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.
Also, never ever ever do they mention anything about human genetics. There are people who carry more hunter-gatherer traits than others. So who is this diet really for?
Genetics matter. I am a FUT2 non-secretor and this effects my gut health tremendously. I had IBD-D for years before I found this out. Before then if I took any pre or pro-biotics it was a nightmare, but that was supposed to be the healthy thing to do.
So sorry, but I do not listen to any nutritional research anymore that over generalizes a genetically diverse population.
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.
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.
> 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.
To take it literally, it is impossible for eight billion humans (current world population estimate) to live as migratory hunter-gatherers on earth, even if the planet was terraformed back to how it was ten thousand years ago. It's highly unlikely even eight hundred million people people can live like this. In fact, it's possible there are not enough resources that even eighty million can live like this.
So aside from the terraforming, world population would probably have to shrink to less than 1% of what it is currently.
"The Long Earth" series by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter plays with this scenario, by giving humanity access to essentially limitless parallel worlds mostly untouched by humans. You can "step" into a parellel world, and thus eventually hunter gatherer lifestyles come back, since you can just step over once or a couple times to hunt there, and give resources time to recover. The series is quite a good read.
Exactly, carrying capacity of the land has changed thanks to how much of the biomass we are able to take advantage of. You don't get 8 billion humans on earth plus the abundance of flora and fauna from premodern times for free, its gotta come from somewhere and in this case we scorched a lot of the earth and disrupted a lot of flora and fauna for the agriculture that feeds 8 billion.
What changes the equation a little bit though is when we mine or extract resources like fertilizers and oil from below the surface of the planet. That is now adding nutrients and more energy to the system that wasn't around at least in premodern times. All that oil is old biomass anyhow, so burning it and adding it back to the atmosphere would potentially make it available again for species that take advantage of carbon fixation, if we give these species room to accumulate this biomass out of the atmosphere.
It's kind of interesting to think about how even with today's combustion engine tech, we could solve our climate change crises and set the earth to whatever greenhouse gas level we'd like, if we merely strove to balance this system by growing out sufficient biomass.
I don't think many people want to live like real hunter-gatherers so let's come back to the goal of having a healthy (or healthier) lifestyle while still enjoying some joys of modern living. We agree that stress at work or living stuck in chairs should be replaced, but replaced by... what? How can we have jobs and still live healthy? Now this is for me the discussion worth having.
If you can because of the nature of your work, move out of the city and suburbs, back to the country.
Abandon the idea of isolated nuclear family living towards more social small communities. Suburban life is terrible for every single happiness metric.
Embrace as much nature as you can. A city park stroll on Sunday ain't enough.
Many jobs still benefit from close proximity to other people and businesses, but cities have no business being 10+ million people and constantly growing, when many of us just spend most of our time behind a laptop screen.
We're at the dawn of an enormous social and civil reorganisation after the massive migration towards cities started in the Industrial Revolution, yet no-one is spending much time thinking about it. The pandemic has massively accelerated the disillusion of city life by knowledge workers, but the only voice we can hear are bosses wanting the return of the status quo, with everybody back in their downtown offices. I would expect more open push-back from us than just grumbling about it on forums.
Maybe it's only me, it feels like it's overdue but we're dragging our collective feet to reimagine better connection between the modern human and our natural roots, especially in the nascent era of climate awareness and loneliness epidemic caused by modern city life.
I live in a major city. Most people I know who moved to the burbs did so for a single reason: kids.
They want enough space to raise kids. They want a back yard. They want to still be close enough to restaurants and other amenities. They want to be in better school districts. They want to be around less crime.
But no one I know who moved to the burbs is particularly happy about it. They see it as a necessary evil.
You’ve listed excellent reasons for wanting to live in suburbs, which confirms my suspicion (suspicion because I don’t live in the US, so I don’t have any experience with US-style suburbs) that OP’s claim that suburbs make life worse on every possible metric is BS.
Yeah I don’t think it’s fair to say life is worse on every possible metric.
The trouble for me personally is that it’s worse on most of the metrics that matters to me.
