http://www.westonaprice.org/

Pseudo-science has been trying to prove this kind of crap far longer than creationists have been around.

I wonder if we don’t all have all the good bacteria we need, even if we’ve been eating crap for decades, just in very small numbers. And if changing our diets would bring those numbers back up.

It’s “west” all the way ’round.

What does a “healthy” Burkinabe child even mean?

Good intestines and the ability to break down fibrous foods don’t compensate for a good all around diet, which even if a child is healthy in Burkina, is probably fairly malnourished compared to Italians.

A diet based almost entirely on millet meal, and the off chance of having tomatoes, onion, and mangoes and low protein doesn’t mean they are ‘healthy’.

Just in…

Life in Burkina Tied to increased malaria

Take that Africa! USA! USA!

It seems like processed foods, refined flours and sugar are all pretty toxic, whereas veges, fermented stuff and animal fats are great for you. Strangely my wife always got sick drinking milk, however changing to illegal black-market milk that’s full fat, completely unprocessed and unpasteurized she has no problems. Apparently processing the milk to make it ‘safe’ kills something in it that the gut needs to digest it.

can bacteria survive stomach acid?

yes, but it wasn’t believed so until the 90′s when a scottish scientist infected himself to prove it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicobacter_pylori

Obesity is associated with phylum-level changes in the microbiota, reduced bacterial diversity and altered representation of bacterial genes and metabolic pathways.

“A core gut microbiome in obese and lean twins”, Peter J. Turnbaugh, Micah Hamady et al, Nature 457, 480-484 (22 January 2009) link.

Also worth reading is this more recent paper:

“A human gut microbial gene catalogue established by metagenomic sequencing”, Junjie Qin, Ruiqiang Li et al, Nature 464, 59-65 (4 March 2010) link

The numbers are staggering:

It has been estimated that the microbes in our bodies collectively make up to 100 trillion cells, tenfold the number of human cells, and suggested that they encode 100-fold more unique genes than our own genome.

The Turnbaugh and Qin papers highlight both the complexity and variation in the gut microbiome, even between twins. In my opinion, Lionetti is jumping the gun a bit in drawing his conclusions about the relative impacts on health of the Western and Burkinabè diets based on bacterial differences alone.

Bugs – the food of the future!

As a bonus Google says their otters are clawless.
I know they can still bite your finger off if you grab the wrong end but Otter Bourguignon, yum.

so, we’re pretty much trying as hard as possible to keep new microbes out of our guts.

My money is on the helpful microbes winning in an otherwise healthy(ish) gut. I walk around the garden with toast, nom-noming whatever is ripe.

Even if that’s true typically, and I don’t know, you certainly run the risk of catching something nasty from time to time. Even if the soil is quite clean, there’s stuff like Toxoplasma gondii if the neighbour’s cat (or a feral one) has gone potty on your carrot patch. In less-developed areas, of course, there’ll be a wider range — eg if the area is flooded or irrigated with river water which may have been contaminated upstream.

If the price for a healthy gut is sickle-cell anemia, I’ll keep my western bacteria thankyouverymuch.

Sickle cell anemia is a genetic blood disorder and has nothing at all to do with diet.

http://www.metavitae.com/archives/2006/06/dirty_good_and.php

Despite several disagreements, nowhere did anyone really resort to downright rudeness, and some of the arguments were sharp and funny. Probably attributable to a combination of the commentators and the moderators.

Thank you for the information and the grins.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/17/health/research/17appe.html

Never hurts to add good guys on a regular basis, as far as I’ve seen. (goodbelly juices, Attune brand probiotic chocolate (!! & also tasty) bars, fermented foods like saurkraut, etc)

A friend, upon hearing of the NYTimes article, quipped he’d known this for ages, based on an outdoorsman background, because beavers apparently have a huge appendix, to replenish the gut flora needed to keep digesting wood chips.

Yes, I’m a chemist and my girlfriend’s a microbiologist. This is not only _not_ pseudoscience, it’s increasingly well-established science. I’d heard about similar results before, (and discussed them both at home and work quite a bit as well) so this doesn’t come as a surprise to me (or probably most microbiologists) at all.

E.g. http://www.microbeworld.org/index.php?option=com_jlibrary&view=article&id=2287

And to answer other commenters, no it’s not as simple as being our diet, which in turn changes the bacterial flora. The evidence is pointing towards both. Which is pretty typical of biology, really. And would also go a long way towards explaining why dieting often doesn’t work so well.

Likewise, the link between intestinal flora and allergies has been pretty well-established over the last decade. These things are simply not at dispute. It’s the mechanisms and causal relationships that they’re trying to find out.