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Listening to a Chris Kressler Podcast [1] earlier and it really crystallised something that I have been thinking for a while…..
The podcast was about a response to a question about whether a vegetarian diet is better for your microbiome or not, and I have posted a link at the end – well worth listening too and I am going to poach liberally from it……
Professor Ian Spreadbury wrote a paper called “Comparison with ancestral diets suggests dense acellular carbohydrates promote an inflammatory microbiota, and may be the primary dietary cause of leptin resistance and obesity.”[2], and, as the title says, it is predominately concerned with obesity and metabolic disorder, but the relevance is obvious.
His theory is that a diet high in acellular carbohydrates creates an inflammatory microbiome, which in a large portion of the population, translates as obesity, but for a different portion of the population will translate as a different disease.
The crux of the matter (or, as Chris puts it, “The biggest diet factor that determines gut health”) is the ratio of cellular to acellular carbohydrates consumed……
“…...the basic idea is that all carbohydrates that were part of the ancestral diet, which would be tubers, fruits and vegetables, plant parts like stems and leaves, store their carbohydrates in fiber-walled, living cells, and those cells remain largely intact during the cooking process, and they also resist digestion or absorption in the small intestine, and therefore, the fiber remains intact all the way down to the colon, where it then becomes food for beneficial gut bacteria that are living in the large intestine. So those are the cellular carbohydrates, and they’re, like I said, found in all ancestral carbohydrate sources.
On the other hand, in the Western or industrialized diet, you have a lot of acellular carbohydrates. These are things like flour, sugar, and other processed starches that have no living cells. These industrial foods are much higher in carbohydrate density than anything the microbiota of our upper GI tract would have encountered during our long evolution. And these foods, because they have no living cells, they’re absorbed higher up in the GI tract, and they can stimulate the overgrowth of bacteria in the upper GI tract, AKA SIBO, or small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, and they preferentially will feed some species of bacteria over others, and that can in turn lead to an inflammatory gut microbiota.”
“And so they have a completely different impact on the gut microbiome. When you compare diets and you take one diet that has 25% or 30% of calories as carbohydrate in the form of these cellular carbohydrates, the tubers and the fruits and the vegetables, and then you have another diet that’s 30% of calories as carbohydrate in the form of flour and sugar, those are going to have a completely different impact on the body. And Spreadbury’s argument is the thing that’s mediating that difference in impact is the gut microbiome. “
Pretty straight forward, because the provcessed food (acellular carbs) is predigested it is consumed by bacteria further up the GI tract, and consumed by different bacteria because the ones that broke down the fibre (cell walls) in the lower GI are no longer required.
Listen to the podcast and read the paper if you are interested, but as a theory it is pretty solid.
Goes on to talk about paleo, elemental diets, temporary carb restriction to bring gut bacteria under control, and why you may not want to be on FODMAPS for too long……
paleo…...
“We’re telling them to eat a diet that is very rich in fruits and vegetables and fermentable fibers and fermented foods and things that support the gut microbiome that also happens to include meats because meats are very nutrient dense and have a lot of other beneficial impacts on health, even if they don’t have, necessarily, a beneficial impact on the gut microbiota. “
sibo (and elemantal)…….
“And another angle or way to look at it is, like, in clinical practice, if I’m treating SIBO, one of the strategies that we use is a diet that’s low in fermentable fiber. We put patients on a diet that is low in these fibers because we know that these fibers can feed bacteria that have become overgrown in the small intestine. “
“one of the treatments for SIBO, for example, is an elemental diet, which is composed of only simple carbohydrates, like glucose and fructose, that are absorbed extremely high up in the digestive tract and thus don’t become food for bacteria lower down in the gastrointestinal tract. And we know, studies have shown that people who are on elemental diets experience a dramatic shift in the composition of their gut microbiome. “
fodmaps…….
“if FODMAPs are an issue for you, obviously cut them out while you fix the root causes, and it’s an indication that your gut is really messed up. The more sensitive you are to FODMAPs, it appears that you’re having some definite issues. And then over time, you want to get those foods back in as fast as possible. “
[1] RHR: Are Vegetarian Diets Better for the Microbiome?
http://chriskresser.com/are-vegetarian-diets-better-for-the-microbiome/
[2] Comparison with ancestral diets suggests dense acellular carbohydrates promote an inflammatory microbiota, and may be the primary dietary cause of leptin resistance and obesity
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3402009/
The podcast was about a response to a question about whether a vegetarian diet is better for your microbiome or not, and I have posted a link at the end – well worth listening too and I am going to poach liberally from it……
Professor Ian Spreadbury wrote a paper called “Comparison with ancestral diets suggests dense acellular carbohydrates promote an inflammatory microbiota, and may be the primary dietary cause of leptin resistance and obesity.”[2], and, as the title says, it is predominately concerned with obesity and metabolic disorder, but the relevance is obvious.
