Gut Microbes May Talk to the Brain Through Cortisol | Hacker News Reader

Gut Microbes May Talk to the Brain Through Cortisol

neurosciencenews.com

124 pointsMichaelAO27 comments

We are linking gut health to schizophrenia and now ASD. At 51, I eat homemade yogurt, Braggs vinegar, live pickled vegetables, some miso and ground flax seed every day. I just avoid sugars, booze and factory food at home. I have serious seasonal allergies and inflammation common to people who relocate to flowery swampy Washington, DC. I had one round of sinus surgery due to constant infections. I will not be an Olympic swimmer, but strong gut maintenance makes food better and days easier than time wasting doctors, pills and powders. The solutions are too simple and regimen based to weaponize, refine, patent and bottle.

Have you looked into the GAPS protocol? There's an operating theory that allergies and autoimmune issues are linked pinhole-sized ruptures in the intestines, and GAPS takes a very pragmatic and mechanical approach to helping heal one's intestines. My wife had eczema from her fingertips to her shoulders on both arms and GAPS mostly cleared it up over a couple of weeks. She fully cleared up the eczema using the Autoimmune Paleo Protocol for a few more weeks.

GAPS protocol is a quackery and its creator is antiscientific and dogmatic.[1] Your wife's eczema cure probably had nothing to do with GAPS protocol. Even if it was the reason it may not work for others and other diseases.

[1] - http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2011/08/01/gaps-in-a-docto...

The idea of healing small ruptures in the intestines by lining them with fats and collagen to isolate them from inflammatory stool components, and then preserving that lining by eating soft foods seems highly practical to me.

And on a scientific scale, I give your assessment a zero. You have simply wielded the word "science" with contempt prior to any observation. IOW you're employing pseudoscience to make your point, then referencing a blog post which cherry picks assertions from a licensed scientist, cites them out of context, relies on analogy, and you present this as "Science". You have in essence conflated science with rhetoric, especially given the well-documented biases of the Skeptics, the organization behind scienceblogs.

Criticize work not people.

Wish I had enough karma to downvote. Not CodeWriter's comments, but dimmuborgir's - for being so rude.

Contrary to you he at least gave a reference link to pick apart and discuss the validity of his claim. Which is better than a counterargument thar boils down to "I believe it could work because these ideas behind it soundsl reasonable" with no actual back-up from scientific studies testing those hypotheses. Which is then followed by an ad hominem accusation of being unscientific, and topped off with a claim of "well documented biases" but again without providing any actual references to said biases.

I don't know anything about GAPS and have no stake in its validity going either way, but I can say that your accusations of unscientific behaviour come across as projection.

A quick search shows this hitting too many of the typical pseudoscience bullshit triggers to merit much further analysis:

- mentions of "toxins" and "heavy metals"

- zero quality research or scientific backing

- broad list of afflictions it can miraculously cure, with little scientific reasoning for method for most

- supported by Dr Axe and other peddlers of bullshit

- origin story about how "mainstream medicine" failed the creator, who doggedly persisted in finding magic cure

Etc, etc.

Like most alternative treatments that aren't inherently harmful, I'd try it if everything else failed.

But this almost certainly doesn't work.

Edit: I mean, check out this blog post on eczema and the GAPS diet. I don't mean to make fun of this parent, but this is exactly what I'm talking about. I'm not sure there's any actual facts or understanding of science here at all. Almost every sentence is wrong. http://www.mariarickerthong.com/healing-eczema-with-the-gaps...

That epidemiology sounds compelling. I had 18 months of completely debilitating IBS due to "allergic reactions" to Cipro and Levaquin. That left other serious now diagnosed scars in nerve demyelination and yet another rarer autoimmune disease. I of necessity live a pretty refined weekly regimen I keep tweaking (anti-inflammation, upper respiratory, gut health). Humira for example is contraindicated by my nerve demyelination. Restoration to American grab and go commercial habits is not really in my cards according to overlapping specialists. My remaining dream is to kickstart an Open Source Longevity movement with open data sets, cost accounting and revision history on GitHub. My kid and Americans generally need more oxytocin rich hippie deluxe food and hospitality and less Soylent.

They didn't actually find that microbes talk to the brain through cortisol. They just found an association between gut microbes, cortisol and the brain.

We already know that the brain influences gut microbes through cortisol. So why did they not say that this is the most likely route for communication, rather than speculating on an unproven association in the other direction?

I find it odd that these studies keep popping up, and HN users keep voting for them. It seems there is a great desire for people to want to blame bacteria for autism/depression/IBS/CFS, rather than accepting a neurological or psychiatric cause.

