[HN Gopher] Hunter-gatherer lifestyle fosters thriving gut micro...
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Hunter-gatherer lifestyle fosters thriving gut microbiome
Author : LinuxBender
Score : 58 points
Date : 2023-06-26 19:23 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| CrHn3 wrote:
| This article conflates diversity with gut health. It has not been
| proven that more diversity is necessarily better[1]. In fact, in
| infants a less diverse b. infantis dominant environment is
| probably advantageous[2].
|
| If you're having a baby, the best thing you can do is to
| supplement b. infantis, especially the robust strain from Evolve
| Biosystems[3]. The Hadza have more b. infantis[4] which kicks off
| a set of immune host interactions that have positive effects on
| inflammation during the critical period after birth[5].
|
| "After around 3 years, the gut microbiota stabilises retaining
| relative proportions of taxa with adaptations to composition
| harder to impose,"[6] so I doubt it's diet as much as it is
| vertical transmission of the right kinds of bacteria that set the
| infants up for a lifetime of healthy immune response.
|
| 1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5103657/
|
| 2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6177445/
|
| 3. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7352178/
|
| 4. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9894631/
|
| 5.
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009286742...
|
| 6. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6950569/
| dmbche wrote:
| I'm surprised you're downvoted, you liked 6 papers and are just
| stating that the link is tenuous, I think that's fair.
| cesarvarela wrote:
| Agriculture was a mistake.
| myshpa wrote:
| Our biggest mistake.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| Yuval Noah Harari had a good quote on wheat farming in Sapiens
|
| _Think for a moment about the Agricultural Revolution from the
| viewpoint of wheat. Ten thousand years ago wheat was just a
| wild grass, one of many, confined to a small range in the
| Middle East. Suddenly, within just a few short millennia, it
| was growing all over the world. According to the basic
| evolutionary criteria of survival and reproduction, wheat has
| become one of the most successful plants in the history of the
| earth. In areas such as the Great Plains of North America,
| where not a single wheat stalk grew 10,000 years ago, you can
| today walk for hundreds upon hundreds of miles without
| encountering any other plant. Worldwide, wheat covers about
| 870,000 square miles of the globe's surface, almost ten times
| the size of Britain. How did this grass turn from insignificant
| to ubiquitous? Wheat did it by manipulating Homo sapiens to its
| advantage. This ape had been living a fairly comfortable life
| hunting and gathering until about 10,000 years ago, but then
| began to invest more and more effort in cultivating wheat.
| Within a couple of millennia, humans in many parts of the world
| were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking care of
| wheat plants. It wasn't easy. Wheat demanded a lot of them.
| Wheat didn't like rocks and pebbles, so Sapiens broke their
| backs clearing fields. Wheat didn't like sharing its space,
| water and nutrients with other plants, so men and women
| laboured long days weeding under the scorching sun. Wheat got
| sick, so Sapiens had to keep a watch out for worms and blight.
| Wheat was attacked by rabbits and locust swarms, so the farmers
| built fences and stood guard over the fields. Wheat was
| thirsty, so humans dug irrigation canals or lugged heavy
| buckets from the well to water it. Sapiens even collected
| animal faeces to nourish the ground in which wheat grew._
| pj_mukh wrote:
| Dumb question: After the 8473628484th study confirming how
| important the gut micro biome is, why isn't there a pill to build
| it up?
|
| Like a multi-vitamin that just boosts the diversity in the gut?
|
| Are processed diets changing the physical makeup (thermal?,
| acidic?) of the gut as well and therefore a pill won't work?
| edgyquant wrote:
| Isn't this exactly what a probiotic is?
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| I think this is an example of such probiotic pills.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/dp/B002NL165W
| notaustinpowers wrote:
| We all have a different micro biome. While humans are only .01%
| different from each other, our micro biomes can vary wildly
| based on diet, lifestyle, environment, etc. There's no one size
| fits all pill we could take.
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| True, though it might be possible to make a more one-size-
| fits-all pill that targeted species which correlate with
| worse health (say, a bunch of bacteriophages).
| JPws_Prntr_Fngr wrote:
| As edgyquant says, these pills are called probiotics, and
| they're readily available. The problem is that the gut biome is
| composed of 16 gajillion types of microbes, and understanding
| their individual & synergistic effects is nearly impossible
| currently. I do self-treat with probiotics periodically, but I
| see it as basically a leeching- or bloodletting-tier technique.
|
| See fecal matter transplantation - we're still in the dark ages
| here.
| joker_minmax wrote:
| Lifestyle is more than just diet, there's the activity level, sun
| exposure, and different things in the water. I think we should
| just start saying that gray cubicles are bad for the microbiome
| and roll with that.
