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  #1   ^
Old Thu, Jul-06-17, 00:17
Demi's Avatar
Demi Demi is offline
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Default Professor’s gut feeling that a tribal diet will boost health

Quote:
From The Times
London, UK
6 July, 2017


Professor’s gut feeling that a tribal diet will boost health

The recipe to beat western diseases is simple. Take one part baobab, mix with several parts wild tubers, marinate in a soupcon of mud and, as an occasional treat, serve with a porcupine steak. It may not be to everyone’s taste, but the results are astonishing.

A scientist has suggested that we need to “rewild” our gut bacteria, after he lived and ate with an African hunter-gatherer tribe for three days — and found a huge improvement in the diversity of his microbiome.

The Hadza in Tanzania are one of the world’s last surviving pre-agricultural societies. They live in small communities amid the savannah, eating only seasonal fruits and vegetables, and hunting game and birds.

Scientists have discovered that they have some of the most diverse gut bacteria found in humans anywhere in the world, a discovery that may go some way to explaining their lack of western ailments such as asthma, diabetes and various autoimmune conditions.

Tim Spector, from King’s College London, went to spend some time with them to see if there was anything we in the West could gain from returning to the lifestyle of our evolutionary past.

“The Hadza have the healthiest guts in the world in terms of diversity,” said Professor Spector, who is the author of the book The Diet Myth. “They live as we would have done, in the same spot eating the same food.”

He decided to do the same — and was surprised not just by the health results, but also by how pleasant the experience proved to be.

There is growing research into the effect of gut flora on health, and of the western diet on gut flora. Two years ago Professor Spector persuaded his son to live solely on McDonald’s fast food for ten days, and showed that his gut flora diversity fell by 40 per cent. Professor Spector said he enjoyed his diet a lot more than the McDiet alternative.

“I was a bit worried about being starving, but I was just amazed by how much food there was.”

The first exotic taste he had to get used to was the fruit of the baobab tree, which was crushed and filtered. “I wasn’t expecting to like it. But actually it ended up like a citrusy milkshake,” he said.

He was less impressed with tubers. “We dug them up and stuck them on the barbecue and they were a bit dull. Halfway between a turnip and celery. But they were fine.” As was the meat: a rare delicacy of fresh porcupine. “Once you had taken the fur off and the quills it was pretty much like most barbecue meats.”

The highlight was the dessert, of wild honey and berries. The proof of the pudding, though, was in the pooing. Professor Spector is fascinated by the emerging science into how gut flora affect health. “A more diverse microbiome is [inversely] associated with the risk of almost every western ailment,” he said. “It’s not so much the microbiome itself, it’s what it produces. All these microbes produce thousands of chemicals and metabolites.”

So everywhere he goes he takes a stool sample. “I’ve taken 50 samples or so in the past couple of years, and it doesn’t go up or down much. I went to India, and it didn’t change anything like this.”

After his African adventure Professor Spector gained 20 per cent more microbe types. Obviously, it was a single sample, but this matched what would be expected: the Hadza have, on average, 40 per cent more gut microbe species than western humans.

“Perhaps this is where we were meant to be before we started losing them all. Is it this amazing combination that keeps the Hadza thin and in a better immune state?”

If it is, how do we recreate it? Professor Spector, who will talk about the experiment on BBC Radio 4’s Food Programme, says eating porcupine and tubers probably isn’t the best approach. “If I ate exactly those foods in north London for a couple of weeks would I still see the same result? Probably not. The Hadza don’t use utensils, don’t sterilise anything, and everything is thrown on the fire, fur and all. That’s what we all used to do, what our bodies are pretty much designed for.”

That, he thinks, is the key. Western hygiene is a wonderful thing, but maybe we need less of it than we have. There is increasing evidence that gardeners, for instance, have healthier microbes.

“It’s not just the food, it’s the outdoor, non-sterile lifestyle. Maybe we should occasionally go back to our roots — rewild ourselves, go camping with the kids, and get dirty.”