There are just some things about suburbia that are fundamentally worse and never won’t be. But that involves tradeoffs, and good luck finding or affording a place with a yard in the city. It’s just a bummer that the tradeoffs can be so severe.
> Finding time to get your 8 miles of walking a day in would be hard enough.
I frequently do 6 mile walks with my dog, 8 miles would only be about 3 hours. Considering how much time people spend planted in front of a TV each day on average that shouldn't be that hard to hit. Tell you what, have the corpos give me an extra 1.5hrs each day and I'll give up 1.5hrs of TV and then we'll have enough for that 8 miles.
We really need to take back our time from the exploitation class. A lot of problems go away if you work fewer hours a week, but there exist very few jobs that will pay anywhere near a livable wage for that. Like, I could easily survive on half my income if only someone would give me back half my time for it, but that just isn't an option.
Nobody is exploiting you. Get that toxic mindset out of your head and you'll be happier and better off.
Quit your job today and start providing a service for other people if that's what you will.
Another thing, 3 hours a day spent on walking alone seems like a waste of time to me. Walking is a terrible form of exercise, it's meant to save energy. You could run for 20 minutes a day and do strength training for another 30 minutes to an hour and never be in bad shape in your life.
> Another thing, 3 hours a day spent on walking alone seems like a waste of time to me. Walking is a terrible form of exercise, it's meant to save energy.
I don’t doubt that there are diminishing returns, but I don’t think it’s fair to say that “walking is a terrible form of exercise.” I was just reading _Built to Move_, and they contend that one hour of intense exercise followed by an otherwise sedentary lifestyle does not make you healthy. Walking might not be the best cardiovascular activity, but it is good for your hips, alignment, digestive tract, promotes healthy sleep schedule, etc.
Walking fast with a steep slope is a good way to exercise I think. Andrew Weil even wrote that walking is a complete form of exercise: you don't need anything else to be a good athlete. But I guess it is a long hard walk, not a short easy one. I walk regularly and I found that it was really demanding if I do that in the woods with regular slopes. And sometimes I run a little bit, alternating walk and run.
> You'd have to uproot how the western world works
This is one of the things a lot of people say they want but almost nobody really wants. But the truth is that we like the way the western world works too much to give it up.
We like getting Amazon packages the same day we order. We like TikTok. We like pushing a button and getting a car to come pick us up. We like making a ton of money for stressing over deadlines and sitting in meetings run by pointless MBAs.
Oddly enough I consider myself part of western society despite having grown up surrounded by hunter gathers ( coastal, riverine, and desert ) and worked with many others (equatorial highlands, etc).
Even today, largely surrounded by industrial scale agricultural farming in the Western Australian wheatbelt (making frequent trips into the Murchison quiet zone for radio astronomy work) I don't see much of what you talk about despite people here using cutting edge tech in farming and many doing FiFo (fly in | fly out) work on largely automated mines that in toto shift almost a billion metric tonne per annum.
Western Society has some interesting slices to it that many miss due to being locked into their own bubble horizons.
I also don't like most of the things you mentioned here yet I don't feel we need to roll back Western society to be healthy. Sample size of one but I went from overweight/high blood pressure to the picture of health at 41 pretty much just by lifting weights twice a week and replacing the most egregious fat bombs in my diet with protein. I feel like people have a tendency to way overcomplicate this stuff.
I have been walking 90 minutes a day for a month and feel amazing. I just realized that with remote work, 30-60 minutes a day is just not enough activity.
Of course, we can't realistically go back to the paleolithic but there is a sense that you can't afford to not get a baseline of physical activity in.
No one is more productive being out of shape. You don't get less stressed from being less physically capable.
If a person can't find time in a day for enough physical activity but they are reading this then maybe they are making a poor trade off with their time.
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?
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.
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.
There needs not be a typical hunter gatherer lifestyle. The distinction is between gray cubicle sedentary junk-eating modern lifestyle and the general hunter gatherer lifestyle, it’s distinct enough.
They'd probably eat more than 25 different edible roots/tubors alone regularly, plus berries, fruits, leaves, and honey and meat/animal products it would run into hundreds, its surprising how much around us is edible that we no longer see as food.