| asdff wrote:
| You'd have to uproot how the western world works to get us back
| to how we evolved to be healthy and survive on this planet.
| Finding time to get your 8 miles of walking a day in would be
| hard enough. We probably spend way too much time thinking a day
| as well with the 8 hour day. Think about how often a white
| collar worker does nothing but sit all day and gets home
| exhausted from the mental drain and stress: that can't be very
| healthy and is really far off from early modern human behavior
| as well. Stuff like a deadline you are stressing over is a very
| modern concept too, probably takes years off your life but what
| do you know we live by them and pretend like we are being
| productive and healthy while burning the wick at both ends.
|
| By the time you actually get the time to live like how you are
| supposed to live, you are old, in retirement, fragile from a
| lifetime of inactivity, and can't make up for your years lost
| of good physical health that you had to spend at a desk growing
| lethargic instead.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Yet another unambiguous data point that modern life is measurably
| worse for your body, and with less diversity, than tens of
| thousands of years ago.
| jandrese wrote:
| I'm not sure "diversity of gut flora" is a good indicator of
| quality of life. It might just mean you have less dirt in your
| diet.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| >Yet another unambiguous data point
|
| I checked. It's ambiguous:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleolithic_diet#Health_effect...
| myshpa wrote:
| I don't think a modern paleo "fad" diet has anything to do
| with the real diet of that times.
|
| Anthropologist Debunks the Paleo Diet
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNIoKmMq6cs
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| To be clear I think there's a significant difference between
| "What people ate in the Paleolithic" and "The Paleo Diet" TM
| r3trohack3r wrote:
| > Yet another unambiguous data point that modern life is
| measurably worse for your body
|
| I'm not sure this is the takeaway.
|
| I feel there are many unambiguous data points that modern life
| is measurably better for your body.
|
| Infant mortality rate. Average life expectancy. The mortality
| rate for mothers during pregnancy. The mortality rate for
| random injuries (cuts, breaks, etc.). Death by food poisoning.
| Quality of life, and mortality rates, for mental and physical
| disabilities.
|
| It seems like, in nearly any circumstance, the modern human
| body is at considerably less risk than our ancestors.
|
| But there are trade-offs and missteps. It seems we've tossed
| the baby with the bath water in some cases. And getting the
| baby back further improves modern life.
| martythemaniak wrote:
| All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine,
| education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh
| water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever
| done for us?
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Obviously we don't have records for the majority cause of
| death in 100,000BC, however I see no reason to believe that
| compared to Paleolithic man there are fewer risks now.
|
| Consider the top youth killers today: drug overdoses,
| automobile accidents, firearms, household accidents. These
| were just not possible ways that people could die in
| 100,000BC. Yet heart attack and cancer have always led death
| rates for as long as humans have been counting.
|
| My hunch is that people for the most part have always mostly
| died of "old age" (cancer, heart attack, pneumonia,
| infection) for all of human history and while overall rate
| had dropped - the type has changed to be less random biology
| and more social-cultural (which is worse IMO)
| fasterik wrote:
| I doubt this is true if you factor in the positive effects of
| medical care, safer living conditions, sanitation, etc. that
| are available in modern developed countries.
| chomp wrote:
| I don't think this is right, hunter-gather diets were largely
| restricted to the area they lived, you can't across the board
| call them diverse. It depends if you lived in an area that was
| blessed with diversity, or if you were forced to eat the same
| seeds/nuts constantly.
|
| Malnutrition plagued the Neanderthals by the way. We have
| skeletons and teeth that show disruption to growth. There's
| evidence of some groups of gatherers that subsisted on local
| flora that caused excessive amounts of tooth decay. Modern
| living results in way healthier people (for the most part).
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Point is well taken that I shouldn't generalize and that it's
| likely been a trade off.
|
| I suppose my rebut would claim that the diet of the average
| US adult today is worse than the average Paleolithic person,
| but that the healthiest US adult would be healthier than the
| healthiest Paleolithic person.
| mlyle wrote:
| > I suppose my rebut would claim that the diet of the
| average US adult today is worse than the average
| Paleolithic person
|
| Worse in some aspects. But the leading cause of death in
| paleolithic times is thought to be diarrhea from foodborne
| illness causing dehydration and starvation, which is not
| such a killer today. Is that included in "diet"? (It would
| seem to be, because we're talking about effects on gut
| biome...)
| carabiner wrote:
| Reminds me of cats living in the wild vs. domestically...
| Wild cats are known to be riddled with disease and
| starvation, and that's why they evolved to have large
| litters. Domestic cats live much longer, healthier lives,
| even though they're generally eating the same stuff every
| meal, every day.
