 'But it is NOT a quick fix. It can take years. You have to remember that most people have neglected their microbiomes for years too (I did for my entire post weaning childhood). Most modern humans who don't actively foster the health of their gut microbiota, will have some degree of SIBO. Getting rid of SIBO can be very difficult. I suffered from bloating for the first two weeks of upping my fermentable fiber intake - a sure symptom of SIBO. But the healthier your colon microbiota become, the healthier your S.I microbiota become as well. For reasons that aren't yet fully understood. For me personally gut dysbiosis is the key. Tackle that first and you won't spend the rest of your life trying to micromanage supplementation of the latest serotonin antagonists/dopamine agonist.... it seems to become a very long list. Trust your gut Kasper!
I don't know much about the GAPS diet, sorry.
RE serotonin. The most effective ways of producing serotonin from whatever tryptophan you've consumed (lots in dairy) are sunlight, massage , moderate exercise, and recalling happy memories.
Heres one link
http://mentalhealthdaily.com/2015/05/06 ... in-levels/
But if you google 'sunlight happy memories serotonin' you'll get hundreds of thousands of hits.
Many people seem to have problems with the way their bodies regulate serotonin. There's increasing evidence that your body and brain will regulate all brain neurotransmitters (dopamine, serotonin etc.) better if your have a healthy gut microbiota. I eat a vast amount of fermentable fiber. I eat a lot of dairy and most serotonin is produced in your gut (colon). 'Which could well be why Peatdom is so dismissive of gut microbiobial health. It seems to be considered an oxymoron. So I probably produce a lot of serotonin. Yet I have zero symptoms of serotonin dominance. I have the most stable relaxed mood, libido, sleep , motivation, I've ever had. Surely it has something to do with having a healthy gut microbiota?
Art Ayers' blog 'Cooling Inflammation' is by far the most informative source for info on gut dysbiosis, the profound effects it has on human health from viral/bacterial infectious diseases all the way through to autoimmume conditions.
Good Luck.

 

[cantstoppeating]

I don't know why we're continuing to let cantstoppeating being an ***hole to everyone he disagrees with in these threads. Moderators? What kind of forum do you all want to run?'

"I have answered this question for you. I will oblige you again. It's very simple. Try to read carefully, and follow along, I'm about to drop some serious knowledge:"

Just disgusting...

It is disgusting and only proves that she doesn't understand the fundamental massage that ray peat is trying to put across.

For your reference, there's a little button with an exclamation mark at the top right of every post. You can use that button to report whichever post you personally find offensive and mods can judge.

The immature thing to do is make this a forum-wide issue and invoke Dr. Peat when really it's about you personally being upset about my blunt challenge of your points.

Also: