Please allow me go offtopic and ramble for a bit. This article feels like a punch in the gut.
So before my tech career, I did a 1.5yr Fellowship at a renowned research lab -- The Rockefeller University. Our entire programme of research was around the possible causes of multiple sclerosis. One of the reasons I decided to pursue Computer Science rather than clinical research was the slow discovery cycle in clinical research. I got so much faster (albiet smaller) victories in Computer Science.
That was 1996. This is 20 years later and sadly we're still trying to determine the etiology of the disease. My research advisor passed away, the other is deep in retirement. We're still trying to figure out the mess of genetic and environmental factors which cause MS (our theory was Human Herpes Virus 6.)
I owe so much respect to individuals who pursue clinical research for a generation despite how slow progress can be. I was pulling my hair out in 1996 when I worked on this, because it was so slow with so little signal to success/failure. ...In the meantime, I get antsy if my build takes longer than two minutes or if a scrum sprint goes over by a day.
PS this is also why I admire Craig Venter (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craig_Venter) so much -- he worked so hard to institute the practices of automation into biomedical research. It is also why im so excited by Mousera/Vium
Its only gotten worse in the last 2 decades. There are a myriad of articles that pop up on HN about how bad bio had gotten. No one can replicate anything anyone else is doing and it seems like ~45% of published research these days is p-hacking to graduate students. It used to be 'publish or perish' but now its 'funding or famine'. Why not fudge the results, who is ever going to check, let alone prove p-hacking? The researchers have mortgages, college-funds, and college debt too. Nature came out and said that a P of 0.005 (not .05) is the way to fix it. Like, guys, the culture is rotten from the core on up, you need to fix that, not add a 0. It makes sense, the funding is (long-term) drying up relative to the number of researchers, there is less money to go around, so we get to see who is swimming naked.
Bacteriophages lost out to antibiotics in the 1950s. Designing bacteriophages for specific microbes is fairly straight forward so you could design a probiotic loaded with good bacteria to be delivered with a bacteriophage against bad bacteria to quickly adjust the microbiome ecology towards a desired state. The nice thing is that bacteriophages are dietary supplements so you don't need drug approval (unless cure claims are made).
It seems like a pretty obvious connection once you know that detail. If you have any kind of chronic medical condition, you would likely benefit from improving your gut health. (Hint: Dietary changes are a good place to start.)
What kind of changes? I have a hard time searching google about gut health without feeling like none of it's scientific, and all a scam for advertising or selling products.
I've recently watched a ton of Ted talks on the subject (thank you, autoplay), so you can call me a proper internet know-it-all. The consensus seems to be: nobody knows, but the SAD certainly is not the right answer. As diverse as you can get and as little processed as you stand seem to be popular ideas too. Dropping sugar and milk seem commonly recommended, but they can pry my ice-cream from my cold, dead fingers.
Small amounts of animal protein and lots of raw greens and vegetables, tubers and roots. Everything else is extra. Be careful though about making any specific recommendations here or else someone with a different idea will attack you for not backing it up with scientific data. Because you shouldn't try to figure out what to eat until you get a PhD.
Your implication is that nothing should ever be suggested without scientific references and footnotes. That is just absurd in the extreme. Do you do search the journals before teaching your kid to wipe his ass? Do you really think that diet is any different from any other thing that we do several times a day for our entire lives?
The number of people making fantastical claims about toilet paper is a lot smaller than the number of people making fantastical claims about the important of specific diet components or habits.
Like take your comment that I replied to. It is incredibly specific advice. As if there is 1 brand of toilet paper that is absolutely the right one.
What’s the value in raw vs cooked vegetables? I thought cooking makes their nutrients more bio-available. Do you really eat tubers raw? I can't imagine eating a potato raw. Our ancestors even always cooked them.
Does the book really present evidence that a raw diet is worse for human health than cooked food? From the table of content and introduction it seems to present a strong case that cooking affected human evolution. But that does not mean that it made humans healthier. For example, cooking could have made long-term health worse, but other benefits coming from increased food availability and shortening time to get it outweighed that.
It's not the main point of the book, but it does describe how it's very hard to live a healthy life on only raw food. I remember it pointing out that about half of women on such diets stop menstruating.
This is something our bodies do out of pretty desperate lack of nutrients, and it's of course devastating from an evolutionary standpoint.
The thesis of the book is that we've cooked food for so long that our digestive system is adapted to it. It even speculates that the shrunken digestive system made our bigger brains possible. All that is far from uncontroversial, but it's a well written and argued text.
>Remember the E. Coli epidemic in Hamburg a few years ago? It started from raw bean sprouts.
