The Western diet has nearly killed our ancestral microbiome
nautil.us
nautil.us
- raw food is rarely eaten unless it has a thick / peelable skin - mostly veggies are cooked in oil - starch heavy (flour for dumplings or baked goods, and rice) - spice heavy (chili, Szechuan peppercorn) - sodium heavy (soy, bean pastes, and preserved vegetables) - lots of odd ingredients from a western point of view (mushrooms, fermented beans) - no set "breakfast" foods vs "supper" foods per se; more like "banquet" foods vs . "Everyday"
I've been told from my Chinese friends they find our penchant for salads and raw food to be barbaric. Evolved people eat cooked food, or so the saying goes.
I can next talk about India, Pakistan, Bangkadesh and its varied regional diet...
My point is that there are a couple billion people that articles like these completely ignore and treat as if these people are martians...
However, they don't cook their vegetables too much.
And in a proper Chinese hotel, even orange juice in the breakfast table is hot.
I believe that is due to a cultural aversion to cold drinks.
[1]: http://www.spiegel.de/gesundheit/diagnose/muenster-16-jaehri...
This is a pet peeve of a biologist I know: even though I know nobody who can determine species like he can, he's still very strongly against collecting mushrooms in the wild and does not do it himself. According to him there are just too many edible mushrooms with a poisonous look-alike which in some cases prefers the same surroundings as habitat and in for which the distinction can only be made by smell, or by squeezing it and see how the color changes, etc. Not sure he's exaggerating but it does illustrate why people die from eating mushrooms out of the wild, time and time again.
>Though there is no harm in assuming all colorful snakes are dangerous
I assume all wild mushrooms are dangerous. There is no harm in it. :)
But looking at the math, the most fatal species belong to Amanita [0]. Amanita contains about 600 varieties (wiki lists 500ish). Of those 500, for my region only, I would need to learn how to identify about 30 varieties. A reasonably feasible amount! But wait... we can trim that number down some more. Ignoring the ones where edibility is unknown, that leaves only 10 or so to identify. Anyone who cared enough could likely easily learn to tell them apart. But with 5 being known as deadly and 1 of those being the angel of death [1], I won't be taking any chances. :)
It's also totally fine to not do anything, I just wanted to point out that your position was extremely conservative on the matter.
Here, beginners are advised to only pick extremely easily recognizable mushrooms like various Boletus (Tatti).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boletaceae
The books have very thorough instructions on identification.
Come back in 50 years and we'll see how well the Chinese have coped with their modern diet. I'm guessing it won't be so well.
I once took a cooking class in Beijing for home cooks (I speak mandarin and the class was for locals, not foreigners).
The amount of sugar going in some popular dishes was crazy (literally handfuls).
Traditional Chinese culture believes raw food damages the Qi of the Stomach. This belief may be grounded in the fact that their traditional way of fertilizing the crops is "night soil" or human excrement. Eating raw vegetables is a maladaptive behavior under those conditions.
It might be also linked with cooked foods being easier to digest. China has had high population densities - and therefore a recurrent problem with crop failure leading to famines - for many centuries (at least in the river valleys), so using non-eatable plants as an energy source to make human digestion more efficient is also an adaptive behavior.
I'm also reminded of how the Chinese traditionally regarded cold drinks as dangerous. They didn't even drink wine without heating it -- and certainly would never drink cold water, or tea that had been steeped without being brought to a boil (and, I think, held there).
Sure, the vestiges of that diet still exist today as do many of the cultural beliefs and habits e.g. only eating cooked foods unless they have a thick, peelable skin, boiling water before drinking it etc.
The point I am trying to make is that the Chinese have taken that traditional diet and added a huge amount of sugar, salt and MSG, not to mention significantly more meat (in recent years, this can often be doctored with water and/or various chemicals by the vendor). If you're eating at a restaurant rather than at home, meals probably contain a good dose of gutter oil too.
That should not be taken in any way as being healthy, and because it's also relatively recent, the effect it will have on the health population is not yet highly visible.
In mainland China they also have a poor concept of proper nutrition and this is exacerbated by the one child policy, with parents and grandparents feeding their only child whatever they want to eat (often sweets, candy, soft drink) rather than what is good for them.
On multiple occasions in China I've known children under the age of 5 with rotting, horrible teeth and when I brought it up with the parents and/or relatives (who I also knew) they laughed it off and said "oh it doesn't matter, they're just baby teeth and new ones will grown in soon and they'll be ok".
