“WHERE THINGS SO SMALL CAN HAVE A MASSIVE IMPACT ON YOUR HEALTH.”
Herbsprout is a webblog and podcast dedicated to sharing the health benefits of herbs, food, innovations related to our gut microbiome. Herbsprout seeks to bridge the vast chasm dividing the mainstream medical community and alternative medicine.
One of the studies by Dr. Iain Chapple, head of dentistry at Birmingham University, in Britain found that Porphyromonas gingivalis, one of the bacteria in the gut and mouth microbiome, is connected to gum disease and rheumatoid arthritis, he is quoted as saying in a February 10 2021 article in the Economist.
Natalia Shulzhenko, an associate professor of biomedical sciences at the Oregon State University (OSU) and her associates have employed a data-driven, systems-biology approach called Transkingdom network analysis to study host-microbe interactions under a western diet, according to a January 05 2021 report by News 18 television station in Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India. They use operational taxonomic units, or OTUs to categorize bacteria based on gene sequence similarity, says the report.
The OSU team studied Lactobacillus Johnsonii, Lactobacillus Gasseri, Romboutsia Ilealis and Ruminococcus Gnavus, for example, and their impact on the western diet. The team compared multiple studies of both humans and mice and the abundance of these four bacteria on our body mass index (BMI). With this analysis, R. Ilealis to be present in more than 80 per cent of obese patients, according to the News 18 report.
According to a recent February 26 2021 article in Mind Body Green, akkermansia municiphila is the great gut protector, supplying our gut lining with a protective layer of mucus. A common gut ailment called leaky gut is connected to a deficiency of Akkermansia.
The weakening of our gut wall can enable undigested food particles and bacteria to "leak" into the bloodstream which causes inflammation, even worse, gastrointestinal diseases, according to Dr. Mark Hyman, founder and director of The UltraWellness Center, the Head of Strategy and Innovation of the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine who is quoted in the article.
There are a number of foods that are high in anti-oxidant properties such as pomegranate, green tea, and cranberry. These phytochemicals contain large amounts of tannins, flavonols, anthocyanins which feed the akkermansia bacteria.
In the article, Dr. Hyman also mentions the importance of Akkermansia for certain drug cancer treatments which are only effective with the presence of this bacteria in the gut.
According to a February 19 2021 article in Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News (Genengnews) researchers have built "the Gut Phage Database" (GPD), a collection of 142,000 nonredundant viral genomes (>10 kb) obtained by mining a dataset of 28,060 globally distributed human gut metagenomes and 2,898 reference genomes of cultured gut bacteria.” They identified common ancestors among the identified viruses.
Researchers at Wellcome Sanger Institute and EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) claim that more than half of these viruses have never been seen before.
Genengnews quoted Alexandre Almeida, PhD, postdoctoral fellow at EMBL-EBI and the Wellcome Sanger Institute saying this could lead to new treatments such as antimicrobials from bacteriophage origin.
Microbes out in Nature, from cyanobacteria to diatoms, could affect human health, according to a January 16 2021 report in Phys.Org by Kevin Dillon, a doctoral student in the lab of co-author Professor Donna E. Fennell, chair of the Rutgers University-New Brunswick, Dept. of Environmental Sciences, Environmental and Biological Sciences. They found these microbes travel in clouds distributing themselves throughout nature, including soil, rivers, and lakes (1).
It has been known that phytoplankton such as diatoms and various forms of algae thrive in nutrient-rich coastal waters, during oceanic spring blooms, and fresh water environments. The algae include blue-green (cyanobacteria), green, red and golden algae, and diatoms (another form of algae).
The power of microbes is their ability to recycle the primary elements of all living systems, such as carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen. Plankton are responsible for much of the food we eat and the air we breathe (2). Dillon says their research can lead to unlocking specific genes associated with the production of toxins by these microorganisms and limiting their growth. What this means is our well being really does go full circle in the "circle of life", and the connection is more interdependent than we may have ever suspected.
In addition to our personal health, diatoms hold 20% of carbon emissions in check, playing a major role in climate change control and is a major source of food for mammals such as whales, according to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (3). Additional research by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology say these tiny plankton drive a process called the "biological pump", consuming carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and moving it to sediments in the deep ocean (4).
According to a January 2021 Well and Good article by writer Kayla Hui, there are four main herbs associated for centuries with traditional Chinese medicine or TCM.
1) First is ginseng, the "granddaddy of them all". Ginseng is an adaptogen, aka a substance that helps the body react to stress and keep it in balance.
2) Though popular in Chinese culture, Huang Qi dried roots of the plant astragalus is known to protect the immune system.