That's a hygiene problem not a culinary one.
I doubt that stir frying bean sprouts would be enough to sterilise them and surely no one cooks them any longer than that.
Used to eat a lot, mostly sprouted at home and we never took any special precautions, just normal domestic hygiene. Ate a lot of them raw too.
Of course I haven't tested either the internal temperature of a bean sprout during stir frying nor have I tried infecting one with E. Coli to see if the E. Coli is neutralised by stir frying. Perhaps someone with the necessary gear and expertise could try it.
Yup, cooking and increased animal protein/fat intake (aka eating more meat) are responsible for 2 most important evolutionary jumps in our history by increasing both availability of calories+protein and (in case of fire) reducing parasite load.
Raw-diet adherents might not think in these terms, but I would suggest that many of the health benefits stem from the much poorer absorption of macronutrients from raw food. Which allows you to eat quite a lot (leaving you sated), but doesn't actually provide a lot of calories (though potentially lots of other nutrients, like folate, vitamins, minerals etc., though some are easier to extract from cooked food also) Or you could eat less cooked food...
Or alternatively, go on keto diet - 60-70% fat (mostly animal and milk fat), 20-30% protein, 5-10% carbs. Make sure to increase your electrolyte and fiber intake to account for lower intake of those through the diet.
A few colleagues at work recently started their keto diets (primarily in order to lose weight). I am interested in gut health and looked at some of the background materials I could find. It seems reasonable that the body can switch its energy source to fat, but the (long term) effects on overall health seem to be poorly studied/ understood.
My father worked in Mongolia and observed how local people in remote rural areas ate. Calories came only from meat of horses, sheep, camels and some small game plus fermented camel milk. There were no vegetables or any other plants besides few herbs that they used for tea. This is not surprising as it is very difficult to grow there anything but local grass, so one can survive only from animals that can eat that.
My father does not remember that locals got some particular health problems from that. Old people looked healthy and worked pretty much until the dearth. What is especially interesting that it was also true for descendants of Russian emigrants there from 100 years ago, but they did grow some vegetables and cereals.
Of cause, that does not prove that meat is healthy. But it does show that in a particular climate eating only meat is not harmful when the meat is from animals that was treated by locals with extreme respect and that were fed on grass that was either fresh or covered with snow at winter.
Meat is not bad on its own. All claims and 'research' about meat being bad are by people who have an ulterior motive. Online it's mostly sensitive vegans who think that the legitimacy of their goal of 'not hurting animals' gives them right to steal, cheat and kill their way to it.
All bad things related to meat consumption are result of intensive and unhealthy farming practices, and combining increased fat intake with increased carb intake (especially fructose). Correlation, not causation.
That being said, there are two issues with meat: in the West, we pretty much only consider muscle as meat, and dislike the internal organs, when it should be the other way around. Even obligate carnivores prefer internal organs because they are richer with fat, and often leave a lot of muscle meat on carcasses.
Second, and related, issue is that muscle meat based diet is a high-protein diet, not high-fat diet, so it's more akin to Atkins than to keto diet. High protein diet comes with its own set of issues: it places significantly higher load on liver, which causes increase in liver size; obligate carnivores have extremely large livers compared to their body size (just google for an image of shark's liver compared to its body, it's almost 1/3 of the volume). This also applies to humans, for example Inuit have enlarged livers as well.
This is the result of increased need for protein-processing capacity. Liver can only process so much protein into fuel per unit of its volume per unit of time. And to use Inuit as example again, because of this, they keep snacking every couple of hours, more often when exerting themselves physically.
A related concept is 'rabbit starvation': eating lean meat (rabbit in winter) is not enough to keep a human being alive - while you're in theory ingesting enough calories to survive, your liver's capacity to process pure protein into fuel is less than your body's need for fuel.
[1] gives direct evidence that meat from grass-feed cows comes with higher load of endotoxins than wild game. It will be interesting to know if this is a consequence of modern breading/farming or something related to cow domestication.
The summary doesn't mention 'grass-fed', only 'wagyu'; wagyu is intensively grain-fed in the last year of their life or so.
To quote from a quickly-googled article:
"What many people overlook is that farmers make Wagyu as fatty as possible by feeding their cows huge amounts of grain for the last 300-500 days of their lives. Some farmers even add wine and beer to further increase fat content. The result is that a wagyu cow’s muscle tissue is thoroughly marbled with fat. Unfortunately, it’s the kind of fat that is not good for you. The mold toxins in all that grain are bad for the cow and end up in its fat, and then in you, which would mean wagyu beef has a disproportionately high toxin load."
