Idea that intestinal bacteria affect mental health gains ground
nature.com
nature.com
A side effect I noticed was the disappearance of allergies. I had some level of pollen allergies and can't recall to have any reactions anymore, which is part of having a improved immune system function.
This is where it gets interesting to that article. I also noticed my general far better mood stability. I never had much of a problem, but like any human some ups and downs. Being more energetic I recognized also that I am far more upbeat. I do have no real explanation and it is only my case, but I can see the link between the digestion and depression.
http://sustainablepulse.com/2014/02/19/roundup-linked-global...
http://www.alternet.org/food/meet-controversial-mit-scientis...
http://www.gmwatch.org/index.php/news/archive/2013/14764-com...
Here are some that refute the above: http://www.examiner.com/article/bogus-paper-on-roundup-satur...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tamar-haspel/condemning-monsan...
http://ultimateglutenfree.com/2014/02/does-glyphosate-cause-...
GABA doesn't cross the blood-brain barrier, so the fact that bacteria in the gut release GABA won't have any effect on the brain.
A caesarean will be a huge stressor, and cortisol in the mother is known to affect the brain of the child, so why do they think the bacteria was causal in making these changes when they didn't actually do any controlled tests for the bacteria?
Similarly for autism: we know the brain is different, so it seems more likely the brain changes are causing the changes in the gut bacteria rather than the other way around, as we know for certain that brain changes will affect the gut (stress), but there is no evidence that gut bacteria can make these kind of changes in the brain.
Yet tons of people take it as a supplement regardless. Maybe it's just placebo?
I feel like we should hold out judgement on this. I wouldn't be surprised if GABA somehow affected us in other ways even if it doesn't get into the brain. But yes, as far as we currently know, it shouldn't affect our mental performance.
People take all sorts of dubious supplements...
I have taken that stuff and while it may not have crossed the barrier it definitely made be feel really weird. So much so that my roommate and I both had to stop taking it after a week or so.
Since then I have spent more time trying to see what some of the research suggests in terms of biological and genetics causes. There's a huge community out there experimenting with their children's diets and exposing them to a number of vitamin and drug therapies. I haven't been sufficiently convinced that the risks of many of these therapies outweigh the reward. We did start her on a gluten-free diet (she has digestion issues and gluten intolerance runs in my family) but only because it wasn't risky to try.
I don't really KNOW anymore than I did before my daughter's diagnosis... but the lack of substantial research in some of these areas is concerning as a parent. I can understand why a parents may seek to implement some of these drastic changes to help their kids... but I fear that we know so little that it may cause more damage.
Our pediatrician is not a developmental specialist but is of a similar mindset that there is just not enough evidence to support a lot of the mind/gut theories. Same goes for the metal toxicity and vaccination links. She's not dismissive of diet having a link, but does not feel the risk in the more extreme cases is worth it.
She also mentioned that many families experience a great deal of stress as a result. Autistic kids can be difficult when it comes to feeding (textures and sensations can be an issue)... so introducing more restrictions causes the family to have to spend more time on diet and potentially more effort in getting their child to eat... Everyone gets more stressed.
That would all be worth it... if it was clear it was effective. Unfortunately often times it turns a difficult situation into a more stressful environment.
We deal with many other specialists but they are mostly physical and speech specialists... they are by no means trained in dietary issues.
I find a lot of the information out there overwhelming. There's no shortage of claims (both from doctors and parents). It's tempting to latch on to cutting edge studies... but sadly very few have very comprehensive studies.
http://psychcentral.com/news/2014/04/23/risk-of-child-autism...
This might partly explain why autism is increasingly prevalent in wealthier societies where families are more likely to delay childbirth.
And, the book "The Art of Fermentation", which promotes fermenting beverages, vegetables, etc using wild yeasts and generally yielding foods with various Lactobacillus, is a fantastic read.
I have no problem with others looking at this, I think it's probably great, but for me this is where I nope out.
Funny side note - my poop has no smell. For quite a while after the transplant, mine smelled like the donor's. It proved that it took hold, for a month or two at least. Now I take Cholestyramine every day, and that has helped even more.
Can the microbes be transplanted?
If not, it should be easy to do. The hardest and most expensive part (for mice) would be a sterile C-section to prevent the mice from picking up the wrong bacteria.