His theory is that a diet high in acellular carbohydrates creates an inflammatory microbiome, which in a large portion of the population, translates as obesity, but for a different portion of the population will translate as a different disease.
The crux of the matter (or, as Chris puts it, “The biggest diet factor that determines gut health”) is the ratio of cellular to acellular carbohydrates consumed……
“…...the basic idea is that all carbohydrates that were part of the ancestral diet, which would be tubers, fruits and vegetables, plant parts like stems and leaves, store their carbohydrates in fiber-walled, living cells, and those cells remain largely intact during the cooking process, and they also resist digestion or absorption in the small intestine, and therefore, the fiber remains intact all the way down to the colon, where it then becomes food for beneficial gut bacteria that are living in the large intestine. So those are the cellular carbohydrates, and they’re, like I said, found in all ancestral carbohydrate sources.
On the other hand, in the Western or industrialized diet, you have a lot of acellular carbohydrates. These are things like flour, sugar, and other processed starches that have no living cells. These industrial foods are much higher in carbohydrate density than anything the microbiota of our upper GI tract would have encountered during our long evolution. And these foods, because they have no living cells, they’re absorbed higher up in the GI tract, and they can stimulate the overgrowth of bacteria in the upper GI tract, AKA SIBO, or small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, and they preferentially will feed some species of bacteria over others, and that can in turn lead to an inflammatory gut microbiota.”
“And so they have a completely different impact on the gut microbiome. When you compare diets and you take one diet that has 25% or 30% of calories as carbohydrate in the form of these cellular carbohydrates, the tubers and the fruits and the vegetables, and then you have another diet that’s 30% of calories as carbohydrate in the form of flour and sugar, those are going to have a completely different impact on the body. And Spreadbury’s argument is the thing that’s mediating that difference in impact is the gut microbiome. “
Pretty straight forward, because the provcessed food (acellular carbs) is predigested it is consumed by bacteria further up the GI tract, and consumed by different bacteria because the ones that broke down the fibre (cell walls) in the lower GI are no longer required.
Listen to the podcast and read the paper if you are interested, but as a theory it is pretty solid.
Goes on to talk about paleo, elemental diets, temporary carb restriction to bring gut bacteria under control, and why you may not want to be on FODMAPS for too long……
paleo…...
“We’re telling them to eat a diet that is very rich in fruits and vegetables and fermentable fibers and fermented foods and things that support the gut microbiome that also happens to include meats because meats are very nutrient dense and have a lot of other beneficial impacts on health, even if they don’t have, necessarily, a beneficial impact on the gut microbiota. “
sibo (and elemantal)…….
“And another angle or way to look at it is, like, in clinical practice, if I’m treating SIBO, one of the strategies that we use is a diet that’s low in fermentable fiber. We put patients on a diet that is low in these fibers because we know that these fibers can feed bacteria that have become overgrown in the small intestine. “
“one of the treatments for SIBO, for example, is an elemental diet, which is composed of only simple carbohydrates, like glucose and fructose, that are absorbed extremely high up in the digestive tract and thus don’t become food for bacteria lower down in the gastrointestinal tract. And we know, studies have shown that people who are on elemental diets experience a dramatic shift in the composition of their gut microbiome. “
fodmaps…….
“if FODMAPs are an issue for you, obviously cut them out while you fix the root causes, and it’s an indication that your gut is really messed up. The more sensitive you are to FODMAPs, it appears that you’re having some definite issues. And then over time, you want to get those foods back in as fast as possible. “
[1] RHR: Are Vegetarian Diets Better for the Microbiome?
http://chriskresser.com/are-vegetarian-diets-better-for-the-microbiome/
[2] Comparison with ancestral diets suggests dense acellular carbohydrates promote an inflammatory microbiota, and may be the primary dietary cause of leptin resistance and obesity
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3402009/