No bad, it's a pleasure to discuss these things with someone who is willing to research and to admit their mistakes.
Much better than the usual crowd I get in these kind of discussions, the 'sensitive vegan' type who pushes false statistics to try to hide being emotionally invested behind the authority of science (two of their favorite falsehoods are to push all people who consume meat into the same group for comparison vs vegans - bad science, because majority of omnivores have very bad diets incomparable to my efforts at keeping on keto, and arguing that 'cows emit methane, so we need to eat less meat', never 'cows emit methane, so let's eat other meat more'). And then when I display patience and deconstruct their arguments, the mask of reason falls off and they just start calling me Hitler, murderer etc. lol.
I vouch for it based on my personal experience - I suffered from a serious and untreatable autoimmune disorder (of thyroid, not directly of gut), and the only 'treatment' proposed by doctors was to cut out my thyroid and make me dependant on taking thyroid hormones orally for the rest of my life.
I refused, did some research on my own, and went on keto. My thyroid bloodwork is back to normal and I have no symptoms. And I feel much 'healthier' and more 'energetic' than before all this as well.
I am not proposing keto diet as a magical cure-for-all, but as a possible venue that should be tried before being forced to undergo irreversible surgical procedures for example.
P.S. body does not 'switch' the energy source to fat, it increases the production of ketones as result of interrupted Krebs cycle ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citric_acid_cycle ) because oxaloacetate gets rerouted for use in gluconeogenesis (creating glucose for brain's needs), because there's not enough glucose in diet. This interruption causes the buildup of the main source for Kreb's cycle, acetyl-COA, which is then converted to acetoacetate (a ketone), which is then also partially converted to acetone and beta-hydroxybutyrate (also ketones). Of these, body uses acetoacetate and beta-hydroxybutyrate as fuel. Body is always able to use them, it's just that there's not enough of them to use if you're not on carb-restricted diet, so body defaults to using glucose as fuel.
Like you say, long-term effects of keto are poorly studied, mostly because of two reasons: early keto hype as an effective seizure treatment died out once we got good enough chemical seizure treatments, and there was a lot of money poured into blaming fat intake for negative health effects of increased carb intake from the 50ies (starting with Ancel Keys), and picking up significantly in 70ies.
There are animal studies that demonstrate increased longevity of animals on keto diet, similar to calorie restriction and strict veganism. While the calorie restriction and strict veganism most likely work through lowered intake of methionine (an essential aminoacid which functions as START coding block for protein synthesis, meaning that with lowered methionine intake your body creates protein at lowered rate and renews itself more slowly), keto achieves that through effectively tricking the body to go into 'starvation mode' i.e. the mode of using own fat reserves while the actual fat source is the diet.
What exactly does "processed" mean though? Cooking is a form of processing so do I have to go raw? Pressing oils out of nuts is processing so do I give up oils and only eat nuts? I thought fermented foods showed some potential health benefits but I'd argue that fermentation falls under "highly processed."
"Processed" is a vague word that means very little.
Does it come in plastic wrapping and has a self life greater than 6 months? Probably processed.
Sure that includes cheese, preserved meats, honey, grains, and many liquids, but you can also find those held in paper, wax, wood, and glass containers. Hamburger Helper is processed and it always comes in a plastic bag.
Careful - most of what you buy as "Kimchi", even from Korea, and most "sauerkraut"; is probiotic in no way whatsoever. That's because it isn't fermented as it should be, they've just poured in vinegar to make pickled vegetable matter. That won't help you at all.
On the other hand, making kinchi yourself is super-easy. it takes literally five minutes to set up and a few days to ferment, then just gets better over time (weeks/months).
Thanks for the heads-up. Would avoiding kimchi products that have vinegar listed as an ingredient be a good strategy? Or is some amount of vinegar also used in authentic kimchi?
There have been a few studies on probiotics. Besides that I think not much is known scientifically.
But I think the best way is to realize you are free to experiment with your diet - with careful tracking of your diet, you may be able to find certain foods that work great or certain foods that make you feel worse etc. You can run an "n of 1" experiment on yourself and see what works. No need to wait for a study/evidence because its not coming anytime soon.
In addition to what everyone else is recommending: fermented vegetables like pickles or sauerkraut, especially organic and homemade such that you can see the culture in the jar as well.
> What kind of changes? I have a hard time searching google about gut health without feeling like none of it's scientific, and all a scam for advertising or selling products.
High fiber, high fat, moderate protein, as few carbs as possible. Water whenever you're thirsty.
Well, in terms of general dietary knowledge, NutritionFacts.org[0] is great. When I first visited it I thought it looked a bit sketchy, but turns out to be a treasure trove.