| hirundo wrote:
| This gives them an advantage in the supply of material for fecal
| microbiota transplant bacteriotherapy. Unless they use the
| proceeds to stop eating like hunger-gatherers, which seems to be
| the usual path.
|
| I know some modern Californians who eat like hunter-gatherers. I
| wonder if they might be able to monetize their gut flora.
| xenonite wrote:
| > The analysis suggests that the average Hadza adult gut
| microbiome contains 730 species (standard error [SE] of 14.5
| species), compared with 277 species (SE of 32 species) in the
| average adult Californian gut microbiome, 317 species (SE of 32
| species) for the Nepali foragers, and 436 species (SE of 106
| species) for the Nepali agrarians.
| lucidguppy wrote:
| I think they should call them gatherer-hunter lifestyles. The
| bulk of calories for paleo/neo-lithic people came from stuff that
| didn't run away.
| beezlebroxxxxxx wrote:
| In what sense are hunter-gatherer diets "more diverse"? Are they
| eating a lot of different things? Is the food they're eating
| simply better on a microbiome improving level regardless of
| whether they have more variation or less, or is it more to do
| with preparation/cooking?
| CrHn3 wrote:
| From the publication, their diet "includes foraged tubers,
| berries, honey, and hunted animals."[1]
|
| Their microbiome is more diverse, with "23.4% of microbial
| species detected in the Hadza infants represent[ing] novel
| species"[2].
|
| 1. https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(23)00597-4
|
| 2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9894631/
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Exercise, lots of plants, variety.
| neves wrote:
| probably eating more dirt
| mstipetic wrote:
| If you look at any modern supermarket and strip out all the
| processed junk, you're left with a few types of meat, few types
| of vegetables and maybe some mushrooms. Most of our dishes are
| a combination of maybe 25 items of which 6,7 are heavily used.
| GordonS wrote:
| Would your typical hunter-gatherer have more than 25 edible
| items regularly around them? I'm not so sure.
| asdff wrote:
| The world your typical hunter gatherer lived in was
| remarkably different than today. So much more flora and
| fauna. Actual functioning ecosystems versus disrupted ones.
| The world today is so bizarrely different than even the
| world 500 years ago all thanks to our farming, hunting, and
| resource gathering over the years.
| mastazi wrote:
| > hunter-gatherer
|
| You don't even need to go that far - my Italian grandma who
| was born in a farming village in the early 1900s, knew
| dozens of herbs, how you would go about finding them, and
| how could you use them for this or that other purpose. You
| can't find any of those herbs in a modern supermarket
| except maybe for a couple of them.
| asdff wrote:
| Imagine the biodiversity on the peninsula before all
| those humans moved in too. It must have been like a
| garden of eden to the first migrants of humans. There are
| islands in the Mediterranean today that are still barren
| of trees due to Venetian shipbuilding.
| rdevsrex wrote:
| Yes. I can't cite it, but I remember seeing a study that
| said hunter gatherers in warmer climates can have up to 200
| different food sources.
|
| Of course I'm sure it's highly dependent on season and
| region.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| The idea that there is a "typical hunter-gatherer" across
| all of human history and geography, and that we know what
| that is -- is I think a fundamental problem with a lot of
| these theories.
|
| Someone studies one group of people at one (modern) time
| and place -- a group of people who probably don't even
| _exclusively_ "forage" for their food and other economic
| activity now as encountered -- and then they, or their
| readers, assume that what they found is somehow typical of
| everyone they assign to the category "hunter gatherer", and
| further assume what people at what other times and places
| are "correctly" assigned to that category too.
| [deleted]
| 4b11b4 wrote:
| You also have to consider all of the invisible (to the naked
| eye) stuff you get from eating plants in the wild.
|
| When I graze in the backyard... I don't brush off all the dirt.
| If there are small bugs on a leaf, I might eat em.
| ozim wrote:
| Yeah tapeworms, pinworms all super healthy and tasty.
| frereubu wrote:
| That's a facetious take on a reasonable opinion. If you
| disagree - which there are _also_ reasonable grounds for -
| snark isn 't going to help us understand what your real
| point is.
| comte7092 wrote:
| >Are they eating a lot of different things?
|
| This is a generalization/simplification on my part, but yes.
|
| Hunter gatherers at a minimum are eating different foods
| throughout the year as seasons change, but even within seasons
| as different foods become available.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I have a hard time believing they would have a greater
| variety than a reasonable modern day person.