They completely failed to realise they were setting their children up for a lifetime of diet, teeth and health related problems.
I've got no problems with the concepts of traditional Chinese cooking, but it's increasingly difficult to find that in modern China.
I eat lots of raw food in contrast... salads, veggies with hummus, fruit, etc.
I'm no expert, so please correct me if I'm wrong. My understanding is that they need to cook their vegetables in China to make sure they are safe to eat. Tap water isn't generally potable there, or is that just in cities?
I forget the source where I read this, but there were supposedly vendors who only sold hot water. Water is a really cheap commodity, so the currency reflected that. Those lightweight, fractional-cent coins with the holes in them were kept on a string by the water vendors to easily take/dispense for selling hot water.
It's been years since I read this, so I may be totally off base with my recollection. But it makes sense given the problems associated with very dense populations and potable water in pre-industrial times.
Some people aren't convinced.
I found it odd as well vs here in India were it would be some cooked dish.
Developing a comprehensive and objective view of human digestion wasn't the goal of the research. The primary goal was to disparage the so called modern "western diet," and glorify that of a traditional Exotic Other by contrast. Facts were then selectively chosen to support the pre-ordained conclusion.
For that purpose, only one non-western analysis is necessary, and in particular they must stringently avoid analysis of non-western places that are also heavily into fried food.
The author also goes on about how terrible antibiotics are, the damage they've done to the western microbiome. They further lament with little comment how antibiotics are now appearing with increasing frequency in the remaining environments where Exotic Others still live in a traditional fashion.
They fail to note that this is because in the absence of antibiotics, people -- especially children -- tend to die horribly painful deaths of sepsis at a vastly increased rate, and even exotic others tend to prefer not to die like that when taking $2 worth of pills can prevent it.
There are some pretty sensationalist claims asserted for the gut microbiome at the moment, but it's early days yet so we're not certain what works for who, when, where, and why. I can say on a personal anecdote that after decades of not being able to eat the spicy foods that I enjoyed in childhood, I went through a course of probiotics for a year (they actually hang out here on HN), and now I can dial up the heat. It wasn't a controlled, double-blind study, but I'm sufficiently satisfied with my N=1 experiment to tentatively ascribe the result to the probiotics until new evidence arises to show me otherwise.
[1] http://discovermagazine.com/1987/may/02-the-worst-mistake-in...
[2] http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t...
GB is not exactly cheap if you are on a student budget, so in the interest of full disclosure and crufty, messy, crowd sourcing pseudo-science, I'll offer some caveats of what else I was trying at the same time that might have also yielded my results. I tried two other brands of probiotic before settling on GB: Dr. Ohhira's and Bio-K+. Six months on Bio-K+ followed by two months on Dr. Ohhira's. At the same time, I went to a 20 mg / day maximum net carbohydrate, high-fat, moderate protein diet. I used testing strips to verify that I actually went into ketosis, and cycled to a 100 mg net carbohydrate day once 1-2 months to break weight loss plateaus. So before you "follow in my footsteps" and commit to a year of GB, be aware I had confounding factors that might also explain what happened to me (the ketogenic diet is the next candidate for a cause, but I've never heard of anyone being able to eat spicy foods again by starting that diet).
If I had the time and access, I'd pay to try bacteriotherapy using donor material from an athletic donor who likes spicy food. I suspect bacteriotherapy is good for more than just CDI.
The GB guys are super helpful and friendly, and you go month-to-month. I found suspending or cancelling super easy and hassle-free. So if you are curious to partake in your own N=1 experiment on gut microbiome reconstitution for just a month (though they themselves say don't count on any changes before within months), I encourage you to try it out and share your results.
Sure, they breed kids with a gut flora that deals with indigestable cellulose even worse than previous generations, but will they make it to their own reproductive prime age? Chances are, they will.
Which is all "evolution" cares about, harsh as it may sound.
Reproductive success in a natural selection context is not only about the sheer number of offsprings you have, it's about how good you can disseminate genes to the next generations. If genetic mutations allow you to increase that dissemination by caring for your offsprings, then it's selected.
Can you back that up? Actually having living healthy grand-parents can be a boon to reproductive success: they can take care of kids, while parents are out hunting or gathering. So yes, if you have genetic mutations favoring living old enough to be grand-parents, it is subject to selection pressure.
Plus, it's been a while since we started caring for old people. In that context, because evolution is all about context, having healthy elderly is also a boon to reproductive success since it doesn't divert resources from child care to elderly care.