Yes, Dr. Michael Greger also sells books and DVDs through the site, but you need neither buy anything nor register to get access to all the material on the site.
Most of the videos are basically him summarizing a large number of papers on a specific subject. Each video is accompanied by a transcript, and sources.
I would like to know why someone would downvote me for linking what is basically a vlog/podcast where each episode cites at least a dozen scientific papers.
If the guy turns out to be a quack after all, I'd like to know why, not just be passive-aggressively told I'm wrong.
People often have strong opinions regarding diet and nutrition claims. For the shade of gray of your comment, I can't imagine you received more than a couple of downvotes. While I sympathize with your desire for responses, I wouldn't worry about it too much.
From the Wikipedia article on Greger, it looks like he may be cherry-picking his evidence or overstating his claims in some cases. Speculation, but that might be a reason people would disagree that nutritionfacts.org is a good source:
> Retired physician Harriet A. Hall, who is known for applying critical thinking to health claims, has written that, while it is well accepted that it is more healthy to eat a plant-based diet than a western pattern diet, Greger often overstates the known benefits of such a diet as well as the harm caused by eating animal products (for example, in a talk he claimed that a single meal rich in animal products can "cripple" one's arteries), and he sometimes does not discuss evidence that contradicts his strong claims.
> People often have strong opinions regarding diet and nutrition claims.
Well, I suppose. Ariely has a good video on that people getting irrational as the topic moves closer to the body[0].
It's still pretty ridiculous given that just about everyone else is replying with their unsourced opinions.
And that's basically one guy whose critique is "he's a bit too enthusiastic about the plant-based diet." Given how attached people are to meat, that's hardly a strong counter-argument.
I did some research on this a few months ago and landed on this book, which is highly recommended by physicians with interest in the relationship between gut health and autoimmune diseases.
in america, there is almost a shaming done if you do not eat other cultures foods, but other cultures mostly stick to their own food (and there is a good reason for that).
There was another intriguing connection: Acinetobacter are molecular mimics of proteins found in myelin, the nerve cell coating that the immune system attacks in MS.
Some bacteria have evolved to trick our immune system into ignoring them, but an overactive immune system will attack that bacteria and the human cells they're trying to mimic.
Auto-immune diseases and their link to gut bacteria is not new. The relationship between MS and gut bacteria alone goes back to at least 2006 [1].
To learn more about auto-immune diseases and gut bacteria, I highly recommend the book An Epidemic of Absence [2]. It's an impressively well researched book that doesn't skimp on the science.
I managed to get my eczema under control by learning about the relationship between gut, food, inflammation, and auto-immunity.
What to do varies because human bodies, environment, and gut bacteria composition varies. It's more than diet. Inflammation due to lack of sleep, stress, or smoking is also a huge factor.
That said, the biggest factor for me was eliminating dairy. I used to drink more than a gallon of milk a week. I saw results after about two weeks of eliminating dairy. My dermatologist was shocked. She refused to believe there's any correlation between diet and eczema. Patches didn't start completely going away until I also eliminated wheat. They are basically gone when I regularly eat fermented foods, take a soil-based probiotic, and get good sleep.
You might want to try an elimination diet (starting with dairy, then wheat/gluten). If you want something more structured check out an auto-immune paleo protocol like Whole30. I wish that existed when I got started. Had to learn the hard and slow way on my own.
I also recommend a gut bacteria test like uBiome to see how it alters your composition. Do a before test, then another one after a month or two of use.
I would recommend against spending your money doing a uBiome tests. The research is showing that where you sample in the stool highly affects the results.
You might also want to have her CSF independently tested for nematode worms. (what I mean by this is to put it under a microscope). it surely won't hurt, as some pathologists (although not published yet in the medical literature AFAIK) are finding them in all the samples they have tested for.
If this proves to be the case for your aunt, the good news is that anti-helmintics like Ivermectin, could efficiently treat the underlying cause.
You also might benefit from performing Metagenomic tests ( such as Digital Culture by Karius - kariusdx.com) to look for insidious pathogens that might play a role in her illness.
In other words, there are many different things that might cause the symptomatology described as "Multiple Sclerosis", Lyme disease actually being one of them, https://youtu.be/Fy0ViOX7xNk?t=9m37s
Making such claims lightly is (excuse my language) being a fucking asshole.