|
| Reflecting on today, I've had four different species of
| fruit, three different vegetables, and two different
| subspecies of Cheerio. Not to forget the different meats,
| nuts, and dairy.
| viscanti wrote:
| From everything I've come across, hunter-gatherer people
| are substantially deficient in their Cheerio intake. Modern
| diets have multiple subspecies to choose from that would
| likely be unavailable to hunter-gatherers.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Just because you had several different items doesn't mean
| they are all that diverse
|
| Having a Cavendish banana, Fuji apple and hothouse tomatoes
| isn't "diversity" as all have basically the same nutrient
| content [1] which is dwindling rapidly. None of which have
| manganese for example, because we stripped it from our
| topsoil long ago.
|
| So yes, eating a handful of legumes and some honey along
| with a healthy slab of wild meat (which contains everything
| that the meat ate) could be way more nutritionally diverse
| than a standard western meat + veg + grain combo. That is
| effectively the Hadza diet.
|
| [1]https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/vanish
| ing-...
| shagmin wrote:
| Typical fruits people eat are probably the ones that were
| the easiest to domesticate and have the most sugar, not
| necessarily representative of more variety in nutrition.
| And what you might consider a variety of vegetables is in
| fact just the same couple species but different cultivars.
| And modern people certainly eat more meat but for the most
| part have totally abandoned eating organs and other tissue.
| Probably not as much difference in chicken breast vs turkey
| breast as chicken breast vs chicken gizzards. I ate mutton
| and liver as a kid, I've known other people that ate
| chicken feet as kids. So in some ways you don't even see
| the variety today you did a generation ago, but things like
| avocados are more common I guess.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| There's a difference between having a greater variety
| available and eating a greater variety of food. Most people
| eat what they're comfortable eating, and many eat
| everything already cooked to death.
| tomjakubowski wrote:
| Yes, and hunter-gatherers are forced by their
| circumstance to eat a wide range of foods: individual
| food species are in limited supply, and the supply of
| them changes throughout the year (and over the years,
| too).
|
| Today in the United States, food is so plentiful there is
| enough to provide a person with the same food every day
| if that's what they want.
| Y_Y wrote:
| I hope the trade-off is worth it for them
| OldManRyan wrote:
| What trade-off specifically?
| ramesh31 wrote:
| >What trade-off specifically?
|
| Not starving to death when there's a drought
| [deleted]
| woeirua wrote:
| How long before we see a SaaS (s*t-as-a-service) startup where
| you can get fecal transplants sourced from people who only forage
| for their food?
| eganist wrote:
| https://www.google.com/search?q=fecal+transplant+as+a+servic...
|
| halfway there
| blitzar wrote:
| > Donors needed
|
| A call to action, just the kind I have been looking for. It
| is my duty to give a shit.
| freitzkriesler2 wrote:
| Last I checked, the FDA approved fecal transplant pills so you
| can swallow capsules of verified safe poop instead of having to
| inject poo up your bum.
| yCombLinks wrote:
| Why skip the good part
| dheera wrote:
| That sounds _more_ disgusting, not less.
|
| The mouth is for clean stuff. The bum is for dirty stuff.
| n8henrie wrote:
| All of the commenters so far (and the article's title) seem to
| assume that this is causative of good health. Why is that?
|
| I'm aware that fecal transplants can help cure C diff infections.
|
| Do we have randomized, placebo-controlled evidence that suggests
| that gut biodiversity is causative of (and not just associated
| with other lifestyle features causing) good health? It's hard for
| me to imagine a good way to design such a study.
|
| I thought the rigorously performed research regarding eg
| probiotics had mostly been disappointing.
|
| Is there any reason to think that food that is good for human
| health would not also be good for gut flora health, thus heavily
| confounding much of the non-interventional research?
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Study after study fail to disprove the hypothesis that gut
| microbiome diversity is a strong correlate with longevity.
|
| Here's a meta study for you:
|
| Here we introduce the MicrobiomeHD database, which includes 28
| published case-control gut microbiome studies spanning ten
| diseases. We perform a cross-disease meta-analysis of these
| studies using standardized methods. We find consistent patterns
| characterizing disease-associated microbiome changes.
|
| What more do people want? Why is this something people fight?
|
| [1]https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-01973-8
| CrHn3 wrote:
| The IMPRINT study has given us a lot of information using
| shotgun metagenomic sequencing of longitudinal fecal samples:
| https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(21)00660-7
|
| There seem to be windows where bacterial populations are in
| flux until the microbiome stabilizes around 3 years of age. It
| is difficult to modify the microbiome after that. I think our
| models have to shift so that we prioritize early intervention,
| especially for those at risk for dysbiosis (like premature and
| c-section babies).
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