Mix of Bacteria in Gut May Depend More on Diet Than Genes

Also, they also found a connection between obesity and "Steroid use, male sex, urban practice, public insurance, Hispanic ethnicity, and diagnosed asthma or wheezing were also predictors of obesity; common infectious diagnoses and antireflux medications were not."

Six doctor visits, stool and blood tests later, the doctors found what moved in. New antibiotics and replenishment medicines, diet with lots of probiotics, and within a few months I was back to mostly normal.

My story is simple, if you end up on harsh antibiotics it can change your life. Plan for it.

1. The speed at which the microbiome can change (<3 days)

2. The permanence of such changes (some of them are more permanent than others)

Tradition? Capsicums are a new world crop. They didn't make much of a dent in cuisines outside of the Americas until the 18th century.

1) You might not get them all, and the ones that survive might transfer the traits of antibiotic survival and pathogenic-ability (if present) to the new population.

2) You would need to ensure that your hyper-specific diet contains the right mixture of microbes, say, you would need to avoid irradiated food, and a bunch of other things. "Bad microbes" coming into an empty gut seems to me like a bad thing.

We don't really enough enough about what should be the optimal mix of bacteria to make someone healthy.

They do "fecal" transplants to help people get back bacteria that are missing.

There was a graduate student talk (an hour) about some of this stuff last spring. slide decked linked to the right.

http://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/seminars/2014/in-the-loop-with-p...

[1] http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2013.11.024

In it, the author tells a story of someone in a village in a less developed country who cannot afford pesticides. So he starts a war between two ant colonies in order to drive out the ants that are destroying a beloved fruit tree.

You can do the same thing for gut flora. You don't have to wipe things out first. Trying to wipe the gut clean is extremely hard on the body. It's much easier on the body to just feed the good flora and give them support so they start crowding out things you don't want. It's a gentler path. It just takes persistence.

The answer in humans does not quite match the answer in mice so far. Possible reasons to explain this discrepancy : might be the lack of a large enough group to study, or a local variation in the groups that does not generalize to mice.

The problem with this is that they are frequently wrong. Many people respond poorly to these type of probiotic diets, and holistic medicine has observed outcomes in a small portion of the population and thus encouraged us to generalize them. All we really know about the gut is that it is extremely complicated and that in terms of gut conditions' ("IBS") relationship with gut microbiota they run the gamut. Many of them are either not directly affected by microbiota population (ie: nerve damage, circadian rhythm ), or gut microbiota are part of a multi-causal problem.

We need more science like this, that reaffirms what we "know," not more holistic bullshit.

Source: IBS sufferer who has spent years talking to GI specialists and reading research papers about this stuff. It's hard, and as soon as you think you have it figured out it smacks you in the face with another factor you haven't considered.

"Turnbaugh’s team found that switching mice to a high-sugar, high-fat diet reshaped the abundance of the community of microbes in the gut to a new, stable makeup within three days, in a reproducible manner that was largely independent of genetic differences among individual mice."