(I know, harsh words. But I needed to get this off my chest)
Taking this out on someone with carefully worded suggestions that only advocate testing is also "being a fucking asshole." Because very frequently the people putting out such info are giving testimony from firsthand experience because they know firsthand what a fucking nightmare it is and if they got better, it only seems the decent thing to do to share info that might help some people with the same diagnosis they had. And then they will run into this kind of ugliness ten thousand times, no matter how carefully they word it.
I agree that I might be a fucking asshole here, but those sharing anecdotal 'it helped for me' stories aren't helping. They are the exception, their advice still isn't based on verified science and therefor unlikely to work someone else.
They are commenting on a public forum. If you think they are full of shit and have no useful information, you are free to ignore it. The fact that it is anecdotal testimony in no way justifies being verbally abusive.
Your first paragraph inquires as to whether or not they can substantiate their claim. The next four are gratuitous ugliness. You could have stopped at the end of your first paragraph. They could have replied to that. People could judge for themselves if it merited further investigation or not.
You having big feels on the topic is not justification for this kind of behavior. They also likely have very big feels about it too and they aren't intentionally shitting on anyone.
People bitch all the time about the lack of a cure or the lack of real alternatives. Then, anytime someone has a story of success with an alternative approach, they get shit all over, dismissed as "that's just anecdotal," called crazy and worse, plus outright told they have no right to participate in the conversation because they can't prove their claims.
Maybe if the world were not so full of asshole behavior, we could more rapidly find new solutions by listening to the folks who were told it was hopeless who did not politely agree to suffer and die so that other people could feel like they are smart or some shit.
I, myself, was diagnosed with RR Multiple Sclerosis, with multiple dem. lesions in both brain and spinal cord, ON, delayed evoked potentials, 4 years ago. Completely reversed the condition with long term antibiotics and anti-helmintics, no evidence of MS currently. So my advice might be biased, sorry. As I said, there is no harm in examining this perspective. I didn't advocate for treatment, but for testing.
What do you mean by "no evidence of MS"? Brain damage reversed? 4 years with no relapse with RRMS is not unheard of. I did 15 perfect years before I got hit with a big one. I too am symptom free untill I suddenly am not. That's exactly why you and I have the diagnosis RRMS as opposed to one of the other subtypes.
I think there's an imprecision problem here with the language. What people might mean by "could help" ranges from "A miracle cure overnight" to "3% improvement in perceived severity of one symptom"
I hope that people will avoid the former and view the latter in context - i.e. a genuine wish to relieve their suffering for a while, rather than a flat denial of the reality of the disease. I don't think either is especially appropriate, but the latter is misguided rather than malicious.
So, the more precise description of different types you could read about, say, on Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_sclerosis#Types. To describe it briefly, though - there are different types, some appear later in life some earlier, some show up sporadically, while some are constant and get progressively worse. The issue is that, from what I know, there is nobody who can even tell if they are the same pathology, just that they have some similar symptoms.
> The issue is that, from what I know, there is nobody who can even tell if they are the same pathology, just that they have some similar symptoms.
I have an auto-immune disease (ulcerative colitis) and the situation is the same for me. Doctors always tell me they can never be entirely sure that's what it is. But I'm sure there are plenty of diagnosis are generalizations about symptoms rather than root cause.
We simply don't know what causes plenty of diseases.
Side-note: given that my aunt has MS while me and multiple of my other aunts have an IBD (irritable bowel diseases: chrohns, colitis) on one side of the family, there seems to be a connection between UC and MS as both are auto-immune related:
Basicly just different severities. Afaik no clear indications that they have different causes, so I don't understand the reason for OPs objection. I would assume their results are spanning all types, or it would have been spesifically mentioned. Most research seems to be done on the more severe type, tho.
> They put Acinetobacter and Akkermansia bacteria into samples of healthy blood. The microbes increased the kind of cells that activate immune attack (they’re called T helper cells) and decreased the kind (regulatory T cells) that suppress excessive immune responses, including autoimmune attacks as in MS.
As far as I understand the article it seems like they have replicated the effect MS has on the T-cells, and that is not subtype spesific. If they could inhibit this effect it would be a fix across all subtypes, even if it doesn't fix the underlying problem.
This is very interesting, and I particularly like the causal test of inducing sensitization to the antigens present in the bacteria through exposure. It's probably the strongest causal link you're going to get in humans (you can't infect them with the bacteria to see if it induces nerve damage for real!).
The problem here seems to be that this doesn't measure how feasible it is to reverse the tendency for the immune system to attack the nerves. Even if you erradicate the causative bacteria, once the immune system has started to attack the nerves, it's possible that it won't stop. Maybe the presence of the antigens (the proteins that are attacket) in the bacteria is needed as the trigger that starts the attack, but once that's gone, the low level presence of the same antigens in the nerves might be enough to sustain the attack. On a more optimistic note, maybe the erradication of the bacteria leads to a lack of simulation that causes the aggressive cells tow ither and die. This must be tested experimentally.
