Fungus in humans identified for first time as key factor in Crohn's disease
sciencedaily.com
sciencedaily.com
It seems that fecal transplant (or pills based on them) can alter/fix gut profiles[1]. I wonder if someone tried fecal transplant to cure Cron's disease.
[1] https://youtu.be/e_dF1N-Ckbw?t=1m44s
Edit: It seems this has been tried and pretty successful[2].
"A recent publication in the journal Inflammatory Bowel Diseases titled, “Fecal Microbial Transplant Effect on Clinical Outcomes and Fecal Microbiome in Active Crohn’s Disease,” reports seven of nine patients with Crohn’s disease were effectively treated using FMT in a Seattle Children’s research study."
[2] http://pulse.seattlechildrens.org/study-suggests-fecal-trans...
To stay in remission, I focus on diet and exercise, and deny the bacteria the fuel they require (at least, that's my theory).
Big pharma has largely focused on alleviating the inflammatory symptoms of auto-immune response. Treating the symptoms and not the cause unfortunately allows the vicious cycle to continue.
I hope discoveries like this will encourage more Medical Professionals to pursue preemptive dietary, naturopathic, and lifestyle remedies for managing Crohn's.
However, these remedies are not profitable, so I'm not optimistic :-(
Water: Probably the #1 most important thing for Crohn's patients to manage is water consumption. Bottled water whenever possible. More specifically, the more alkaline the better. Tap water, unless you live in the mountains, is commonly bad on the digestive tract.
Fried food: Generally "bad", but food fried with certain oils seems to be okay. The oil needs to be fresh. Fried food from fast food chains is always "bad".
Sugars: Complex sugars are "bad". Monosaccharide sugars, found in fruits or honey, are okay.
Vegetables: "Good" when steamed. But undigested raw veggies increases risk of triggering an auto-immune response. I eat small salads... ideally chef salads with some protein (ham/bacon/turkey).
Fruits: Similar to veggies, only small portions. Don't let roughage linger in digestive system too long.
Dark Chocolate: 80%+ cocoa in moderation tends to be okay. The endorphin rush is a plus and a good substitute for coffee.
Popcorn: Definitely off limits. Auto-immune response triggers when the body detects undigested kernels.
Dairy: Odd mix. Milk is extremely "bad". Won't even touch it. So is milk chocolate. Eggs are okay if used in cooking, but I avoid eating plain eggs for breakfast. Butter and many gourmet cheeses are fine (processed cheese is "bad").
Coffee: I drink a lot of coffee. Probably too much. The water, beans, and preparation process all contribute to coffee being "good" for Crohn's. Coffee becomes "bad" if there are any additives, such as dairy or sugar. Not even dairy substitutes, like soy, can be added.
Meats: Okay in moderation, but lately I've been cutting back on red meats after learning more about increased risk of colon cancer in Crohn's patients. High quality beef burgers and fish are common staples.
Alcohol: I abstained from drinking for many years when first diagnosed with Crohn's, but was pleasantly surprised to discover that I could introduce many "top shelf" brands in moderation without any real symptoms. I've learned a lot about the distillation process of wines and spirits as a result. There are such things as "good" and "bad" alcohol.
Craft Beer: Similar to above, there are "good" and "bad" beer yeasts and fermentation processes. It's very hit or miss, but when I discover a craft beer that "works" with my digestive system, I stick with it. Lagunitas is an example of a beer that happens to be "good" with my gut bacteria.
That seems like a huge find. Biofilms can be very hardy and difficult to break down. I wonder what a treatment for something like this would be.
For candida overgrowth for me there were 2 parts - dietary changes and antifungals.
Dietary changes. While being a heavy consumer of breads and pastries, i stopped eating white bread and similar yeast and sugar rich stuff from the stores. Found a good Russian and German bread instead, and sometimes enjoy their pastries. And whole wheat bagels. Gives me that carbohydrate fix. Several years ago, for moral reasons, i stopped eating pork, lamb and beef, and accidentally it helped too as the US beef seems to be a stuff that candida likes, at least it was liking it in my case. And also i did a bunch of other small changes in those general directions, increasing greens/veggies consumption and in general similar to what the other poster says about "good" and "bad" foods/drinks (except for coffee, still drink it though it is more neutral than "good" or may be even a bit toward "bad" for me). Also based on my experience, in particular with letting go of heavy meats and eating more greens/veggies, i believe the other guy who mentioned veganism though myself i haven't been able to make such big of jump.
Antifungals. I didn't went medical antifungals as they are heavy on liver and the reported results from various Internet accounts aren't better than natural antifungals. There are a lot of natural antifungals, and it is more about what works for you personally. I tried apple cider vinegar, garlic, virgin coconut oil, ginger. All of them work to a good degree, initially better, after some time the fungi seems to adapt somewhat. The mix of those natural antifungals seems to work the best. I didn't really liked the coconut oil. So i ended up with daily regiment of double dose of garlic pills (i like the real garlic, yet the smell is an issue at home and work), several cups of ginger tea during the day at work, and 2 table spoons of apple cider vinegar 2 times a day (of course diluted in a cup of water or just used as a dressing for a large cucumber/tomato/greens/etc. salad. Also that dose is a result of my personal experience, i started with 1 or 2 table spoons per cup of water 3-4 times a day, it worked for me, yet dosing down and adding ginger and garlic instead worked even better, and one would want to be easy on vinegar). Frequently instead of the diluted vinegar i drink Kevita - apple juice with the apple cider vinegar with ginger with probiotic - works better than the equivalent volume of diluted vinegar alone, in particular because probiotic is extremely important in dealing with candida.
