https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lacticaseibacillus_casei is another interesting one that got split into a separate genus. No direct action has so far been found for this genus of bacteria, but it makes the GI tract more hospitable for a large number of probiotic species and less hospitable for others like C. difficile, which is one of the nastiest post-antibiotic infections one can get. So nasty it has the French word for “difficult” in its name.
Found in cheddar cheese and yogurt. Any time I have problems or have to take antibiotics I make sure to line up some of both for recovery.
lr4444lr · 3h ago
Makes me wonder how much of the positive research on fermented foods generally has to do with liver function improvement, since the organ is crucial to the health of most of the body.
0cf8612b2e1e · 3h ago
Koreans live off of fermented kimchi, something like 80+ pounds per person every year. Do Koreans have lower incidence of gut complications?
ginko · 1h ago
They have a much higher stomach cancer rate.
astrange · 1h ago
They also drink like fish and eat hot foods. Both of those are known contributors.
hungmung · 3h ago
I bet they've got lower rates of hep than America, but that probably doesn't have anything to do with the kimchi.
hinkley · 3h ago
We’ve mostly studied gut health. Something about modern diets is messing that up substantially. Some think it may be Roundup, others dish detergent, others some microbe we can’t culture on Petri dishes.
Llamamoe · 1h ago
Why assume it's the diets rather than antibiotics? Your gut microbiome develops during the first ~3y of life(including partial heritability from your mother), after which the total set of microbes in it remains approximately constant throughout your life, with only the relative proportions of them shifting with diet changes.
In contrast, antibiotics often kill a strain of a few off completely, while suppressing everything else except for a few strains that resist the antibiotic, which also creates a massive opportunity for new bacteria to colonize. And these deficits are partially heritable.
griffzhowl · 3h ago
What's the evidence that modern diets are substantially messing up gut health? (just curious, not (necessarily;) sceptical)
hinkley · 3h ago
The incidence of crohn’s, IBD, celiac, etc going on out there. Some people want to throw obesity into that ring as well. Inflammation certainly causes weight gain.
griffzhowl · 2h ago
Ah ok, well, obesity incidence is probably almost entirely explained by the amount of sugar and fats in modern diets. I wouldn't have thought of it as pertaining to gut health specifically, but no doubt there can be relationships there.
The other things seem more plausible. Purely anecdotally, my step-dad always thought he was intolerant to gluten because of his reactions to British bread, but when he spent a lot of time in France and tried bread there, he was fine.
Could be there's something about the production process of the standard British "Chorleywood loaf" that aggravates some bowels.
In general, I find it quite easy to believe that a lot of mass-produced foods contain what are essentially poisons, but I'm curious about evidential links (and I'm also aware that lots of naturally-occurring foods can be poisons if eaten too much, but that's a different question)
astrange · 56m ago
> Ah ok, well, obesity incidence is probably almost entirely explained by the amount of sugar and fats in modern diets.
The obesity epidemic started rapidly around 1980, but it's unlikely diet changed for the worse since then.
Also, it happened to lab animals and pets as well.
> Purely anecdotally, my step-dad always thought he was intolerant to gluten because of his reactions to British bread, but when he spent a lot of time in France and tried bread there, he was fine.
The American equivalent of this (people who go to Europe and think the bread is healthier because it's easy to digest) is because we fortify wheat and the extra nutrients esp. iron cause stomach discomfort.
XorNot · 2h ago
You need to define "spent some time". Was he working? On sabbatical or holiday?
"I travelled somewhere and things improved" has the serious complication that you changed almost everything at once and possibly removed major stress sources. You were even outside of your own home - and buildings have ecosystems themselves anyway as well as just systemic faults.
griffzhowl · 2h ago
Yeah ok, but it's just an anecdote so it doesn't count as generalisable evidence in any case.
I would just add that when he got back to Britain and tried baguette style bread there he found that he could tolerate it in Britain too.
Again, I'm just reporting a story as it was told to me because I was reminded of it in response to the previous comment.