3) Also well known and popularly used in Chinese and Japanese culture, the lingzhi mushroom, or ganoderma lingzhi, also known as reishi, is a polypore fungus ("bracket fungus"), that may be familiar by its fanning out shape. It has therapeutic properties that can enhance energy and increase memory.
4) The goji berry which took the health community by storm in recent years, possesses potent antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties that help reduce stress by limiting free radicals.
Diwakar Dacar, oncologist at the University of Pittsburgh and colleagues evaluated the transfer of fecal matter from melanoma patients who responded well to immunotherapy compared to those patients for whom immunotherapy failed.
First reported by the Science journal February 05 2021 the results showed an increase in "CD8+ T cell activation, and decreased frequency of interleukin-8–expressing myeloid cells" which are known to suppress the immune system.
This fecal transplant treatment helped reduce size of the tumors in their patients where other treatments weren't effective. This brings up the "unproven theory", possibility that fecal transplant through microbes can potentially reach places where other treatments cannot. Again, more research is needed to confirm this.
University of Bologna researchers found gut bacteria species in our gut that have been passed on from the Neanderthals. They extracted ancient DNA from 50,000-year-old faecal sediments samples of Neanderthals at the archaeological site of El Salt, near Alicante (Spain).
Researchers today know that modern influences such as processed foods, drugs, and even lifestyle has lead to a critical reduction of biodiversity in the gut microbiota.
Discovering these gut mucrobes that have existed since before humans tells us about the microbes that are essential to survival.
Bacteria often referred to as "keystone species" in both our own gut and those of Neanderthals are Blautia, Dorea, Roseburia, Ruminococcus and Faecalibacterium.
Microbes in plants known as Arbuscular Mycorrhizal Fungi (AMF) grow within the plant roots and help them grow better and be more resistant to environmental stressors, according to Dr. Nicolas Corradi, Associate Professor in the Department of Biology and Research Chair in Microbial Genomics at the University of Ottawa quoted in a February 04 2021 report by SciTech Daily.
Why is this important? It impacts the health of the plant food that we eat, making for the reason among others, why growing organically and naturally so critical to maintaining the plants nutrients. The study was able to identify how these AMF affect plant growth, and how the can be controlled by plants, leading to ways farmers can manipulate sustainable farming to improve crop yield and quality.
Scientists and the health communities of the Boston area are collaborating on microbiome research and development of treatments based on the research. That is the direction the medical community is headed, according to a January 05 2021 MIT News article.
MIT, Harvard University, The Broad Institute, and a number of Boston- based health organizations are weighing in on the gut health research and the treatments for every human disease. “In almost every disease context that’s been investigated, we’ve found different types of microbial communities, divergent between healthy and sick patients,” says MIT professor of biological engineering Eric Alm says. He and his team found contrasts between different types of microbial communities, making microbial related treatments for disease illness complicated.
What these sometimes divergent groups do agree on is that appropriate treatments are specific to each individual case. They hope their collaborations will lead to more concrete treatment solutions, such as the fecal transplants by companies like OpenBiome and personalized health recommendations by Viome.
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HERBSPROUT ADVISORY BOARD:
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●Jenny Pandol, Co-owner/founder/ COO, Microbiome Learning Center;
●Dr. Sabine Hazan, Founder and CEO, Progenabiome and Ventura Clinical Trials;
●Naveen Jain, Founder & CEO, Viome
●Hans Parge, ex-Pfizer director;
●Rob Greenlee, VP, Libsyn;
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●Cindy Postma, essential oils;
●Chris Kenji Beer, herbs & microbiome;
●Ely Diana, translation/ support services.
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Cindy Postma has been a writer and editor across all disciplines. She has been an instructor of Asian studies at Kings College (Cambridge), Columbia, and Cornell. She received her PhD from Kyoto University, Masters from Columbia University, and undergraduate from The University of Washington. She is proficient in four Asian languages and French.
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I am Chris Kenji Beer, Herbsprout writer and editor. I come from a family of health nuts. My mom was a psyche major and shared her Japanese culinary tradition. Uncle Tetsuo was and cousin Satoru Harada is a surgeon. Aunt Shigeko was a dietitian in Hiroshima before complications from the nuclear fallout took her life.
I am currently enrolled at Bastyr University's Ayurvedic Health Advisor program. In the past, I spent many years researching health care. I was published on the topic "Japanese Health Care for the Elderly" by the U.S. - Japan Foundation, and as co-author of health care reports for National Conference of State Legislatures Health Services Program, NW Asian Weekly, & as Editor/ co-Publisher of Asia Pacific Economic Review. Email us with questions or comments @ sales@mzinger.com.
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The contents of this webblog is not intended to be used to treat, cure, mitigate, or diagnose any medical condition. The readers must consult your doctor before you make any changes that could affect your health.