Any genetic mutation that is expressed and results into higer reproductive success in a specific context is subject to selection.
Also, food conservation! Pickled veggies and sauerkraut have always been stapled foods for me.
Speaking of diets. During the last ten-fifteen years people in Russia have developed a taste for fresh vegetables and fruit available immediately from the supermarket shelves. This trend is being reversed quite quickly due to skyrocketed prices (and the ridiculous embargo on agricultural production from eu and some other selected countries). Well, back to dachas, I guess.
Rather than derailing our evolution, the "Western Diet" is part of our evolution. Our children's hair does not fall out due to malnutrition, and that's pretty cool (if you want to see a place where it does, go to Papua, where they do a mostly simple vegetarian diet like the Burkina Faso folks praised in this article).
As for the "Western" part of the headline...a diet lower in fibre and higher in protein, fat, and sugar can equally be found in China and Indonesia, which happen to be two of the largest countries in the world, and very much in the East. So don't feel too bad about which hemisphere you were born in.
It was something said to everyone in high school.
Some populations have famously experienced strong detrimental effects on their health when switching away from more traditional diets. North Karelian heart attacks post-WWII are a notorious example.
Within my field of research, we know there's an enormous budding crisis in Southern US. A very significant fraction of all Alabama population is pre-diabetic. This is a massive public health problem. Corn syrup-driven diets are terrible.
Obesity as a result of poor diet is a point of pride for many people in the US.
I think it's in part a sociocultural issue. If your rent is low, you tend to avoid buying good food which is usually way more expensive and less satiating than cheap and simple carbohydrates.
Abusing soft drinks is also really problematic. These completely wreck your metabolism with their high concentrations of soluble syrups.
[1] www.cdc.gov/diabetes/pdfs/data/diabetesbelt.pdf
Fortunately, almost everybody ignores the food pyramid. They just interpret it as "oh, I should try to eat from all the food groups". Fine.
The problem with the food pyramid is that it is based on obsolete science at best, and was probably designed by food industry lobbies.
> a diet lower in fibre and higher in protein, fat, and sugar can equally be found in China and Indonesia
On what basis have you arrived to those conclusions? The normal diet in China and Indonesia is plant based. Yes, they eat a lot of rice, but that rice is much more healthy than the vitamin-fortified substance made out of bleached, white flour that we call bread nowadays.
And don't mistake the food that you can eat in your local Chinese restaurant to what the Chinese are actually eating. For example much of the food promoted in western Chinese restaurants (at least the ones where I've been) is unbelievably greasy and sweet. But guess what, the food being eaten in China is not sweet, sugar and soy sauce being used only sparingly in only some meat-based dishes, but that's not the norm.
Also singling out one nutrient or another is reductionist science and represents everything that's wrong with western nutrition and health-care. Remember cholesterol? That was a fucking fiasco for which the medical community never apologized for. We need more Omega-3? Sure, put some in the supermarket sliced bread. Does our food have so much high-fructose corn syrup or other corn derived substances in it, that we can effectively be called the corn people? Oh, point to the Chinese for also eating sweat stuff. Do the French eat saturated fats and wash it with wine? Call it a paradox.
> And don't mistake the food that you can eat in your local Chinese restaurant to what the Chinese are actually eating.
I live in Asia. My local Chinese restaurants are Chinese, and if I want Indonesian food I can eat it in Indonesia. I should have given a shout out to Thailand as well, where sugar is put in lots of things you wouldn't expect, like fresh fruit juice.
I suppose you can call Indonesian meals "plant based" when they largely consist of a heap of white rice, but I defy you to find the plants in the ever popular "bakso" and Indomie.
On what basis have you arrived to those conclusions?
Considering how popular street vendors are and crappy restaurants, who have been caught using gutter oil, well, China may not be the miraculous country of healthy eaters you think it is.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/10/28...
Fried foods and obesity are huge concerns in China right now:
http://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-...
Chinese kids are almost as fat as American kids:
http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2014/05/29/as-obesity-ris...
"The country is now No. 2 for obesity, with its number of obese residents outstripped only by the U.S. Its obesity rate has skyrocketed over the last three decades, resulting in 46 million obese Chinese adults and 300 million who are overweight"
They have more overweight people than the US has people!
>Modern processed food managed to increase our daily calories intake while decreasing the essential nutrients that we need.
