
Mix of Bacteria in Gut May Depend More on Diet Than Genes - Multics
http://www.ucsf.edu/news/2014/12/122151/mix-bacteria-gut-may-depend-more-diet-genes
======
zach
We're slowly coming to understand that antibiotics are very unkind to our gut
flora and are a prime suspect in subsequent weight gain. Post-antibiotic diet
could be a critical intervention to keep patients from falling into the grasp
of obesity.

A NY Times article earlier this year gives a background on how the rise of
antibiotics has been accompanied by a rise in weight among animals and humans
alike:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/09/opinion/sunday/the-fat-
dru...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/09/opinion/sunday/the-fat-drug.html)

Kids in particular seem to be at risk. A recent study of 64,000 kids has
associated repeated antibiotic exposure before age 2 with early childhood
obesity:

[http://archpedi.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=19098...](http://archpedi.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=1909801)

It's good we're investigating diet-based therapy, so patients can someday hear
their doctors say "after finishing this broad-spectrum antibiotic
prescription, you [or your child] should eat like this for this amount of time
to restore digestive health."

~~~
Shivetya
Cipro did wonders on my intestinal tract, effectively killing everything
including the good. Had nine days of that to fight an under the skin
infection/etc. Months after I started having problems with food, restrooms
were becoming my second home and my commute was planned around easy access to
them. You never want to experience life where one bit of food can send you
off.

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.

~~~
seekingtruth
>Six doctor visits, stool and blood tests later, the doctors found what moved
in.

Something other than C. Diff? Would you mind sharing what it was?

------
presidentender
Given the evident link between gut bacteria and mental health, it may be that
we'll see diet as a component of psychiatric care in the future.

([http://www.nature.com/news/gut-brain-link-grabs-
neuroscienti...](http://www.nature.com/news/gut-brain-link-grabs-
neuroscientists-1.16316))

~~~
monting
We _should_. Sadly, it's hard to administer, and harder to make money off of.

~~~
Mz
If somatopsychic medicine ever becomes a thing, I imagine it will not be
called "psychiatry." And someone will figure out how to monetize it.

------
aroch
Eh, as a researcher at the periphery of the Human Microbiome Project and
American Gut project this has been the accepted (and already shown,
experimentally) conclusion for quite some time.

~~~
wdewind
This study examined two new things:

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)

~~~
aroch
Those aren't particularly new things to study. We have tons of murine data on
the subject and quite a few PhD students over the last 4-6 years have done
their PhDs on microbiota and diet with themselves as the guinea pig, so to
speak (2-4 year longitudinals).

There are a couple mouse papers out that don't directly address the issue in
2, but that permanence (or lack thereof) played prominent roles in their
findings.

~~~
wdewind
Yeah, you know what, you're right. Did a bit more googling around and there's
tons of stuff on both. Sorry!

------
jobu
Study seems to follow common-sense - change the nutrients ingested and
different gut bacteria will flourish.

What I'm really interested in is which types of bacteria create a feedback
loop by releasing chemicals/hormones to increase hunger or cravings for
specific foods. Definitely not an easy thing to determine given all the
variables, but it seems very likely based on the other studies showing
bacteria can promote fat or thin mice:
[http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-gut-
bacteria-h...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-gut-bacteria-
help-make-us-fat-and-thin/)

~~~
derekp7
Which means that a cure for obesity (or at least one of the components of a
cure) can be as simple as an antibiotic that targets the "bad" gut bacteria.
Very interesting.

------
dschiptsov
Ask like this: Is it a mere coincidence that so many of poorest tropical and
subtropical (hot and humid climate) populations traditionally use highly
spiced food? Does it strictly a tradition of making a "poor" food taste hot,
or there is a connection with bacteria population?

~~~
Aloisius
> Ask like this: Is it a mere coincidence that so many of poorest tropical and
> subtropical (hot and humid climate) populations traditionally use highly
> spiced food? Does it strictly a tradition of making a "poor" food taste hot,
> or there is a connection with bacteria population?

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.

~~~
dschiptsov
India? Sri Lanka? Thailand?

------
kaitai
This complements other research that has been done on gut bacteria across
cultures -- in different places we humans eat different prevailing diets:

[http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2012/05/0...](http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2012/05/09/three-
nations-divided-by-common-gut-bacteria/)

[http://www.wired.com/2014/04/hadza-hunter-gatherer-gut-
micro...](http://www.wired.com/2014/04/hadza-hunter-gatherer-gut-microbiome/)

The second link is particularly interesting, as the Hadza hunter-gatherers
have a lot of gut bacteria that cause disease in the west. So it seems that
gut bacteria aren't the whole story. Something to complicate the story for
people who want to cure mental illness or create skinny people via
manipulating gut bacteria.