If it does, the mother's bacteria may have to be complemented according to the expected changes.
Both my sister and I were born through a cesarean birth and we both suffer from depression. Nothing really bad in our lives to justify these depressions.
Here is my sample of 2.
No it isn't. People quote Barry Marshall[1] all the time but most people don't perform their self-experimentation with any kind of rigour. How many people have access to endoscopy to take before / after tests?
Self experimentation could be an excellent source of data. Quite a few "interesting" things cannot effectively be rigorously tested, either because we have no effective placebo, or because they are inhumane (e.g., the vast majority of so-called "rigorous" diet studies are actually based on self-reporting and willful compliance, because you can't keep people in controlled a lab for more than a few weeks). Also, as Ionnadis pointed out, quite a bit of (supposedly rigourous) published research is simply wrong.
So for a lot of things, we have to do with "amateur hour" experiments, whether conducted in a university lab and published in Nature, or conducted at home and published in a blog.
Self-experimentation can easily disprove a "general truth" but cannot really support one due to lack of controls ( and do recall the scientific method is statement about disproving things, not about proving them) However, if you do stumble on a local version of a "general truth", you can then look for the n->inf version more rigorously.
You can look at e.g. the late Seth Roberts for examples; the ideas are interesting, some of his successes have been replicated by enough people; Among these - correlation between Vitamin D intake time and sleep quality (see gwern for a rigorous test of that experiment, that confirms it for n=|{gwern}|=1, and many other less rigorous; Rigorous correlation among flax seed (supposedly omega 3) intake, butter, bacon and response time for n=|{seth}|=1, which I have not published but have verified rigorously for n=|me|=1 about flax seed. And there are a few others. I think some of his ideas are crazy but almost all are interesting.
(Self-reported) success on his Shangri-La diet is ~80%, which is very high for a diet, but obviously not a general truth since it is not 100%. It worked for me once, but not the 2nd time a couple of years later despite following exactly the same protocol. I'd say self-experimentation is much less rigorous, but way more time-and-captial efficient way of arriving at results.
By the way, did anyone find out what happened to Seth?
The product is not a DIY FMT, but serves a similar function (restore missing aggregate metabolic pathways).
Personally, from generation 1 of our product onwards I've felt considerably less stressed, more upbeat/happy, and haven't had diarrhea (I have IBS-D, so that's a huge one for me personally). Our pilot study has offered us preliminary confirmation of this, so we're paying for a 200 person placebo-controlled follow up study.
Early versions did have hiccups, but IMO gas is FAR preferable to diarrhea.
I don't personally think DIY is worth the risk, as there are a lot of things you'd absolutely need to screen for if you're considering that route (see http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/776501_4 for a minimal list). I think you should also screen for mental disorders, stress disorders, mood disorders, etc. Basically anything known to be correlated with the microbiome at minimum.
Assuming you've screened for those things (which is to say basically a pro-level FMT), I think it's basically safe -- there are a lot of FMT procedures performed every year with minimal side effects.
#include disclaimer: obviously not medical advice, etc, etc
It takes about 30 days to get a decision one way or another, we are prioritizing lawyer time using the wait list: http://eepurl.com/5qS9z
Another question... what is your take on the fecal transplant process and do you ever think it could end up in a "pill format"? Are you aware of any such pills in the North American market?
I've been following the FMT related news recently, and since starting specific probiotics my NSAID related GI issues have been vastly reduced to almost zero pain.
Once you start shipping to Scotland I'll give your product a try!
If you're running one that involves disease, doctors, regulators, etc those numbers grow exponentially. FDA trials (which are often less than 200 people) are in the 100s of millions.
Email me (david@generalbiotics.com) if you'd like some help setting one up.
ED: Can't reply because of rate-limiting. So;
It breaks down a bit differently. Foods which are gluten-free are quite different in several ways. There are a lot of unhealthy things I avoid while also avoiding gluten.
I think that short carbs influence the dopaminergic system which intestinal health influences the serotonergic system. Both are feel-good hormones. I suffer from chronic depression which seems to mean permanently reduced levels of one or both of these. I'm an 80s kid, meaning my formative years happened during a time which was crazy on many levels. I don't have diabetes, fortunately. Aside from chronic depression I'm in very good health.
Take this as you will.