This sounds like bullshit that falls into the nostalgia of the past fallacy.
Likely because for centuries Chinese believed that "a fat child is a healthy child". Some children are almost force-fed from infancy to early teens. Often only then does the _child_ realize there is a problem. Encouragement to eat is ubiquitous in the Chinese culture. A "hearty appetite" is always considered a good thing, regardless of age or obesity.
It may require two generations to nullify this Chinese traditional belief.
Speaking of a group of about 1.6 billion people as if they were a monolith is not particularly productive.
Just looking at China itself, there is huge variation in the "average" diets between different provinces (e.g., Shanghainese dishes tend to be sweeter, Sichuanese dryer and spicier, etc.). And even at that provincial level it's kind of silly to lump everyone into a single average.
The parent discussed the diet of these huge countries as if they were consistent across all (or even most) individuals. In my opinion, this becomes highly subjective very fast.
Granted, this argument is pretty pedantic, and the threshold which determines when a group is too large to discuss as a single unit is squishy and highly contextual.
Likewise, I'd ask you what data you used to arrive at your conclusion that rice is healthier for you than bread? A quick googling of white rice vs white bread told me the exact opposite, or at best, that they were relatively equal. Other colors compared similarly, assuming I kept them similar. The terms "rice" and "bread" are way too generic to compare, really.
There was no conclusion to question. You created a false equivalence because there's an assumption that one MUST be better than the other. That presumption is what the original post questioned. There was no "conclusion"/assertion that flour > rice.
In your original post, you say "... but that rice is much more healthy than the vitamin-fortified substance made out of bleached, white flower that we call bread nowadays."
So, perhaps not a conclusion, but an assertion then. Semantics aside, I believe a statement like that should be backed up by data, and I've been unable to find any data that backs up your claim. So again, I ask to know what you're basing that assertion on.
I literally don't know what you're talking about, as a Chinese person. Health in China has been getting bad. The reason obesity and other statistics were low compared to other places is because China is very big and there are many places where people are only a generation from starving subsistence farmers.
Western technological advancements have pretty much everything to do with our wins against malnutrition.
Without question, there are still far too many hungry people in the world. Chronic persistent hunger is an enormous problem that will be difficult to overcome but these people aren't hungry because there isn't enough food. There's food aplenty, we haven't been able to come up with a system for providing it to everyone in adequate amounts.
That's "derailed evolution", isn't it?
There are side effects in any rapidly-evolving creature. Sports and mutations survive because they are helpful. But they can be hurtful in other, non-fatal ways. I think modern illnesses (need glasses? have a food allergy?) are unfortunate side effects of a rapidly-changing genome.
edit: sorry to nitpick but it's just one of those things that always gets me
There is absolutely no way there is a diet higher in sugar for the average person in Indonesia and it is extremely unlikely that their diet is lower in fiber. Many people have access to cheap fresh vegetables through wet markets they can walk to and because of the price it is a significant part of their diet.
Hot muslim countries like Malaysia have problems with sugar due to drinking lots of soda but they aren't ahead of the US in sugar consumption per capita.
Human evolution is no longer in the hands of nature in the sense that people most commonly think of it. It will never be again.
We've taken over direct control of our evolution. That's not an exaggeration, it's a fact of our present circumstances. These are the early days, yes, but non-the-less. The time scale of meaningful human evolution is about to shift from tens of thousands of years, to decades.
In that time we'll start altering the general human genome, and likely remove countless inherited conditions out of it either directly or indirectly. The technology will accelerate at an incredible pace from here, becoming very common; leading edge CRISPR knowledge and capabilities today will be laughable in 30 years.
Our evolution has done anything but been derailed, it's about to leap forward.
Who here really thinks humans ~500 years from now, will have much in common with humans of today? I don't think what exists at that point will be reasonably considered human at all, as we know the term. Nothing can really stop that outcome except an extinction event. The only question is what we become, not whether we change; and taking over control of our evolution is part of that.
For already living, it is hard to predict how hard it will be to go from in vitro to in vivo for gene modification.
At a minimum, with robotisation we will get cheaper beauty surgery and chemicals can affect confidence and work ethics. So e.g. looks and first impressions (for sexual selection) will be quite irrelevant.
As to "first impressions" and such, they're based on thousands of years of both social and genetic selection, and I don't think those traits are conveniently located in a single location. Even then, what if the same genome location controls both "first-look judgements" and "jump away from the path of that speeding bike"?