------
mercurialshark
Can someone speak to my theory (that's based on limited knowledge), that if we
wanted to "reset" the gut, we could deliberately take antibiotics to wipe out
good/bad colonies of microbes and tailor a hyper-specific diet for sought
after results. The hypothesis being that if certain microbes flourish for
years and that if it is impractical to genetically map the gut biome to
identify which are thriving in every patient, this could help us get to a
clean slate before therapy is attempted.

~~~
beltranrm
IMHO, that seems like a bad idea. Two thoughts (these are only very overly
generalized opinions, biology is a little bit complicated):

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.

~~~
mercurialshark
Thanks, both are good points! I assumed there were downsides to if you weren't
able to wipe out the robust bad microbes but that's even worse than I had
expected. Perhaps I'll wait on self-experimentation. The possibility of
nefarious and now genetically enhanced microbes reigning supreme in my body is
not cool.

------
viewer5
So do we know yet what sort of diet cultivates a microflora biome that
encourages healthy weight loss? I'm asking for a friend...

It's easy to find diets for losing weight in general, but I'm curious if we
know enough to create a diet to make a microflora composition that can help
the weight loss process along. I keep seeing mentions of the microflora factor
influencing weight gain, so I'm assuming there's a way to cultivate it to help
with loss as well.

~~~
beltranrm
Turnbaugh was also an author on
[http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v444/n7122/abs/nature05...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v444/n7122/abs/nature05414.html)
(looking at parts of that question on mice) and also on:
[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21543530](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21543530)
(looking at parts of that questions on humans).

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.

------
scotch_drinker
It would be interesting to hear both why the chose a "high fat-high sugar"
diet and to see further research that did more isolated tests in the vein of
"high carb", "high fat" and "high protein" instead of combinations of them.
Also, what are the implications of altered gut makeup after adopting these
diets? Surely we could come up with experiments to measure metabolism and
behavior as a result of the altered gut bacteria.

It will be fascinating to see how our understanding of nutrition and diet
changes as science finally catches up. Studies like this are just the
beginning.

~~~
shaneofalltrad
It does seem like a very simple study, that we would have guessed the results.
Seems like a study like this would be to help facilitate laws or actions
rather than finding the really important answers you are suggesting. I hope
one day we come up with a model to fund research for the people, and not wait
for larger organizations to fund, typically for selfish reasons. I think if we
could find this model science will not only catch up, but trail-blaze new
findings.

------
ratsmack
I know that antibiotics are a significant factor in the loss of gut bacteria,
but another factor is all of the preservatives that pervade the manufactured
food most people eat every day. I've often wondered what percentage of the
loss is from these substances.

------
md2be
Here is a case where the research is lagging the knowledge base. Every
holistic MD has, for decades, preached eating foods enriched with healthy
bacteria. What we need now is research that looks at outcomes.

~~~
cing
These results indicate that you can eat anything, not just foods enriched with
bacteria like probiotic yogurt (which has questionable benefits in itself
[http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/6180/do-
probioti...](http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/6180/do-probiotics-
have-health-benefits)), and observe a change in gut microbiota.

"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."

~~~
kolev
The real yogurt is the Bulgarian yogurt, not low-fat high-sugar ones sold at
store in the States. Only an idiot will eat a probiotic "yogurt" with 30g of
sugars in the small container and think they are doing good to their health!
Fortunately, there are two brands [0] of the original sold at Whole Foods
today (one, unfortunately, available only on the East Coast [1]), but they are
too sour for the American to like. Does it have questionable benefits? Maybe
you should try to research how yogurt got the attention of medicine. It was
eaten by my predecessors for centuries and the benefits are without doubt.

When babies are born, their gut is sterile before it gets colonized from
outside. The diet definitely can affect which strain will outgrow others, but
all gut bacteria is exogenous.

[0]
[http://www.whitemountainfoods.com/YogurtProductPage.html](http://www.whitemountainfoods.com/YogurtProductPage.html)

[1] [http://www.trimonayogurt.com/](http://www.trimonayogurt.com/)

~~~
bch
If one is sufficiently motivated (and can utilize all the product), it's not
hard to make ones own yogurt, with starter.

For that case, you could find your favourite local milk and make yogurt who's
ingredients you are certain of, because you put them in.

[http://www.wikihow.com/Make-Yogurt](http://www.wikihow.com/Make-Yogurt)

~~~
kolev
This is true and might be surprising that Bulgarians are not accustomed to
make their own yogurt, because stores are full of high-quality one that's
cheap (unlike the $6-7/jar in the States). Kefir is also great and can also be
made at home. My favorite is Lifeway [0].

[0]
[http://www.lifeway.net/Products/OrganicKefir/WholeMilkKefir/...](http://www.lifeway.net/Products/OrganicKefir/WholeMilkKefir/OrganicWholeMilkPlain.aspx)

