Amazoniac
Member
Modest amounts of fermentable carbs might be beneficial, but it's easy to overdo it..
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I wonder if studies have been made yet about whether and how body temperature affects bacterial populations. Seems as though it could.XPlus said:Temperature, humidity, acidity, aerobicity, food are the main factors in colonial expansion. Inside the body, these factors along with immunity are set by the functioning physiology. Just like a loan mower needs a person to control it, gut bacteria needs a functional physiology to control its imbalances and overgrowth.
Stuart said:@ tara
Your colon is basically a bag of bacteria. About 100 trillion of them. They all have to eat something, and what's left for them after the upper digestive tract has extracted all the macronutrient calories is soluble fiber. Insoluble fibre (cellulose, for example) cannot supply them with nourishment, and just produces more bulk in your stool. The wall of your colon also produces mucus/mucins, and gut bacteria will also eat this if they have to. but if they do, they don't thrive, and what is even worse over time this mucus lining becomes progressively thinner and will lead to intestinal permeability. This is inevitable I'm afraid. We all have a colon, and even if you don't consume enough soluble fiber, the trillions of bacteria will eat you.
One of the things I didn't mention is that one of the major reasons keeping your gut bacteria well fed is that they will reward you with copious amounts of SFCA's (short chain fatty acids) the most important being butyrate. SFCA's are all considerably more saturated than even coconut all, Red Palm fruit oil, or butterfat. In short they are the healthiest fats in existence. There is no dietary source of SFCA's. The only way to get them is for your gut bacteria to make them. They provide a host of health benefits, control bacterial overgrowths in the small intestine, and are used as an energy substrate by your body just like any dietary fat - except you don't eat them, you eat soluble fiber, and your gut bacteria do it for you, then the wall of your colon will absorb them, helped by other beneficial gut bacteria.
I think one commenter said ; '..but they're still bacteria'. I got the impression that being a bacteria was somehow 'bad'. Nothing could be further from the truth. Bacteria aren't intrinsically bad. Some are beneficial, and some are pathogenic, and ofter the 'good' guys eat the 'bad'. This goes on in your gut constantly. If it isn't well supplied with soluble fiber, pathogenic bacteria will always be more likely to survive. In which case people often reach for the antibiotics. Which might indeed help solve the short term problem of pathogenic bacterial overgrowth. But long term, it inevitably makes the much more serious problem of gut dysbiosis even worse. Man made antibiotics are indiscriminate bacterial destroyers unfortunately.
Your body is exquisitely perfected by billions of years of evolution to WORK. We are increasingly understanding that modern attempts to interfere with that intricate balance , for instance by limiting your intake of soluble fiber in a mistaken attempt to somehow take your gut bacteria out of the equation, always ends badly.
Don't forget when you try to shore up your dietary preconceptions, from whatever dietary guru you are currently subscribing to, that you have a very large bag of bacteria from birth who all need to be constantly fed. It has been very well understood for decades that the preferred food of gut bacteria is soluble fiber. And until very recently fruit was far less sweet so you had to eat a lot more of it to get the same amount of fructose. So we automatically consumed a lot more soluble fiber , particularly pectin. Remember the baobab fruit I mentioned in one of my earlier posts. It's 50% pectin. Humans have always eaten a similar proportion of soluble fiber as babies get in breastmilk. Until modern times. Far less infectious disease, no doubt. Unfortunately the long term health consequences of changing our diet from the way our bodies (and in this discussion, specifically our colons) are designed to work, and quaffing antibiotics to 'get well' has made us all sicker. And when you think about it, it's probably no surprise that diverging from the dietary intake of soluble fiber we consumed throughout our evolution produces the health consequences it does.
@whichever commenter wanted to know about the amount of HMO's in breast milk, this is one study:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3406618/
scroll down to the ''concentration composition and variation' paragraph if you don't find the other stuff interesting. I actually learnt heaps just from the abstract. Soluble fiber and the importance of gut health is amazing.
But there are hundreds. Just google ' HMO's in breast milk' if you are still curious. It's a very well understood field.
Stuart
Stuart said:Dr. Peat knows well about the perils of systemic and prolonged inflammation. Why on earth would you think that deliberately underfeeding your gut bacteria the substance that billions of years of evolution has shaped them to expect wouldn't be inflammatory
Looks like a dietary philosophy to me. :)Stuart said:You don't need a 'dietary philosophy' Xplus, you really don't. Just eat the fresh whole fruit, whole vegetables and whole animals (eg include plenty of bone, collagen and gelatin along with the muscle that humans evolved to eat. You'll automatically get plenty of soluble fiber. And the gut bacteria whose health you are responsible for (and whose health is inexorably tied to your own long term health -by design) will repay you incalculably. as nature intends. And don't eat any food that would have been difficult to obtain in any quantity before extractive technologies or agriculture were developed. There's small amounts of PUFA'S in all foods, notably even pasture fed eggs and shellfish. Those very small amounts won't do you any harm. In fact the way evolution works those small amounts will probably turn out to do a lot of good. Dose is the poison after all. Google 'hormesis' sometime. Potatoes are very high starch foods, humans and prehumans have been digging up and thriving on both raw and cooked tubers since we developed the opposable thumb.
Look to evolution Xplus, not dietary theories.