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.
I have an Italian mother in law. One of the things that impressed me is how so many of the methods of cooking feed into each other. The leftover milk that's nearly spoiled can go into making cheese and there were many similar techniques like this that I don't remember.
I feel like we've lost some of our food cultures at some point and we're only starting to realize what we're missing.
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.
my specific examples was about herbs but it's valid for almost every food category:
* meat: my family is from a village near Rome, Roman traditional cuisine is famously full of recipes that use all sorts of weird meat cuts (pork jowl, internal organs of various animals...) - you won't find most of those in an average supermarket. When it comes to meat, the problem is not just cuts, but also breeds: I live in Australia and it has been extremely hard to find chicken which is not Cornish Cross. In Sydney, you can find heirloom breeds chicken at only a handful of speciality butchers, and prices are very high.
* grains: this is a well known problem, most grain-based products are based on just a handful of varietals. I have to say that the situation is starting to improve: recently, in some upmarket stores, it has become possible again to get products based on some heirloom grains, however they are pricey (example: Pasta Monongrano made from Matt or Kamut flour)
* fish: it is a known problem that fishing boats are forced to throw away certain catch, because certain fish varieties are not "marketable"
Fair enough. I'm not sure if those foods were any better or worse, but there's definitely an argument to make for the poverty of variety of modern cuisine.
yes, exactly, the problem is not whether those are more or less nutritious, the issue is the lack of variety. It seems that gut bacteria only improves if your diet is very diverse. But modern industrially produced food is made from just a small list of commodity ingredients. If you are curious about these topics, you could check out "The omnivore's dilemma", a book by Micheal Pollan, or the video documentary "Food Inc." that is also narrated by Pollan
I'm not sure if the gut microbiota "improves" in adults at all. It's largely established by the time you're past 3 years old, and even radical dietary changes mainly just shift the relative abundances around.
There's probably still an effect in there, but it seems more likely that it's mainly antibiotics that are killing off gut microbiota variety, with an argument to be made for a role of highly processed foods.
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.
There is a super interesting interview with Jeff Leach, a guy who actually went to live with hunter-gatherers, studying how they live and how it influences their microbiome:
Sounds like a large part of the reason for their gut diversity seem to be from not just what they eat, but how they eat it (taking in lots of dirt along with their food).
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.
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.
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.
Indeed, hunter gatherers are severely lacking in this aspect. They can’t take their Che-vitamins. Look, I’m not even mentioning that they’re burdened with intense physical activities like foraging and hunting for food in the forest instead of enjoying the privileges of modern life, for example sitting in front of a computer all day long to earn green papers to then go to the supermarket and buy processed delicious-corn-syrup foods to eat with those green papers, all without even burdening your leg muscles! It must totally suck to be a hunter gatherer indeed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
More like concise critique. Where I pointed out obvious flaw in “hunter gatherers were so healthy and had such a great quality of life not like us” way of thinking.
> When I graze in the backyard... I don't brush off all the dirt.
Given everything we know, this doesn’t seem too reasonable to me. I’m sure those hunters and gatherers would have loved a reliable way to purge those parasites from their digestive system. Even better if they didn’t require removing them in the first place.
As another commenter mentioned read “against the grain” by James c Scott. Also “eat on the wild side” is another. Today we may eat 20 different kinds of plants. Hunter gatherers ate somewhere like 80-120 different kinds.
“ The team suspects chronic inflammation in the gut could trigger such damage, creating a selective pressure for those genes, says study co-author Matthew Olm, a microbiologist at Stanford. “If you have a state of chronic inflammation, it would make sense that your gut microbiome has to adapt,” he says. These genes were not detected in the Hadza microbiomes.”
Think we are learning that a major key to overall health is minimizing the state of inflammation. Poor eating choices, lack of exercise, stressful job / life in general many urban environments tend to promote lifestyles where you could live in a state id constant inflammation.