If the autoimmune ttack doesn't stop after erradication of bacteria, maybe a case can be made for aggressive prevention with testing for those bacteria periodically, ,especially in families predisposed to the disease, and prompt erradication once they appear. Maybe there are correlations between diet and the presence of such bacteria, which we can exploit.
I think the long term impact of these studies will depend on how reversible the "state of war" between the immune system and the nerves is.
> Acinetobacter are molecular mimics of proteins found in myelin, the nerve cell coating that the immune system attacks in MS. That suggests the bacteria might trigger immune attacks that hit myelin, too, as when soldiers who inadvertently resemble the enemy get hit by friendly fire.
If this is true, could high dose antibiotics eliminate the gut bacteria and thereby halt the immune reaction associated with that type of MS?
the researchers never heard of the Wahls protocol???? professor Terry Wahls was is a wheelchair with MS and cured herself. Now she is heading a hospital department where they cure MS
It is very easy to find correlations between phenotypic traits (getting MS, developing cancer, autism etc) and "your favourite biological variable". See John Ioannidis talking about microRNA studies for example. Part of the reason for this is that high throughput data like gene expression measures, gene methylation or microbiome sequencing gives you p << n data which invariably is also low dimensional ie a few factors explain most of thr variation. It is therefore easy to find a variable or a 'signature' which correlates with one of these explanatory factors and the phenotype, but doesn't tell you anything much about what is going on, or how to treat the disease. But it does allow thousands of papers to be published with pvalues <0.05.
Not to downplay this data, but caution is required not to over interpret the results, and avoid making the sane mistakes over and over again.
Researchers in genomics are aware of this and that is why researchers are expected to correct their p-values for multiple testing, for example using q-values.
No that isn't the point. These variables are often associated with an outcome or phenotype in a statistically rigorous manner. The point is that knowing this doesn't get us anywhere.
Get us anywhere? That is research, small pieces to the larger puzzle. Biology is complex, a lot of molecules doing different things. We don't have perfect tools to study those molecules or their interactions. Genomics and statistics offer one path to their study, and they complement already existing methods.
I don't understand what you are trying to say. My point is also that the tools are imperfect, particularly when it comes to generating useful insights, as opposed to just correlations.
If your tools don't generate useful insights, then you are not using them right. A properly designed study, employing high-dimensional genomics data, can for sure generate mechanistic insights, not just correlations. It's all about your study design.
Some tools will never give you useful insights because they have inherent limitations, or the model being studied doesn't lend itself to an informative study design. Results get published anyway. Which is fine. My point was that many high throughput studies do not materially contribute to the advancement of knowledge. This is entirely compatible with your point that well designed high throughput studies can contribute.
Probably not. Unlike MS, which is an autoimmune disease, ALS is not autoimmune. The exact cause is only known in some cases, but it seems to stem from problems with the machinery inside the cell, not an aggression by the immune system from outside the cell.
Do you mean CSF instead (Cerebrospinal fluid)? I'm not qualified to answer that, sorry. But my best guess is that the problem is almost 100% intracellular.
Gut bacteria have many functions, and there are likely more out there to be discovered than we know about currently. One of the functions that I find interesting is that bacteria help to synthesize vitamin K, which is required by the liver to build proteins that allow blood to clot. Neonates do not have the gut flora to synthesize vitamin K at birth, which is why they get a vitamin K shot after delivery.
Normal gut bacteria also coat the GI tract, preventing pathogenic bacteria from sticking to the surface of the intestines. This is part of the reason babies under 1 should not eat raw honey (which has C. botulinum spores that can stick to the intestines and produce botulinum toxin), while older kids and adults have no trouble with it.
Along the same lines, a hot (though, admittedly disgusting) area of research in medicine now is fecal transplant for people with a particularly aggressive form of colitis. I believe that the research on glut flora transplantation is also being expanded to weight loss, but I'm not very familiar with the studies.
Glad you've not noticed a change, that is probably good right! I think the Gut microbiome extends further than just the large intestine, you've probably got some bugs hiding out somewhere in the system :) https://www.newscientist.com/round-up/microbiome/
You still have gut bacteria in the small intestine, and they're probably as important as the ones in the large intestine. I can guarantee you that without both the small and the large intestine, you do notice a difference (but unfortunately for reasons more serious than just not having the bacteria). Glad you're adapting well to living without the large intestine!
I would presume we need them because every healthy human being has them after one to two years of age.
