microbiome – Techdirt (original) (raw)

Stories filed under: "microbiome"

DailyDirt: Sugar, Yes, Please…

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

The number of calories you can ingest as soda or juice can be surprisingly high, if you’re not accustomed to accounting for your caloric intake. There’s a reason why so many diet soft drinks exist — and why a few low-cal beers are on the market. Drinking fewer calories just seems like an easier path to consuming fewer calories.

Should you rely on artificial sweeteners instead of sugar to get your sweetness fix? Obviously, artificial sweeteners aren’t “natural” (well, except for Stevia or tagatose), but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re bad for your health. Added sugar in your diet correlates with some health problems, but so far, serious health issues aren’t so strongly associated with artificial sweeteners. [url]
Aspartame acquired a bad reputation for causing cancer in rats, but actual health problems for humans haven’t been demonstrated. Unless you’re one of the rare individuals with phenylketonuria, there’s little scientific evidence that you should be concerned about consuming a reasonable amount of aspartame. But if you’re worried about your gut bacteria, the scientific jury is still out on the long-term effects from altering a person’s microbiome. [url]
Coca-Cola is moving away from sugary drinks with lower calorie products that replace sugar with sweeteners like Stevia. Stevia-sweetened Coke hasn’t caught on (yet?), but it’s the more “natural” successor to Diet Coke. [url]

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Filed Under: artificial sweeteners, aspartame, diet, food, health, microbiome, phenylketonuria, soda, stevia, sugar, tagatose
Companies: coca cola

DailyDirt: No Meatless Mondays For Cavemen…

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Modern humans have all sorts of wacky diets that are probably slowly killing us in ways we don’t fully recognize, but that doesn’t mean we should all start eating the way people did thousands or millions of years ago, either. Drinking a “soylent green” all liquid or all processed diet doesn’t sound like an optimal solution, but if grown adults want to eat fancy baby food, let them try that experiment (and I’ll volunteer to be in the control group). If you want to know more about pre-historic meals, though, check out a few of these links.

Early human ancestors ate meat which likely improved brain development, and there’s evidence of million-year-old butchery on bone fragments with cuts marks. Eating meat, even today, appears to have cognitive benefits for children — based on a controlled study of hundreds of school-aged kids in Kenya. A healthy diet doesn’t necessarily mean more meat is better, but there is evidence that no meat at all correlates with certain problems. [url]
Using tools to cut raw meat probably allowed our early ancestors to spend less time chewing — and more time doing other things. Before anyone cooked anything, we needed larger jaw muscles and bigger teeth to eat a real paleo diet. [url]
If you ever wondered why prehistoric people didn’t need to brush their teeth, the answer is that they ate different foods. Early humans ate more meat and not much in the way of grains and sugars, and the bacteria in our ancestors’ mouths were more friendly and less harmful than the mouth microbiomes of today. [url]

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Filed Under: ancestors, butchery, diet, early humans, food, health, meals, meat, microbiome, paleo diet, teeth

DailyDirt: How Clean Is Your Soap?

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Soap has saved countless lives by preventing the spread of disease and reducing the number of disease-causing microbes in our world. But we’ve become a bit too focused on killing germs with soap, and we might want to cut back a bit on the over-use of antimicrobial agents. The human microbiome is changing according to our habits and environment, and it might only take a few soapy showers to kill off a healthy microflora balance.

No matter how obsessive you are about cleaning your hands, you can’t get rid of ALL the germs. Soap itself contains live bacteria. It’s rare to get infected by soaps and other hygiene products because manufacturers follow FDA guidelines for maximum bacteria content, but even soap can go bad with time. [url]
Maybe there’s an extreme of using too much soap and killing off the “good bacteria” on your skin. But would you consider using a probiotic lotion/treatment on your skin and skip showering? The inventor of a “skin tonic” hasn’t showered in 12 years. The skin microbiome isn’t well understood, but maybe “microbiomics” will help treat eczema or other skin problems — and decrease the use of soap products. [url]
Antibacterial soaps with triclosan are being phased out as manufacturers find out about how widespread triclosan is becoming in the environment — and in people’s bodies. Soap without antimicrobial agents works, but the ubiquity of triclosan and other antimicrobials can make it inconvenient to stop using it. [url]

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Filed Under: antibacterial, antibiotics, antimicrobial, germs, microbes, microbiome, microbiomics, microflora, probiotic, soap, triclosan

DailyDirt: How Sweet It Is?

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

We’ve been following diet fads for a while now — and seeing how sugar (in various forms) has been blamed for health problems. Artificial sweeteners are supposed to help us avoid consuming too much sugar (and be more healthy in the balance), but it’s probably not surprising that studies are starting to show that these alternatives to sugar also have their own side effects.

Aspartame is being removed from Pepsi products, but it’s still in thousands of other items that people eat and drink. Aspartame is one of the most studied food additives, and there isn’t much evidence that it causes health problems such as cancer — although phenylketonurics should stay away from it (as well as phenylalanine or anything that turns into phenylalanine). [url]
Sucrose (aka table sugar) is a reference on the sweetness scale with a value of 1.0, and other natural sugars such as fructose can be a bit sweeter (1.1-1.8). Other naturally-occurring compounds like chloroform and stevia are orders of magnitude sweeter than sucrose, but you probably don’t want to ingest chloroform. Lugduname is one of the sweetest compounds known, estimated to be over 200,000 times sweeter than sucrose, but it’s not approved as a food additive (yet). People throughout history have been poisoned by sweet toxins (eg. lead acetate), but hopefully we’ll avoid a similar fate. [url]
Artificial sweeteners might reduce the calories a person consumes (depending on how much a person actually consumes), but these additives may also alter the microbiome in the digestive system, making some people less able to control blood sugar levels. It’s still uncertain what the net effect of artificial sweeteners might be on any particular individual, but it’s probably not as easy as you might think it is to eliminate all added sugar and artificial sweeteners from your diet. [url]

After you’ve finished checking out those links, take a look at our Daily Deals for cool gadgets and other awesome stuff.