Diet of a hunter gatherer

Main course
Fresh porcupine
Hyrax
Tubers

Dessert
Kongorobi berries
Wild honey

Washed down with
Baobab fruit porridge


https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/...ector-bvkffrc8c


Quote:

BBC Radio:

Hunting with the Hadza
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08wmmwq

That Gut Feeling: Part Three
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08x4s4v




Quote:
The Diet Myth: Why the Secret to Health and Weight Loss Is Already in Your Gut
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Diet-Myth-.../dp/1468313614/
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  #2   ^
Old Thu, Jul-06-17, 07:38
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WereBear WereBear is offline
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Default

I don't know if it was the porcupine steak, but eating dirt is probably what did it
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  #3   ^
Old Thu, Jul-06-17, 08:08
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bkloots bkloots is offline
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Default

So...my new gardening hobby will make me dirtier and healthier, too? Great! Wonder if squirrel works as well as porcupine? We have a lot of squirrels.

Seriously, lack of microbiome diversity because of western processed food diets, as well as over-attention to "hygiene" through hand sanitizers, anti-bacterial household cleaners, and many other squeamish habits of first-world cultures may well have contributed to the rise in allergies, auto-immune diseases, and even obesity.

Finally, my casual housekeeping could be considered a good thing.
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  #4   ^
Old Fri, Jul-07-17, 07:20
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WereBear WereBear is offline
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"Hey, my lousy homemaking skills saved your life!"

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  #5   ^
Old Sat, Jul-08-17, 20:45
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bevangel bevangel is offline
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Default

As a lackadaisical (at best) housekeeper, I am LOVING this!
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  #6   ^
Old Sat, Jul-08-17, 23:31
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mike_d mike_d is offline
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Default

Well, now I know what to do with that porcupine the dogs keep running across. As far as the rest ill just keep drinking my homemade kefir.
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  #7   ^
Old Sun, Jul-09-17, 05:53
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teaser teaser is offline
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Default

When my Dad was a kid, people used to tell him to let porcupines be, in case he was ever lost in the woods, they're an easy hunt. My uncle got lost in the woods once and claims to have eaten a porcupine, that kept him alive for the day and a half until somebody found him.

Quote:
“The Hadza have the healthiest guts in the world in terms of diversity,” said Professor Spector,


This statement is kind of key, healthy in terms of diversity. In other write ups for this story, I've seen mention that there were decreases in bugs thought to be "good" and increases in "bad" bugs. The Hadza are healthy, therefore their gut biome must be conducive of health, therefore their good health can be ascribed to their gut biome, and this is the gut biome that should be encouraged in western guts... This story could have been slanted as "we know less about what constitutes a healthful gut biome than we thought we did."
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  #8   ^
Old Sun, Jul-09-17, 06:25
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WereBear WereBear is offline
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Default

A few years back I ran across the website GutSense.org and was impressed with the man's passion, research skills, and logical arguments.

I began applying his simple principles, and for me, everything he said, worked. I recently began drinking low sugar kombucha when a kombucha bar appeared in our local health food store, and this improved what I had thought was an already very good situation. (In case this helps anyone.)

Fermented foods, avoiding gluten (it's GLUE, folks, no wonder constipation is absolutely rampant in our society,) and improving inflammation and a compromised immune system has been a great thing, but it is also not complicated or difficult.

I'm just saying that I am sure gut biome is a thing, and eating the SAD is probably the worst thing in the world for it.
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  #9   ^
Old Sun, Jul-09-17, 06:39
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teaser teaser is offline
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Default

A problem with the gut-bug approach, though, is the same as a lot of things, it's hard to isolate for. I'm not sure there's much that can be done that couldn't arguably have an effect on gut bugs.

I get some obvious, repeatable benefits from eating ketogenically. Is it the ketones? Maybe I just don't get up to a therapeutic dose of palmitic acid until I'm eating butter and cream at ketogenic ratios. Or I could have intolerances to some low carb foods that get forced out on a stricter carbohydrate intake. Or lower intake of certain amino acids affects brain metabolism, or it's Bernstein's law of small numbers, my body's just better at finding equilibrium if the amino acids and carbohydrate that pose a greater challenge to homeostasis--a greater change to fasting metabolism in general, compared to fat--are minimized. Causation is tricky.
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  #10   ^
Old Sun, Jul-09-17, 10:44
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Nancy LC Nancy LC is offline
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Default

Probably if you go anywhere you'll pick up a bunch of new microbes temporarily.
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