Modern Paleo Living

Posted by on November 6, 2010 8 comments

A few rare souls have gone off to the wilderness to live a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Of course, Paleo bands were highly sociable, and it would be impossible to replicate Paleo society today; but in the wilderness one naturally eats a Paleo diet.

Such a soul was Dick Proenneke, a carpenter, mechanic, and naturalist who retired at age 51 to live alone in Alaska’s Lake Clark National Preserve. He remained in the wilderness until age 82, when he returned to civilization. He died at age 86 in 2003.

Proenneke kept a journal and took video footage of himself, some of which appeared on US public television as the film Alone in the Wilderness.  Youtube has a collection of this video. Here is Disc 1 Part 1:

P.S.: If you do live a Paleo lifestyle, don’t do your hunting on the Hanford nuclear reservation.

Two From the Web

Posted by on November 4, 2010 21 comments

A few interesting posts elsewhere caught my eye.

First, Dr. Emily Deans reports that people who have experienced influenza or coronavirus infections are much more likely to suffer mood disorders such as depression.

We believe that most diseases result from the interaction of a bad diet with pathogens, so we’re not surprised to see more evidence associating pathogens with depression.

As Dr. Deans says, make sure your vitamin D levels are optimized for protection against these viruses.

Second, Dr. BG offers something tangentially related to our last post on fecal transplant therapies. She links to a post by Richard Nikoley explaining that while in ruminants vitamin B12 is made in the rumen and can be absorbed in the intestine, in carnivores and omnivores like humans vitamin B12 is made in the colon and is not absorbed well, but rather exits in the feces.

This is why animals, in addition to eating a lot of liver if they are carnivores, also eat feces (coprophagia). It gives them vitamin B12. (Perhaps it also cures their colitis, but we’ll await clinical trials to be sure.)

Always eager to provide visual evidence, Dr BG managed to find this video of gorilla coprophagia. Do not watch if you are squeamish, eating dinner, or dislike the sound of children squealing!

More on Fecal Transplants

Posted by on November 3, 2010 43 comments

We’ve had ongoing interest in the topic of fecal transplants from readers of our bowel disease series, and we’ve recently had comments from two biomedical professionals reminding us that it is desirable to have fecal transplants performed by doctors after screening of the stool for pathogens.

Coincidentally, The Scientist ran a nice story today on fecal transplants. [1]

Fecal transplants are effective against C. difficile, ulcerative colitis, and probably other inflammatory bowel disorders:

By producing sturdy spores that can linger in the intestinal tract even after repeated antibiotic treatment, C. difficile can continually give rise to new toxin-producing colonies that wreak havoc on the colon. But these colonies prove no match for fecal transplants, which boast a cure rate of up to 95 percent….

Borody did his first fecal transplant back in the mid 1980s, when he was confronted with one of the most difficult cases he had seen at the time: a woman who had vacationed at Fiji and had developed an incurable colitis through an unknown pathogen.

While searching the literature for alternative treatments, he stumbled upon a paper published in 1958 in the journal Surgery that described four cases in which a similar condition was cured by infusing the inflamed guts of the patients with fecal samples from healthy donors. “So I looked at the method and I kind of made up the rest of it,” Borody said.…

The stool, now turned into slush, was administered to the patient — who had her gastrointestinal tract previously flushed — via two enemas over the course of two days.

The results were nothing short of surprising, Borody said. Within days her colitis was gone, never to return.

It’s a well-proven procedure in animals. Veterinarians don’t bother to screen rumen fluid for pathogens, and yet the procedure is almost always healthful for the recipient:

The procedure, which has deep roots in veterinary science, has been tried and tested in animals for centuries. Farmers handling livestock have long realized, for example, that indigestion following a change in diet in grazing animals, such as cows, can be treated by feeding the sick cow rumen fluid that has been sucked out of a healthy cow’s stomach.

Yet it’s hard to find doctors who will perform the procedure for any ailment except C. difficile infections:

Currently, while most fecal transplants in the U.S. are performed exclusively to treat C. difficile, a growing list of doctors, such as Lawrence Brandt, chief of Gastroenterology at Montefiore Medical Center in New York, are beginning to expand to other gut disorders such as inflammatory bowel diseases….

“It is currently considered a last resort,” he said. But he hopes that will soon change. “It’s relatively simple, relatively inexpensive, and it’s very rapid in its actions.”

Conclusion

In chronic infections of the colon, fecal transplants should be among the first treatments resorted to, not the last resort.

This is one treatment where experience with animals and human patients, demonstrating that fecal transplants are fairly safe and often highly effective in colonic disorders, should trump the normal regulatory barriers to new procedures.

However, given the cautious nature of regulators and most doctors, it seems unlikely that the therapy will be widely available any time soon.

It’s good to hear that there is a “growing list” of doctors who will perform a fecal transplant. Anyone with a seemingly incurable colonic disease should seek one of them out.

References

[1] Cristina Luiggi, “Same Poop, Different Gut,” The Scientist, Nov 3, 2010, http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/57795/.

Thinking With Your Gut Bacteria

Posted by on November 2, 2010 18 comments

Is your personality really yours – or is it your bacteria’s?

What prompts this thought is a new paper that studied mate preference in fruit flies. It turns out that the gut bacteria in fruit flies influence their mate preference. [1]

Image source: Wikimedia commons.

It’s been known for 20 years that fruit flies raised on one type of food prefer to mate with fruit flies raised on that same food. Now, researchers have proven that the preference is dictated by gut bacteria. When fruit flies are given antibiotics, they forget their mate preference and will mate with fruit flies that eat different diets. [2]

Mating preference seems to be dominated by a single species:  Lactobacillus plantarum. This species is common in probiotic supplements and in fermented vegetables. So if you find yourself developing an attraction to starch-fed fruit flies, your probiotic could be to blame.

Personality-Altering Pathogens

Personality-altering pathogens may not be that rare. In the book we mention that Toxoplasma gondii, a protozoal parasite, infects 20% to 60% of the population in most countries, forms cysts throughout the body including the brain, and makes its victims behave recklessly:

  • Rats infected with T. gondii lose their fear of cats. [3]
  • Humans infected with T. gondii are 6 times more likely to get in traffic accidents. [4]

Conclusion

If people seem to be behaving increasingly oddly lately, perhaps it’s not your misanthropism. It might be a bug going around.

References

[1] “Gut Bugs Affect Mating,” The Scientist, Nov 2, 2010, http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/57793/.

[2] Sharon G et al. Commensal bacteria play a role in mating preference of Drosophila melanogaster. PNAS, www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1009906107, 2010. http://pmid.us/21041648.

[3] Webster JP et al. Parasites as causative agents of human affective disorders? The impact of anti-psychotic, mood-stabilizer and anti-parasite medication on Toxoplasma gondii’s ability to alter host behaviour. Proc Biol Sci. 2006 Apr 22;273(1589):1023-30. http://pmid.us/16627289.

[4] Flegr J et al. Increased incidence of traffic accidents in Toxoplasma-infected military drivers and protective effect RhD molecule revealed by a large-scale prospective cohort study. BMC Infect Dis. 2009 May 26;9:72. http://pmid.us/19470165.