Filed Under: artificial sweeteners, aspartame, diabetes, diet, food, food additive, lugduname, microbiome, phenylketonurics, stevia, sucrose, sugar, taste
Companies: pepsi

DailyDirt: Healthier Rice… From Science

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Billions of people around the world eat rice. So if rice can be made to be more healthy, the benefits could be globally significant. Sure, there are plenty of folks trying to genetically engineer better rice (eg. Golden Rice), but if you don’t like GMOs for whatever reason, you’re not out of luck. There are a few things that might help improve rice without messing around with rice DNA.

Cooking low calorie rice can be accomplished by adding coconut oil to the water used to cook rice. The coconut oil prevents some of the resistant starches in rice from becoming digestible starches, thereby reducing the calories available to whoever eats it. [url]
Arsenic content in rice can be reduced by relatively simple rinsing and cooking techniques. A coffee-pot percolation method for cooking rice could eliminate more than half of the arsenic in contaminated rice. [url]
Studying the microbiome of rice could help reduce the arsenic levels in the grain and plant. Bacteria in the soil has been found to lessen the uptake of arsenic significantly — potentially increasing food production productivity and improving food safety and chronic health conditions for the people who eat this staple daily. [url]

After you’ve finished checking out those links, take a look at our Daily Deals for cool gadgets and other awesome stuff.

Filed Under: arsenic, bacteria, cooking, food, gmo, golden rice, health, how-to, low calorie, microbiome, rice, starches

DailyDirt: Boosting Brainpower

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The plot of the classic science fiction short story, Flowers for Algernon has been adapted into a wide range of other stories, TV shows and movies. Upgrading a person’s intelligence through some unnatural means provides a temporary fix — resulting in an addiction to intelligence augmentation (or other complications). In reality, some colleges are starting to deal with students abusing drugs meant to treat ADHD but which also seem to increase mental focus in general. However, other methods that don’t use prescription medication to boost brainpower might be harder to regulate. Here are just a few links on the subject of boosting brainpower.

The number of people playing around with trans-cranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is growing — because zapping your brain with a few volts seems harmless when the upside could be faster learning or relief from anxiety. People experimenting on themselves with about $20 worth of simple electronics could lead to some cool discoveries.. or a lobotomized population of internet users. [url]
People use way more than 10% of their brain capacity. And 37% of all statistics are completely fabricated. [url]
Bacteria that live in our intestines could have a significant influence on our brain chemistry. The microbes that live in our bodies are not well studied, but maybe someday researchers will try to engineer bacteria to symbiotically boost our brains. [url]

If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: adhd, brain, brainpower, flowers for algernon, intelligence, iq, microbiome, symbiosis, tdcs, trans-cranial direct current stimulation

DailyDirt: Good Drugs Everywhere

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Concern over antibiotic resistance seems to be steadily growing, but some folks are optimistic that science will be able to develop new drugs or other kinds of medicines to replace older, increasingly ineffectual, pharmaceuticals that target the microbes in our bodies. Considering that scientists have only recently started to study the human microbiome, it’s possible that medicine could find a whole new categories of treatments that are yet undiscovered. Here are just a few links on finding drugs all around us.

If you’ve got dirt, there might be some naturally-occurring microbes in your soil that would be useful for producing novel antibiotics or other drugs. Citizen scientists can help collect samples from all over the US, and your backyard soil could be considered a “poor man’s rainforest” when it comes to biodiversity. [url]
Big pharma hasn’t even scratched the surface of the possible, potential medicines that could be made. It’s estimated that 1 novemdecillion “small molecule” compounds could be biologically active, and scientists have synthesized an extremely small fraction of them. [url]
Several studies have found pharmaceuticals are turning up in drinking water treatment plants. The concentrations are typically very low, in the nanograms per liter range, but those concentrations could still have an effect on wildlife. These concentrations could also build up over time if the drugs are persistent in the environment. [url]

If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: antibiotic resistance, chemistry, compounds, drinking water, drugs, health, medicine, microbiome, pharmaceuticals, soil

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

The human body harbors many more microbial cells than human cells. There are at least 10,000 different types of organisms on (and in) a healthy person, and finding out how our bodies interact with these microbes could help us understand how diseases are transmitted (or perhaps created). It’s a huge task to study trillions of cells, so some microbiome projects are turning to crowdfunding and citizen scientists to help out. Here are just a few interesting links on the nascent field of mapping our microbial friends.

The American Gut project is looking to raise $400,000 to create an open source collection of data on the diversity of microbes in our digestive systems. This project is also looking for donations of biological samples to analyze…. [url]
uBiome is also collecting samples from volunteers to analyze and create a map of human microbe diversity. The data will be HIPAA compliant, and no personal information will be released — and you’re already spreading your personal flora around everywhere you go anyway. [url]
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has an on-going Human Microbiome Project that catalogs microbial communities that live on the human body. So far, this research has gathered data on the microbes living on 200+ healthy volunteers. [url]

If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

Filed Under: biology, citizen science, crowdfunding, human microbiome project, microbes, microbiome, science, ubiome
Companies: indiegogo, nih