Now, I'm not saying this stuff shouldn't be researched. Of course it should. It's just sad that people automatically assume the direction of causation is the unlikely one (gut->brain), rather than the one we know for certain exists (brain->gut). (And yes, we do know there is a gut-brain pathway, but generally it is just active during infections).

On the autism side, it's because autism also comes with serious gastrointestinal issues. So many people think it's just a neurological issue but there is a legitimate, non-conspiratorial link there.

What people want to know, is why?

https://www.autismspeaks.org/science/science-news/new-insigh...

as an autistic person with many autistic friends i would definitely like you not to grossly simplify the matter so bluntly. thanks

I mean no offense, but what am I simplifying?

Well, there is the case where a double-blind research project into a gut microbial cure (I believe it had something to do with cancer) failed the double-blindness aspect because the doctors could tell which patient got the real treatment and which one got the control group, because those with the real bacteria were visibly happier (and no, the control group did not have more digestion problems). I recall reading about this a few years back in the New Scientist.

There is also the fact that many of the people who get their stomach stapled report (usually temporary) changes in taste, in the sense that a glass of orange juice might suddenly taste like fish for a few weeks. That only makes sense if the stomach is somehow involved in the process of flavour perception.

So there definitely is more going on between the gut and the brain than the former only sending sensory information to the latter and the latter then deciding what happens next. We just don't know how that works yet.

Gut microbes _may_ talk to the brain through cortisol. On related note, a direct passage between the brain and the lymph system was discovered last year. It's behind the sinus cavity and bypasses the blood brain barrier.

https://news.virginia.edu/illimitable/discovery/theyll-have-...

how is this related?

Gut microbes interact with and effect the lymph system.

Since bullshit is cheap, viruses, bacterias and fetuses try to use hormones to make host organisms jump hoops for them.

That's why there's evolutionary pressure to make hormones hard to craft.

So hormones are like the body's proof-of-work system?

Some of them are based on hard currency: Iodine.

It seems more and more possible that we will soon discover substances that affect the gut microbiome to control/change people's behavior, for good or worse.

you can do it right now through food. the gut microbiome tells the host what it wants to eat or not. Different diets cater to different bacteria, that's the reason (for example) that people that now eat healthy but before could eat as much junk food as they wanted without side effects can't simply "switch back" to their old habits without getting bloated or just plain sick.

Anecdotal evidence: I lost about 50kg thru dieting, during my old days I could eat as much McDonalds as I wanted. Now if try to have anything but the smallest burger there I get sick, my system simply does not accept it anymore ;)

Well we know we can curb even cocaine addicted rats (behavior) by offering a mutually exclusive option of the cocaine or sugar/sweetener. They don't exactly get into the microbiome, but in a separate study they do test the differences of high fat vs high sugar diets and the impact on the microbiome: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2894525/

The study showed the same preference using both saccharin –a calorie-free sweetener - and sucrose (natural sugar w/calories). The study was also performed on rats who had never been introduced to cocaine and those exposed and with addiction to the drug. Up to 94% of the rats preferred the sweetener.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1931610/

I'd go into some of the human studies, but it tends to start a flame war here, so I'll skip it and just link to this, and allow people to draw there own conclusions: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4940716/

I'm not sure what that proves other than that sugar is more addictive than cocaine.

side note: "The researchers studied 1-month-old piglets, which are remarkably similar to human infants in terms of their gut and brain development."

http://www.macroevolution.net/human-origins.html

It just wouldn't be Hacker News without a gut-bacteria story, replete with commenters dietarily virtue-signalling and even dusting off "leaky gut syndrome", which precisely zero medical evidence proves is a thing.

Remember, gut bacteria are why webshit stinks.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22109896

Autoimmune diseases are characterized by tissue damage and loss of function due to an immune response that is directed against specific organs. This review is focused on the role of impaired intestinal barrier function on autoimmune pathogenesis. Together with the gut-associated lymphoid tissue and the neuroendocrine network, the intestinal epithelial barrier, with its intercellular tight junctions, controls the equilibrium between tolerance and immunity to non-self antigens. Zonulin is the only physiologic modulator of intercellular tight junctions described so far that is involved in trafficking of macromolecules and, therefore, in tolerance/immune response balance. When the zonulin pathway is deregulated in genetically susceptible individuals, autoimmune disorders can occur. This new paradigm subverts traditional theories underlying the development of these diseases and suggests that these processes can be arrested if the interplay between genes and environmental triggers is prevented by re-establishing the zonulin-dependent intestinal barrier function. Both animal models and recent clinical evidence support this new paradigm and provide the rationale for innovative approaches to prevent and treat autoimmune diseases.

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