Red wine and chocolate on the menu!

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As a new school year begins all over the world, let's look at an academic study that showed that red wine and chocolate are good for you. Oh yes, let's...

Something that we've discussed in previous posts is that the more diverse your gut flora is (higher number of different species), the lesser your risk of developing various diseases. Another thing is that everyone's composition of species is unique, and it makes it very difficult to say this or that species is essential to be healthy!!

Now, a large study on thousands of people, and their poo (where our gut species end up eventually), came up with what influences our gut flora's diversity: 31 intrinsic factors, 12 diseases, 19 drug groups, 4 smoking categories, and 60 dietary factors that can explain 18.7% of the variation seen in the interindividuality of microbial composition.

Among those factors, we'll be happy to know that drinking coffee, tea, red wine was associated with increased diversity. Drinking buttermilk was also shown to be good as it was associated with abundance of two species commonly used in fermentation.

As expected, no need to stress that sweetened drinks and other alcohols are definitely not good.

I was surprised to see, however, that whole fat milk is contributing to lower microbial diversity: whole milk is recommended for infants between the ages of 1 and 2, so I guess there's a bit of risk-benefit balance to play there.

Another good news is that the absence of calprotectin in people's poo (a good thing), was associated with consumption of veggies, plant proteins, chocolate, and bread; while its presence was associated with high BMI, diabetes, use of statins and metformin (again, let's weigh the risk-benefit balance), and systolic blood pressure.

As for everything, all in good measures!

Want to know the basics on how to promote a healthy gut, follow me here and here!

What do you do to influence your high gut flora diversity?

See you next Monday!

The importance of a diverse gut flora

Over the past few weeks, the key message from my latest posts has been that it's become absolutely essential to look after our gut microbiota to feed our most beneficial species!
My essential guide to a healthy microbiota pointed to a few things we could all easily do such as eat more fibres, sleep well, exercise, cut down on alcohol, and give up smoking!
Oh yeah, oh well, I hear you think, another miracle and fashionable diet!
And in part I guess it is true that it has become popular, but - in my honest, scientific opinion - for good reason! Scientists have only realised these past 10 years or so how influential our inhabitants are on our health, and certainly since the Human Microbiome Project started in 2008 (follow me here to read about this).

On thing that has become apparent is how important our microbial diversity is.
Broadly speaking:

• High count of different species = healthy microbiota
• Low count of different species = increased risk of diseases such as obesity, diabetes, allergies, cancers, asthma, gastronintestinal diseases to name but a few (More on the risk of developing these diseases)

Two topics I would like to address very soon are the difference in species count between countries, and the correlation of a low count with consumption of soda (coming soon on MBAI, further reading here and here).
While we may think it's our personal problem if we are not looking after your microbiota, recent research has shown that our worsening low count of species is being passed down to younger generations with irreversible consequences (check it out over here).
Looking after our microbiota truly is for the greater good because what we are doing right now will impact on future generations.
My last note will be about the big C. That's what we are more scared of developing, right? Well, now it's pretty clear that a diverse microbiota helps our body escape cancer, helps treatment work, and helps us bear the side effects of heavy treatments (more on this here).

I've definitely upped my fibre intake, and been taking my probiotics, have you?

Let me know in the comment section,

See you next Monday!

We are not alone...

A bit like Orion the cat - in Men in Black - carrying his home galaxy on his necklace, more and more specialists in gut biology agree that our gut flora represents a whole new organ that lives independently from, as well as in association with us.

For centuries, we have been so fascinated by the sky and its stars, by  the wonderfulness and weirdness of galaxies, by the possibility of an extra-terrestrial life that we forgot to explore the fabulous microscopic world inside of us.

Our microbiota represents a whole new organ in the human body - Do you want to tweet this?

So why haven't we heard more about our inner galaxy? It's not like we've never been interested in invisible little buggers, in fact their existence was hypothesized thousands of years ago.
However, it's not until 1676 that one serious Dutch geek called Anton Van Leeuwenhoek built his own microscope and finally got the evidence of their existence.

Despite all these early efforts, work on our bug's collection of DNA genes only began some 340 years later, in 2008, way after work on the human genome started.

Well, yes, I can hear you say, we didn't know about DNA (discovered in 1869) and its structure and role (observed and proved in 1953) or even how to sequence it before the 70's!

Our fascination for the skies

But did you know that before embarking on the whole human genome sequencing, scientists worked on tiny species? The first ever genome to be fully analyzed was the one of a virus, by Sanger's team in 1977. I guess they chose that one because it was kind of a smallish job to start with - a story of only 11 genes.

Armed with the best techniques, scientists then turned ther attention to our own genome thinking it would give us the key to understand how we function. But it turned out that our own story is told with only 20,500 genes and isn't providing the answers to our most pressing questions!

While our genome is 1863 times bigger than Sanger's virus, we are 50 million time bigger than that virus! Does this mean we may not be in charge of all of our functions? That something else is helping us along the way, and in turn would be responsible for diseases?

With this mind, scientists are now shifting their attention to our gut microbes to find answers.

So, what about the microbiota genome then? How big is it? Well, with 100 trillion bacterial cells belonging to up to 1000 species, it is estimated that it may cover close to 3 million genes!

Three million genes of microbes in and on our body when we, ourselves, are only composed of 20,500? Pretty exciting... or frankly scary...

I can't wait to discover more about our inhabitants, and how we can help them to help us stay in shape, safe and sane! Stay tuned today, I will be publishing more articles throughout the day to celebrate MBAI launch. 

What questions would you like scientists to finally find answers to? 

Would you like to share your thoughts? Feel free to use the comments box, I'd love to read them.


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