One of the main things that i learned - it took me couple of months to work out the regiment once i set out on fixing the issue - is that it is very individualized and require some careful experimentation and observation.
https://classicalchinesemedicine.org/gpa/ancient-solution-mo...
But if the Chron's is happening from a poor diet/lack of exercise, that will be easier to troubleshoot.
If its a candida overgrowth, https://www.humaworm.com/candida---fungi-cleanse.html but they may have parasites (see Gu article above) in which symptoms (some present in Chrons) can appear: https://www.humaworm.com/symptoms-of-parasites.html They provide this formula: https://www.humaworm.com/humaworm-formula---dosing.html
many other companies sell similar concoctions on amazon, but these guys seem to have the best reputation.
Goodluck, everyone is unique so its not as simple as debugging a computer process haha.
Black walnut is from North America. Wormwood is from Eurasia and Africa.
Kindness should not function as a free pass to allow people to spread falsehood.
For anyone interested Joe's podcast is actually incredibly informative and dense with good information.
If you want to be informed with what ever the latest pseudoscience/conspiracy fad is. Rogan has a reputation for his lack of critical thinking. Fake moon landing, 9-11 "truther" BS, chemtrails... all things he has pushed on his show. Oh yeah don't forget to buy stuff from his line of supplements too! Imo, he is nothing more than a meathead snake oil salesman that happens to be funny too.
if you take this seriously and are somehow indignant about the content or the sponsors, that's on you, not him.
"if you're looking for real science, then..." -- well no kidding dude. it's entertainment and can serve as a jumping off point to do your own research.
having said that his UFC content is really good, but you're probably not into that sort of thing, what with your 'meathead' pejorative which i guess you think is somehow cool because we like computers and supposedly shun exercise? that's cool i guess.
What good are your ideas if they can't stand up to being challenged by the ideas of others?
TL;DR is the zeitgeist, and I want to fight it. I want to read long form articles, books and listen to these great podcasts, but the number of hours in my day don't seem to allow it.
Do people set aside time? Am I just inherently bad at managing my time?
For what it's worth, I'm pretty sure this was said somewhere in the Chris Kresser, Joe Rogan Experience podcast episode #842.[0]
Interestingly, this means in a two-dimensional world, an organism couldn't have a similar structure, since the digestive system would completely separate the animal into two halves.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24614898
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/26/health/alzheimers-disease-...
To make matters worse, his long-term girlfriend/fiance left him while he was in the hospital.
I wish I knew what happened to him. He wound up moving out of state to stay with his parents as he got better, and basically cut most folks out of his life at that time.
> As of November 2015, only 269 of more than 6,000 Web of Science search results for the term “microbiome” even mention “fungus,” and the scientific search engine returns only 55 papers pertaining to the “mycobiome.”
> Despite this lack of attention, a handful of recent studies point to the importance of our commensal fungal inhabitants as critical players in human health and disease.
http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/45153/...
Hopefully this type of research will help with a large variety of illnesses.
* collect many samples from people with various symptoms
* do metagenomic sequencing on these samples to find what species are present in which samples
* machine learn the s--t out of this to find associations/correlations
* ...um, profit?
What would be the main problem on this way? Cost? Reliability of sequencing? Correlation not implying causation? Me talking nonsense?
This finding, from what I understand, connected Crohn to the presense of three species working together to form a microfilm. Would not that be something to be found with the method like this?
The abundance of the fungus Candida tropicalis was significantly higher in CD than in NCDR (P = 0.003) samples and positively correlated with levels of anti-Saccharomyces cerevisiae antibodies (ASCA). The abundance of C. tropicalis was positively correlated with S. marcescens and E. coli, suggesting that these organisms interact in the gut.
All we know about correlation level from this is r > 0.
More here: http://mbio.asm.org/content/7/5/e01250-16
For artificial joints like a hip and a knee joint, you have a lot of exposed materials like titanium, stainless steel, or medical polymer, so it doesn't have an immune system. Getting a biofilm infection forming on an artificial joint sometimes means taking the implant out, even if it's working fine.
So biofilms are a tough problem. They're far more sinister than conventional bacterial colonies. Since this is in the digestive tract, I wonder if some type of detergent can be found that simply dissolves the film matrix, washing away the bacteria and fungi.
And, I guess the biofilm in this case is especially tough. From the abstract:
The mass and thickness of triple-species (C. tropicalis plus S. marcescens plus E. coli) biofilm were significantly greater than those of single- and double-species biofilms.
On the other hand, something like Crohn's means your microbiome is already damaged, or at least not optimized to make a positive contribution to your health. Fecal transplants from healthy donors have shown promise in similar circumstances; if you're interested in treatments for such conditions, that might be a good place to look.
The microbiome matters a whole lot, and it's starting to become clear how. These are great developments and I hope to see the trend continue.
The doctors told me UC is the immune system overreacting and damaging the colon. So it's still possible it's correlated to the bodies microbiome. But as you mentioned it could be very person/ethnic-specific.
The Royston Vasey Journal of Culinary Medicine also had some intriguing results from a meat-based therapeutic diet, but the control population disappeared before conclusive results could be drawn.
I told them: don't blend this with anything else. My special stuff isn't hamburger helper is it now? Bloody doctors. They should have listened when they had the chance.
Fungi play an interesting role in these systems.