We also know that antibiotics that kill gut flora lead to health/digestion issues until the gut flora is replenished.
It doesn't take nearly as many why questions to get to a "we don't know" answer with biology versus physics. There's lots of stuff about biology we can observe but do not understand the why as well as we understand something like the physics behind a microprocessor.
Yes, gut bacteria are very important, they serve many functions, not all of which are understood fully. For example, it is estimated that 90 percent of the body's serotonin is produced in the gut, it’s the chemical that helps with sleeping, eating, and digesting. If you want to read more, have a look on PubMed for articles relating to 'Gut Microbiome' like this, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=gut+microbiome
My wife was recently diagnosed with MS. Luckily she studied biochemistry and is now a data scientists. She spoke immediately with a professional nutritionist at the hospital.
Apparently at the current moment the best is to keep your PH value in the body neutral. It's particularly important to prevent "acidity". Which is not easy as a lot of food we eat is acidic.
The reason why you want to not be acidic is: MS causes inflammation and acidity makes it worse. Or in other words, it slows down the bodies self healing "power".
> Apparently at the current moment the best is to keep your PH value in the body neutral. It's particularly important to prevent "acidity"
If you're talking about a neutral pH as in pH = 7.0 (the usual accepted definition of neutral), these claims are contradictory. The pH of the human blood is usually between 7.35 and 7.45. This is usually way less acicic than the neutral pH of 7.0. Furthermore, a pH of 7 is usually associated with very serious disease (and yes, it is causal: if you inject/ingest enough acid to make the pH drop to 7.0 you're in pretty bad shape, especially because it means the regulatory mechanisms aren't working as they should). I don't know who that "professional nutritionist" is, but this sounds like crackpot-level science.
Also, to the best of my knowledge, it's extremely hard to change the blood's pH with diet... The body has a multi-layered system specifically dedicated to keeping the pH in the normal range (7.35-7.45), and that's independent of what you eat. Maybe you're mistaking it for changing the urine's pH, which is much easier to do, and can be achieved through diet alone. Unfortunately, changing the urine's pH doesn't seem to achieve much beyond preventing some inds of kidney stones...
I second the fact that this is crackpot-level science - you can basically only change the acidity of your urine with dietary modifications - not your blood. Btw changing the PH value of your body thing is endorsed by various charlatans for all kinds of stuff - from curing the flu to cancer.
I'm not really equipped to review, but it does make some interesting points that while the body strongly maintains blood PH of between 7.35 and 7.45 the mechanisms of doing this can cause more stress on other systems in the body depending on your diet. It's also interesting that we used to have pre agriculture a 10:1 rather than a 1:3 K:Na balance.
Anyway, the article is an interesting read - maybe supply some counter evidence that Alkaline diets have zero supporting evidence.
The K:Na balance is very interesting, especially because pre-agriculture societies usually have very low levels of hypertension, and this is probably the cause. Na+ and K+ balance does have something to do with acid-base regulation, because of urinary excretion of HCO3- and H+, but the benefits of a low sodium diet seem to be related to hypertension and not to acid-base regulation.
I haven't read the study, and I don't want to claim that Alkaline diets have zero supporting evidence. I just wanted to argue against the claim that your pH is "too acidic" or "too alkaline" or whatever. Any potential benefits of an alkaline diet are surely independent of the pH variation they induce, because the variation will be close to 0 in any case, if your body's working properly. The stress hypothesis is interesting (I'm not saying it's even remotely correct! only that it's an interesting twist on the crackpot claims I've heard elsewhere), but you'll never be able to gauge how stressed your regulation mechanisms are just by measuring the blood's pH. You'll have to find some upstream biomarker that measures "stress" directly.
My very cursory analysis, after skimming the article follows. First, the article in general is quite misleading. It's written in a language that a layman would understand, but in a way that causes such layman to misunderstand some crucial points. I don't know if this is on purpose, or if the author is just honestly trying to address a complex topic and failing.
- Part 1. Background
> Life on earth depends on appropriate pH levels in and around living organisms and cells.
I take issue with this sentence. This is obviously true, as life must carefully control the concentrations of some substances inside and outside the cell. However, this makes it seem like pH is uniquely special. This is not true: pH is merely a measure of the concentration of hydrogen ions in a solution. If this is meant to address the layman, as it's supposed to, such clarification is important. In fact, I think many of the myths around pH would be better addressed by making the pH concept taboo, and talking instead of "the concentration of H+ ions in solution".
> As a comparison, in the past 100 years with increasing industrialization, the pH of the ocean has dropped from 8.2 to 8.1 because of increasing CO2 deposition.