There are people who are "gluten sensitive" and my wife is one of them. More specifically, she is only sensitive to gluten in American products. She cannot eat anything with gluten here in the US without immediately having very painful stomach cramps and bloating. We spend about one month per year in Spain, where she is from, and she eats all the bread and gluten that she wants with absolutely no problems.
So, all I'm trying to say is that you shouldn't be quick to judge people who don't eat gluten and don't have celiac, unless they're just doing it because they heard it was bad.
In regard to the study, I didn't read all the info, but I'm not sure that 37 people is a convincing sample size. I've also heard other Europeans complain about exactly the same thing.
My allergies were terrible before, now they are barely there and manageable taking the occasional zyrtec. My gastrointestinal issues are mostly gone, although I've read that could be from a reduction in inflammation in the gut lining, but might be related to changes in my gut microbes too. Hard to tell.
My energy levels are more sustained and even (no more crashes), and my moods are generally better. Who knows if my changing gut flora is the reason, it might be. I know not feeding those little buggers tons of sugar really changes things up! :)
Or it's all placebo and I'm just healthier in general. Either way I'm feeling better. I'm sure science will eventually figure out if the link is causal or not, but in the meantime don't let my anecdotal story sway you too much.
edit: oops I forgot to mention I also take a probiotic every now and then. Align is the name, I like it but I don't take probiotics regularly.
Here they are claiming microbes living in intestines (which is a different thing) actually cause mental illness. It's a very different thing.
There may be hope that a drop in wheat production leads to a drop in mental health issues.
That is, unless there are infra-clinical effects.
But from my personal circles and work ones I am seeing lots of people that have always been sensitive and prone to say they have some weird diseases are adopting this, switching to Gluten-free and using it like a brand.
I've been away from home for some time, I meet something like 10 people from a total of 100 maybe... that claimed to have some variation of Celiac disease, a few even told me that all their tests were negative, but tests don't matter they still had it. Most of those people didn't know each other.
Now I am back home and guess what? I am finding that the same kind of people around here are claiming the same thing.
Most of those people I meet at IT related things, sport activities and random day to day life
I fell people want to be special and sometimes they do it by having a special condition or something like that.
Besides the real ones we keep creating diseases that are really loose specified and releasing it to the public. People catch those things and blame all their problems on some super special condition.
I can't seat still, I really can't. And I talk a lot too... I've lived like that, learned to control it and to focus when needed. I am no Jedi, life thought me that this behavior would make my life miserable. Now a days children like me are sick! Wonderful, problem solved.
Whether or not it's all in the mind is kinda moot, as it still makes them feel bad. By doing something, anything, they feel a bit better.
I am not against it. Just citing some facts I observed. Medical tests will tell you if you have Celiac disease or not. If you don't and want to keep doing it, fine!
I will not talk with you about it and will run from that topic in order to not offend you, but my opinion still is that this is some mind game people are playing with themselves (unconsiously)
Anyway, I am happy you are happy.
-tests doesn't cater for everything; maybe there is some mechanism in which gluten harms those people which isn't detected by tests
-maybe removing food with gluten from the diet removes something else which was harmful (one hypothesis is that maybe it's this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FODMAP)
Your attitude is amazingly closed minded. There is nothing wrong with being skeptical but suggesting all those people just want to feel special (or similar psychoanalytical mumbo-jumbo) is just made-up nonsense. There is 0 evidence that they do it to want to feel special or what not but there is a lot of evidence that they in fact feel better (their feedback).
Given what we know about people, this hypothesis is a priori far more plausible than gluten acting in some mysterious way that can't be identified, and somewhat more plausible than gluten being associated with other things that people are sensitive to.
The suggestion that gluten is bad in ways that can't be detected is made less plausible by generic blind testing. Put people self-identified gluten-sensitive people on blinded diets with and without gluten and see if there is a difference. This has been done, and the test is negative. This is a black-box test that is completely independent of the mechanism of action.
Look: http://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2014/05/gluten_sensitiv...
As that same study shows, the suggestion that gluten is associated with something else bad is not totally implausible, but anyone aware of the difficulty of teasing out confounding factors in nutritional research will tend to strongly discount any form of anecdotal self-report as unreliable, because self-report about a subject where people are known to very easily fool themselves simply does not increase the posterior plausibility of the hypothesis very much. The potential for confirmation and reporting bias is far too high.