DaveZale · 2h ago
I believe that ultraprocessed foods are recognized as borderline poisons. Esp if they contain trans fats or hydrogenated fats, which arw described as "slow acting poisons" - but the same goes for "extruded foods" - stuff that is processed to the point where it can be molded or squeezed into funny looking shapes.
wdwvt1 · 5h ago
There are so many interesting metabolites that the gut microbiome produces that modulate the immune system. My former startup (Interface Biosciences) was trying to develop a process for identifying and developing these as traditional pharmaceuticals (e.g. small molecule drugs).
One of the big problems with most of these metabolites is that they work better in preventing the emergence of disease pathology than they do in ameliorating it. In other words, they aren't super reverse causal for disease. You'll note that in this study, the design was pretreatment with the beneficial metabolite to prevent injury, rather than rescue once injury occurred ([0], [1]).
It's difficult to make a prophylactic pharmaceutical/intervention - the market is smaller, the therapeutic index must be larger, and the insurance reimbursement is harder to get. I hope that someone smarter can break this open at some point. Natural products are the source of over 50% of approved drugs (though weighted heavily towards antibiotics), and the gut microbiome has really not been explored enough for its natural products.
As a note on the probiotics - be very skeptical of probiotic claims. Even if the microbe actually engrafts in your GI tract (a very big if), the probability that it is producing a given 'good' metabolite is unclear. Microbes have thousands of genes and they are constantly changing metabolism (=the metabolites they excrete) as a function of an innumerable array of factors including: energetic (what food sources are in the GI at that moment?), competitive (what competitor species are they sensing?), immune (what is the host immune state?), and physical (do I sense a high diffusion environment?) factors.
[0] From the abstract: "Here, we report that oral administration of 10-HSA prevented AFB1-induced gut epithelial barrier disruption and preserved mucosal T cell populations.
[1] From the methods: "Mice were randomly assigned into three groups. One group (n = 6) was pretreated with 10-HSA (AstaTech A10837) at 100 mg/kg/day in vehicle for one week and then aflatoxin-β1 (Sigma-Aldrich A6636) dissolved in DMSO (final concentration in water was 0.1%) was added to their drinking water for 21 days at a concentration of 5 mg/L. Another group (n = 6) was pretreated with the vehicle control for 1 week and then aflatoxin-β1 was added to their drinking water for 21 days at a concentration of 5 mg/L. The third group (n = 4) served as the negative control group and received vehicle for 1 week prior to DMSO addition to drinking water for 21 days.
mmmpetrichor · 8h ago
I'll drink to that!
verst · 2h ago
Makes me wonder whether Makgeolli (a low alcohol fermented traditional Korean beverage) contains this too.
Supported by grants from NIH/NIAID Grants and the University of California Davis.
DaveZale · 6h ago
yeah Davis is agriculturally oriented. Because this microbe grows in cows stomachs it is added to silage (feed) - so dairy products have this metabolite.
Amazing finding. The statistics on liver damage from aflatoxins said to affect potentially 5 billion people. And of course in the US, with its high incidence of obesity has liver issues due to NAFLD. Then of course the heavy drinkers are all at risk.
lp299v is extreme safe and can be taken in mega-doses however it will not colonize in the GI so would have to be taken routinely
0cf8612b2e1e · 3h ago
Wouldn’t it be easier to just take a gram of the metabolite itself vs hoping for long term colonization?
DaveZale · 2h ago
yes, this is what's done with tributyrin which is a triester of butyric acid. You want to ingest either a butyric acid salt or an ester of butyric acid, since the butyric acid itself is really stinky.
From the article we are talking about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactiplantibacillus_plantarum and it’s apparently the most common fermenting bacteria for silage, and shows up in sauerkraut and kimchi.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lacticaseibacillus_casei is another interesting one that got split into a separate genus. No direct action has so far been found for this genus of bacteria, but it makes the GI tract more hospitable for a large number of probiotic species and less hospitable for others like C. difficile, which is one of the nastiest post-antibiotic infections one can get. So nasty it has the French word for “difficult” in its name.
Found in cheddar cheese and yogurt. Any time I have problems or have to take antibiotics I make sure to line up some of both for recovery.
In contrast, antibiotics often kill a strain of a few off completely, while suppressing everything else except for a few strains that resist the antibiotic, which also creates a massive opportunity for new bacteria to colonize. And these deficits are partially heritable.
