Study suggests sugar alternative contributing to C. diff epidemic | Hacker News Reader

Study suggests sugar alternative contributing to C. diff epidemic

directorsblog.nih.gov

115 pointssciadvance33 comments

>..it might surprise you to learn that, over the past 15 years or so, some makers of ice cream and many other processed foods—from pasta to ground beef products—have changed their recipes to swap out some of the table sugar (sucrose) with a sweetening/texturizing ingredient called trehalose that depresses the freezing point of food.

How the hell is the food industry not regulated more strictly.

FDA spending on regulation of food. 2017 - 1.195 Billion(https://www.hhs.gov/about/budget/fy2017/budget-in-brief/fda/...)

Total size of food industry based of revenue 2016 - 2.0215 Trillion(https://www.plunkettresearch.com/statistics/Industry-Statist...)

1.195 Billion/2.0215 Trillion = 0.05911% spent on regulation. Is that too much or too little? You decide.

I would argue that this has to do with large companies lobbying to make sure that the consumers stay uninformed.( Do not have data on it)

I know it seems crazy implausible for people to have a digital record of what they eat. Imagine if doctors could have access to that.I am not familiar with EU laws, but sure they are better over there. (Researchers in the U.S never will get access to bulk data because of HIPA: need a personal signature from each person to obtain access.)

How do you go from “x is in foods” to “x is in foods without any regulatory oversight or fda approval?”

How about this?

1. Actually effective regulation takes money and resources. E.g. it requires hiring scientists and doing tests to measure safety, staff to administer compliance, etc.

2. There isn't much money or resources going to the regulator.

3. Therefore, de facto there cannot be much real regulatory oversight, since the money to measure and enforce the things you care about isn't there.

Like sure, you can wave your hands and say these things were de jure FDA approved or GRAS or whatever, but that could just be what an overburdened and underfunded agency just does by default.

We can debate whether ~$1bn is an adequate amount for the FDA to keep us safe from all the bad things it's supposed to, but certainly at some level of funding this argument must be correct. E.g. if your regulator was funded with $1mm / annum there's no way there was any real regulation.

It's in the ingredients list...it is regulated. You just aren't looking.

I have a few serious food issues and have regularly read labels for decades. I'm surprised that I've never heard of trehalose. Perhaps they list it as disaccharides? Or is it just rolled up into 'sugar' on the label?

It can be listed as "natural flavor" http://nagaseamerica.com/news_release/treha-trehalose-availa...

Some day, I'm confident our current practices related to food and nutrition will be looked back upon with horror and dismay. The lack of decent regulation, the lack of understanding of basic nutrition, the desire to somehow improve upon the foods that nature intended, all will be seen as the disasters they likely are.

Our chemically created foods are likely killing us in a variety of ways we are only just now beginning to understand.

Sure, there are lots of foods that are legal but unhealthy but you don't have to eat them. It doesn't take much to get informed about the basics of nutrition.

The broad goal of FDA regulations is not really to prevent you from eating unhealthily but rather to prevent eggs, milk, meat and produce from making you sick. In that respect the food industry and FDA regulations have been spectacularly successful. Any nostalgia for a bygone era of healthy and plentiful food is misguided.

You could make a case for forcing people to eat healthier but that will be an uphill battle, both economic interest and poor consumer habits are aligned against that. There have been some success stories (e.g. outlawing transfats) but they are few and far between.

Unfortunately, the FDA isn't that rigorous about what can be hidden behind words like "natural flavours". Many are innocuous (e.g. coconut extract). Trehalose is one of them.

Absolutely. We don't even know what the right regulations would be. Trans fat is a prime example. The FDA classified it as safe for years and then had to do a 180 on their position.

Anyone interested in the decline of our modern diet should check out Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, by Weston Price. He was a prominent dentist in the 30s that visited remote populations around the world, documenting their traditional diets and the health effects when switching to a "modern" diet. Available for free on Project Gutenberg http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200251h.html

Our chemically chaste pre-industrial food supply did a fine job of killing without much help from us.

Right, and those people looked back in horror and dismay at all the famine that did a fine job of killing their predecessors.

Must any criticism of modern practices equate to an endorsement of dialing back to ancient ones?

Is anybody building AI to catch these sorts of obvious fallacies? Now that would be pretty damn impressive for an AGI skeptic such as myself.

Not necessarily, but in this case it did. The grandparent comment talks approvingly of nature's intention.

You take the good with the bad, is I guess all I'm saying.

But why? How about intelligently assessing the situation and doing away with The Bad?

By invoking the naturalist fallacy ("as nature intended"), I read the original comment on this thread as suggesting we throw the good away with the bad. My point is: that would be a bad trade. The pre-modern food supply was far more dangerous than the one we have now.

That's not the naturalist[ic] fallacy, but an appeal to nature. But you're right.

I think we'll also be remembered as the era that started figuring that out and solving it with science, though. It's not all hopeless; at least we're trying.

Our chemically created foods are likely killing us in a variety of ways we are only just now beginning to understand.

Seems to have worked out ok for the last few 100k years unless you think the other hominids we suspect of cooking got offed by it and we just got deliciously lucky.