This is not close-mindedness, but rather a realistic assessment of the situation based on the long history of dietary fads, all of which were strongly supported by self-report, and later turned out to be ineffective, sometimes dangerous, nonsense.
I never said all of the people.
I also said, that I felt that. The same way people feel better and we have no proof of it yet.
And I actually agree with you about some unknown side effects, but several of those people I've known have been shifting or adding the lasted new diseases/allergy and currently it looks like it's Celiac disease that is the trend.
The same person will go through all these things. And then change their mind without any comment.
But going through the motions still makes them feel better, so I'm saying, even though it's not pharmacologically effective, psychologically it is a kind of cure and you shouldn't just dismiss it. It helps them, so why criticize it? Unless it's dangerous of course.
You can believe in the actual science, but believe in the cure at the same time. It's the best of both worlds.
And I'm actually saying this from experience, I'm going through it at the moment. In reality I'm simply suffering from anxiety. But my brain keeps irrationally latching on to things, it wants something to point at and be scared of. I have had to stop googling any sensations I feel as my brain will just latch on to anything I read.
At the beginning it was actually very scary and disorientating.
Now I'm getting over the anxiety and understand it, I can laugh at it and it's becoming less frequent. But it still happens. Someone mentioned vitamin D deficiency here a few days ago. And now of course I have that. But my scientific brain can understand that it's the anxiety again, and I don't. But I do. In a week or two, rationality will win, simply by waiting for that anxiety to disappear.
Being actually able to do something, like cut gluten out, is in itself actually quite calming.
Maybe they really feel better on gluten-free diet ?
>>I fell people want to be special and sometimes they do it by having a special condition or something like that.
You are the worse kind of skeptic. People are telling you that they are feeling better/some conditions go away on gluten free diet and you not only don't believe them but you project some silly justification on them like "want to feel special".
>>I can't seat still, I really can't. And I talk a lot too... I've lived like that, learned to control it and to focus when needed.
It's easier to learn for some and more difficult for others. That you were able to learn on your own doesn't mean others can without pharmacological help. Also maybe some people other than you feel better on gluten free diet.
Being a skeptic practically requires that you ignore anything based on it.
(but, for instance, hives during an allergic reaction can be assessed by a third party, so they aren't the same as "I feel better.")
No. You really don't. Vague symptoms like bloating or specific pain come and go all the time. You might have some indication that it worked from your single experiment, but calling it "strong evidence" is just...
Imagine if I used your logic to come up with a cure for the common cold? I'd be shouting eureka after 6 days
If a person feels better on a gluten-free diet, it does not necessarily mean they have a gluten sensitivity. For example, see this study of people who self-reported as having gluten sensitivity. The participants unanimously reported feeling better on the low-FODMAP run-in diet, but during the trials were found to have no specific reactions to gluten. This suggests that gluten was not actually responsible for their symptoms. One possible explanation is that a gluten-free diet may lead a person to also avoid (unintentionally) the actual cause of the symptoms (e.g. other FODMAPs that happen to be found alongside gluten in foods).
http://www.gastrojournal.org/article/S0016-5085(13)00702-6/f...
I never argue with someone about it, or try to talk them out of it.I think that if they are happy like that. Fine for them. I am just stating facts and creating my opinion based on those experiences.
I think it's completely wrong to tell a child they have a disease for life and will have to take drugs because they run a lot or can't listen to 6 hours of class. Pharmaceutical companies must love those new diseases...
You might be interested to know that it wasn't that long ago that humans typically got up to 80% of their calories from wheat in the form of bread.
Today it's about 30-40% (in the US anyway).
So there ALREADY has been a huge drop in wheat production. If anything it might be time to reverse that, not extend it.
PS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seitan is quite yummy, it's almost pure gluten and is a wonderful source of vegetarian protein.
http://authoritynutrition.com/modern-wheat-health-nightmare/
That article did not exactly strike me as very credible. It basically took every single possible thing it could find and included them, no matter how credible or not credible the source.
People will look for any excuse to justify their behavior. But really gluten is perfectly fine for 99% of people and saying "the wheat changed" does not change it.
Yes, the wheat did change, but the differences can hardly be enough to say "that's the cause of mental health issues".