The other things seem more plausible. Purely anecdotally, my step-dad always thought he was intolerant to gluten because of his reactions to British bread, but when he spent a lot of time in France and tried bread there, he was fine.
Could be there's something about the production process of the standard British "Chorleywood loaf" that aggravates some bowels.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chorleywood_bread_process
In general, I find it quite easy to believe that a lot of mass-produced foods contain what are essentially poisons, but I'm curious about evidential links (and I'm also aware that lots of naturally-occurring foods can be poisons if eaten too much, but that's a different question)
The obesity epidemic started rapidly around 1980, but it's unlikely diet changed for the worse since then.
Also, it happened to lab animals and pets as well.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/abs/10.1098/rspb.2010...
Also, it appears to be correlated with low altitudes and interventions that cause you to move to higher altitudes cause weight loss.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
> Purely anecdotally, my step-dad always thought he was intolerant to gluten because of his reactions to British bread, but when he spent a lot of time in France and tried bread there, he was fine.
The American equivalent of this (people who go to Europe and think the bread is healthier because it's easy to digest) is because we fortify wheat and the extra nutrients esp. iron cause stomach discomfort.
"I travelled somewhere and things improved" has the serious complication that you changed almost everything at once and possibly removed major stress sources. You were even outside of your own home - and buildings have ecosystems themselves anyway as well as just systemic faults.
I would just add that when he got back to Britain and tried baguette style bread there he found that he could tolerate it in Britain too.
Again, I'm just reporting a story as it was told to me because I was reminded of it in response to the previous comment.
One of the big problems with most of these metabolites is that they work better in preventing the emergence of disease pathology than they do in ameliorating it. In other words, they aren't super reverse causal for disease. You'll note that in this study, the design was pretreatment with the beneficial metabolite to prevent injury, rather than rescue once injury occurred ([0], [1]).
It's difficult to make a prophylactic pharmaceutical/intervention - the market is smaller, the therapeutic index must be larger, and the insurance reimbursement is harder to get. I hope that someone smarter can break this open at some point. Natural products are the source of over 50% of approved drugs (though weighted heavily towards antibiotics), and the gut microbiome has really not been explored enough for its natural products.
As a note on the probiotics - be very skeptical of probiotic claims. Even if the microbe actually engrafts in your GI tract (a very big if), the probability that it is producing a given 'good' metabolite is unclear. Microbes have thousands of genes and they are constantly changing metabolism (=the metabolites they excrete) as a function of an innumerable array of factors including: energetic (what food sources are in the GI at that moment?), competitive (what competitor species are they sensing?), immune (what is the host immune state?), and physical (do I sense a high diffusion environment?) factors.
[0] From the abstract: "Here, we report that oral administration of 10-HSA prevented AFB1-induced gut epithelial barrier disruption and preserved mucosal T cell populations.
[1] From the methods: "Mice were randomly assigned into three groups. One group (n = 6) was pretreated with 10-HSA (AstaTech A10837) at 100 mg/kg/day in vehicle for one week and then aflatoxin-β1 (Sigma-Aldrich A6636) dissolved in DMSO (final concentration in water was 0.1%) was added to their drinking water for 21 days at a concentration of 5 mg/L. Another group (n = 6) was pretreated with the vehicle control for 1 week and then aflatoxin-β1 was added to their drinking water for 21 days at a concentration of 5 mg/L. The third group (n = 4) served as the negative control group and received vehicle for 1 week prior to DMSO addition to drinking water for 21 days.
and eat a kraut dog. Or a Ruben. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactiplantibacillus_plantaru...
Amazing finding. The statistics on liver damage from aflatoxins said to affect potentially 5 billion people. And of course in the US, with its high incidence of obesity has liver issues due to NAFLD. Then of course the heavy drinkers are all at risk.
Lactobacillus Plantarum is a super common probiotic that produces 10-HSA and other important metabolites
its commercial name is also known as lp299v which has been studied for decades, tons of studies
for example: https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4344/10/2/154
lp299v is extreme safe and can be taken in mega-doses however it will not colonize in the GI so would have to be taken routinely