This is very important for the bisphere as a whole, but useless to understand the impact of pH changes in the body. I don't understand the reason for this section.
> This results in a diet that may induce metabolic acidosis which is mismatched to the genetically determined nutritional requirements
No. This is not true. Such diet may wreck your kidneys due to hypertension, and the kidney damage will give you metabolic acidosis. The diet itself will not give you metabolic acidosis, as long as your lungs and kidneys are fine. This is written in a very misleading way.
> With aging, there is a gradual loss of renal acid-base regulatory function and a resultant increase in diet-induced metabolic acidosis while on the modern diet
Now we're talking. I don' know if this is exactly true, but at least it makes sense.
- Part 2. The Role of pH in Various Cells, Organs, and Membranes
None of the mechanisms described here have anything to do with the systemic blood pH. The author doesn't say it, and he should. This section adds confusion and very little understanding
- 3. Chronic Acidosis and Bone Disease
This section is a little confusing. Many studies, little understanding.
The interesting part is this:
> There is evidence that in healthy humans the increased sodium in the diet can predict the degree of hyperchloremic metabolic acidosis when consuming a net acid producing diet
The study this is taken from has does have some regressions that advance this point, but the correlation is so weak I'm not sure we should take the results at face value.
- 4. Alkaline Diets and Musce
> Conditions such as chronic renal failure that result in chronic metabolic acidosis result in accelerated breakdown in skeletal muscle [40]. Correction of acidosis may preserve muscle mass in conditions where muscle wasting is common such as diabetic ketosis, trauma, sepsis, chronic obstructive lung disease, and renal failure
While you can manipulate the pH f patines with no functioning kidneys by giving them tablets with NaHCO3 (an alkali), you should never, ever extrapolate this to the diet of healthy people. Even in patients with kidney failure, doctors don't try to correct the pH with diet alone.
- 5. Alkaline Supplementation and Growth Hormone
> It has long been known that severe forms of metabolic acidosis in children, such as renal tubular acidosis,
No, no, no... Again, don't extrapolate from serious kidney diseases to healthy subjects.
- 7. Alkalinity and Chemotherapy
Some drugs work better with low pH and some work better with high pH. Again, you won't change the pH with diet, so this is useless to a discussion of Alkaline diet
> It has been suggested that inducing metabolic alkalosis may be useful in enhancing some treatment regimes by using sodium bicarbonate, carbicab, and furosemide
As you can see, even when you cant to induce alkalosis, you sue actual drugs, and not dietary changes (one of these drugs, furosemide, works by manipulation kidney function, it's not merely an alkali concentrate).
The discussion and conclusion say that the evidence is weak for lots of things. The only stroong part is the K/Na ratio. If the Alkali diet does this, then its benefits have nothing to do with blood alkalinization per se.
Was pretty sure this was going to be followed up with nonsense.
>>Apparently at the current moment the best is to keep your PH value in the body neutral
Right, it was.
If that was best, then why has the body not evolved into this pattern after millions of years, especially considering that diet prior to the agricultural revolution was almost certainly more acidic than ours today?
Read Alan Aragon's monthly research review for data-driven ideas on nutrition and exercise. A "professional nutritionist" is almost certainly going to have - at the very best - outdated ideas from decades ago seared into their brains. The truth is that we know vanishingly little about nutrition from a micro perspective; any strong claims beyond that are exceptionally suspect.
I suggest to research the Wahls protocol. Prof Terry Wahls was in a wheelchair with MS and cured herself. Now she is heading a department at a hospital where patients are cured of MS.
So before my tech career, I did a 1.5yr Fellowship at a renowned research lab -- The Rockefeller University. Our entire programme of research was around the possible causes of multiple sclerosis. One of the reasons I decided to pursue Computer Science rather than clinical research was the slow discovery cycle in clinical research. I got so much faster (albiet smaller) victories in Computer Science.
That was 1996. This is 20 years later and sadly we're still trying to determine the etiology of the disease. My research advisor passed away, the other is deep in retirement. We're still trying to figure out the mess of genetic and environmental factors which cause MS (our theory was Human Herpes Virus 6.)
I owe so much respect to individuals who pursue clinical research for a generation despite how slow progress can be. I was pulling my hair out in 1996 when I worked on this, because it was so slow with so little signal to success/failure. ...In the meantime, I get antsy if my build takes longer than two minutes or if a scrum sprint goes over by a day.
PS this is also why I admire Craig Venter (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craig_Venter) so much -- he worked so hard to institute the practices of automation into biomedical research. It is also why im so excited by Mousera/Vium