Trehalose is a natural sugar with two glucose, similar to maltose but with different linkage. Some people who have fructose metabolism issues like it for that reason. It doesn't seem to be too widely available on its own, but Swanson Vitamins sells it in small containers and it tastes great IMO. Rice syrup is mostly maltose.

All c. difficle can metabolize trehalose, but the two strains in question have different adaptations that allow them to metabolize it when present in lower quantities.

If this is confirmed, I'm guessing that the implication is less about avoiding trehalose normally but avoiding larger quantities when taking antibiotics. Maybe people on anbitiotics will also be given trehalase enzymes to take with meals. In general, taking a wide varity of digestive enzymes and avoiding prebiotics and excess sugar when on antibiotics might be a good idea to limit the energy available to resistant bacteria in the colon (or maybe not, it looks like there is some evidence that taking some forms of sugar with antibiotics improves the effectiveness of the antibiotics in some cases).

It is a seperate consideration if this is contributing to the overall increase of c. difficle or if it is just determining which strains are more common.

Expect to see a lot more "food X causes undesirable microbiome effect Y" research in the future as more of this kind of research takes place.

There are other interactions like that: for instance, magnesium is known to massively increase the replication of rhinoviruses (common cold).

Magnesium is also a common food supplement...

There is a balance of zinc-magnesium that needs to be maintained in the body. In a mineral-poor diet, supplementing magnesium without zinc can cause side effects like this.

Calcium has a similar problem, but it's even more complicated. It needs corresponding levels of magnesium, vitamin D, boron, and K2 for proper utilization.

Supplementation should not be done in a shotgun fashion. This is why, as much as I appreciate the nutritional research which identifies common deficiencies, I hate the nutrient fads which result from them. People hear "You need magnesium" so they rush out and take magnesium with no understanding of its function in the body, nor the nutrient balance that the body needs.

Yet apparently half the US population is magnesium deficient: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22364157

I've been taking magnesium supplements for the past few months. Coincidentally, I've been blowing my nose continually for the past week. Wasn't aware there could be a potential link.

Edit: Although, I've been taking a Zinc supplement (as well as a D3 supplement) and according to my lay-understanding of this blog-post[a], the Zinc should cancel out magnesium's effect?

[a] http://www.virology.ws/2009/12/16/rhinovirus-and-zinc-part-5...

Many common Mg supplements have rather poor bioavailability according to several studies and the dietary needs are quite high, high enough that most people are actually deficient in Mg according to research by the FDA.

Mg deficiency is suspected to have several rather significant effects. All the way from cognitive effects to heart disease and formation of kidney stones.

Trehalose is not that common an additive in the US. It is also a naturally occurring disaccharide found often in mushrooms. CD apparently has evolved the ability to metabolize it which is why it is now an issue.

Yet, Cargill suggests it can be added to many foods: https://www.cargill.com/food-bev/emea/sweeteners/treha

Bakery: - Baked goods - Flavor enhancement - Sweetness optimization texture - Crystallization inhibition

Beverages: - Mouthfeel - Flavor enhancement - Mild sweetness

Confectionery: - Flavor enhancement - Shelf life - Crystallization inhibition

Frozen Foods: - Stability - Cryoprotectant - Taste enhancement

Dairy: - Ice-cream - Texture - Spoonability

Dairy desserts: - Flavor enhancement - Moisture stabilization - Texture

Fruit: - Sweetness optimization - Stability - Shelf life - Color preservation

Tablets: - Compression agent - Excipient - Non-hygroscopicity - Stabilization

I wonder if people's weird reactions of sugar is really due to these sugar alternatives being in everything.

We really need more research of the microbiome.

A few general principles of biology examplified:

- When there's food, someone will show up to eat it.

- Almost everything is food for someone

Ice cream probably isn't the best option anyway if you have diarrhea. Generally it's best to eat a lot of the types of food that feed the good bacteria, such as vegetables, whole grains, etc.

This article is about the rise in hospital-acquired cdiff infections. So the patients were fine until they were served ice cream made with trehalose.

I think this paragraph is the article's kicker:

>> What has changed is the recent addition of man-made trehalose into the food supply, often in large quantities. This shift was prompted by a new method to manufacture trehalose from cornstarch, which made the sugar much less costly. In 2000, FDA approved the sugar as a safe food additive. Trehalose quickly found its way into processed foods in the U.S. and around the world for its mild, flavor-enhancing sweetness and protection of frozen foods. In some store-bought ice creams, it’s found at concentrations of up to 11 percent.

(emphasis added)

When I buy ice cream I usually get Haagen-Daaz, because it's the only reliable national brand. Cheap ice creams use various gums (carageenan, guar gum, locust bean gum) to give low-cream products the texture of ice cream.

In several hospital patients I have known, they give Ice cream due to the calorie density. So, it has it's uses. Note that this is already linked to sick and elderly patients, so it's ease of eating is also important.

I've had ice cream in hospital myself, but my point is that it isn't recommended for patients recovering from diarrhea due to the lactose and fat, both of which can cause problems.

https://www.healthline.com/health/food-nutrition/cdiff-diet#...

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