As to editing the genome, I'm afraid I don't share your optimism. I consider our genome to be a 3.2 billion-line BASIC program (the old-skool one, with line numbers and no variable scoping), without unit tests or documentation of course. Sure, you can replace a single line and still have the program compile or run correctly. But how are you going to conclusively prove that your modification has no unintended side-effects, for either current or future generations?
I also don't believe that appearance affects chances to pass on your genes. The ability to have sex does. But people with a lower than average appearance score (lets say), have the option of having sex with other people having the same problem. This also bypasses the fact that human beings are very complex animals, capable of falling in love with pretty much anything, including a piece of fiction and that when looking for a partner we also end up looking at other traits.
And please forgive me for my political incorrectness, but as an anecdotal experience, from what I've noticed the people that are breeding a lot (you know, the communities where families of 6 children or more are common place), well those people are downright ugly on average. Which makes sense, given that the people that are breeding a lot are usually the poor and they are ugly and in bad shape mostly due to not having access to health-care. Yet when it comes to having sex, they don't seem to care.
Nature, in the broadest sense, is the natural, physical, or material world or universe [1] If humans are separate from the universe, then where does the universe end, and we begin?
However, besides this nitpick, I agree with all your points. In the future, nature will select some genes based on their fitness as predicted by nature, as well as actual fitness at the current moment.
Well, some of them are bound to make it... http://pets.stackexchange.com/questions/9571/can-cats-surviv...
The next genetic leaps in the next century are going to be stratospheric.
Regarding the headline of this article, if anything, the past century has been great for keeping death at bay and promoting life when it otherwise would not have thrived, but I don't think there will be a major shift in evolution from this because there won't be enough time for it to manifest vs the changes we're about to institute via the above paragraph.
Agreed. I'm afraid your assumption may be completely true. The sad thing is that such a rapid market capture will preclude verification of cross-generational effects of our modifications. And we don't have a good track record for getting things right on the first try.
As a hypothetical example, how many generations do you think it will take to recognize if one particular gene splicing will make interbreeding between spliced vs non-spliced offspring impossible?
I do hope that is not what you meant with your comment though. I prefer not to think of fellow human beings as living petri dishes, so I don't consider field-patching an acceptable solution when discussing genetic manipulation.
To paraphrase the study by Sonnenburg: It is theorized that a depletion of the microbial biodiversity caused by a low-fiber diet is responsible for many chronic diseases. Mice that were fed a low-fiber diet developed less microbial diversity, but if they were put back on a high fiber diet, their microbial community recovered quickly. However, and most revealingly, if they gave birth to a litter while on a low-fiber diet (and therefore with a weak microbial community) the second generation mice were unable to develop a strong microbial community regardless of diet.
The conclusion is that microbes already present in one's body can adapt according to diet. If a microbial species metabolizes fiber and the host does not consume fiber, the microbe will possibly enter a "dormant" (my invented term) state, but it can be recovered to full strength. Still, "dormant" microbes will not be prevalent in the birth canal to ensure transmission to the next generation, so that generation will not have that microbe species regardless of diet. Over generations, this could lead to extinction of entire microbial species.
THIS is the evolution that the article talks about, NOT genome evolution.
> In that time [decades] we'll start altering the general human genome, and likely remove countless inherited conditions out of it either directly or indirectly.
What's the rush? You're talking about altering the human genome, something COMPLETELY IRREVERSIBLE in a single generation. This article asserts that an enormous part of our bodies was barely beginning to be researched five years ago! The reason this hubris is so common is that a few parts of our bodies are relatively simple and easily understood: the circulatory, respiratory and other systems that exist as meat. On the other hand we barely understand the many systems that live in a complex state of delicate equilibrium: endocrine, immune, and microbial which seems to be apart of both of them.
It has always been my impression that much of the microbiome is transferred after birth through breast milk, not in utero. I don't have any authority at hand to verify whether this is true, or to what extent, though.
One of the primary benefits of raw food is that it is a great way to introduce microbial diversity. On the other hand, a diet comprised only of cooked or sterile processed foods is going to exacerbate microbial diversity issues.
If we really wanna get evolution back on course, we need to start letting the weak die. Personally, I think that sounds awful, and I think derailing our evolution is a small price to pay.
Evolution doesn't have a "course," it's just what happens when organisms reproduce with modifications. Until we stop reproducing, evolution is working exactly the same now as it always has.
s/Western Diet/Western Food Industry/