Correct me if I’m wrong, since I’m not an expert in this area, but I think lowering inflammation is not really the goal? Inflammation as I understand it is just a marker for stress (in the broadest sense of the word). I understand that inflammation is the body attempting to heal from said stress. So really, the goal is to remove chronic stressors, of which you listed many. I think you got most of the big ones, maybe missing toxic chemical exposure in food/air/water depending on locale, and mental stress due to a lack of societal cohesion, across a lot of the US at least.
> 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.
Yet a kitchen sink is way more dangerous (in terms of harmful bacteria) than a loo. Measured by scientists by dropping a carrot, and then analyzing what got stuck on it.
You said clean and dirty. I would say these are proximate measurements meant to be indicative of danger. That means they should be very, very, very similar things. If there's very little overlap you have a maladjusted view of what is dirty.
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?
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?
I’m not sure what you take away from that meta analysis, but to me it does not seem to be about diversity as much as which groups of bacteria are associated with general improved health outcomes and disease. If you have more alpha diversity because you have more pathogenic strains, it does not necessarily mean it’s better.
Some studies have found no differences in alpha diversity[1] when looking at outcomes like longevity. Maybe alpha diversity is the byproduct of healthy flora but it could be possible to engineer a microbiome that was more advantageous for a given population that was less diverse.
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).
> 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.
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)
People have used drugs since time immemorial and even "natural" drugs can kill you. For example dying from esophogeal rupture during those purging ceremonies where toxins are ingested to induce profuse vomiting.
Though there were no firearms, there certainly were weapons and murder. Even human sacrifice.
Before there were cars, being kicked by a horse was a significant risk. Or being killed by the animals you hunt, like mammoths and other large mammals.
And I'm not sure what you mean by suggesting "household accidents". Accidents were possible before too. And way probably more lethal on average because there were no antibiotics, soap, or blood transfusions.
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?
Jokes aside but ancient rome was probably a disgusting place where setting foot into it put you at severe health risk compared to a quaint village. There's a reason why the rich rich of rome lived in villas outside of town.
Our injury prevention and treatment is better. Our knowledge of kinesiology is better. However, how many people even care about the findings of kinesiology or public health? Not a lot as it were if you were to go out in public and observe the average state of health for most people, some people take good health advice and straight up take offense to it. People made political campaigns out of it not long ago with the pandemic.
That being said, if you were to take your average hunter gatherer who is not ill or infected, compare them to your average american office worker, I'd guess you are comparing a slender low bmi person with great endurance, functional strength, and practical knowledge on survival to one who is overweight, doesn't know how to feed themselves without a modern grocery store, only walks to the car, and will probably end up dying sooner due to health issues stemming from being overweight, a poor diet, and general inactivity.
> It seems like, in nearly any circumstance, the modern human body is at considerably less risk than our ancestors.
I don't think so. I think the risk is just flattened. We've quashed deaths from injuries and trauma, but chronic disease has been getting worse, due in part to our diet and lifestyles. I'd be surprised if modern people have better vitality and stamina over their lifetime than our pre-agrarian ancestors did.
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).
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.
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.
> 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...)
I think it has more to do with sanitation than diet directly, many illnesses that kill that way (cholera, for one) flourish to this day in unclean areas, where excrement contaminates the water/food. Not eating rotting food as well, which was normal for a very long time.
Pretty certain that that accounts for a whole lot of diarhea and death.
It does make me think of how little soil we are in contact with compared to paleolithic persons - I know that B12 is sourced from the soil in our alimentation, but since we wash our produce we don't get any, and if you don't eat meat you need to supplement.
I wonder if there are not other bacterium that we are washing away.
Also remember hearing that it could be picked up on your skin on contact, which is also not something most people do daily.
Cholera flourishes today because of dense, stable housing with poor sanitation, which were lesser problems for hunter-gatherers. (Not to say that cholera wasn't still a killer...)
Properly cooking and cleaning food (and avoiding having to eat raw food) are really important factors, though.
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.
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.
Fermented foods, psyllium husk, non-strict intermittent fasting and strength training will get you like 80% of the way there while still being able to enjoy sitting at your computer for 8+ hours a day.
This is the sort of advice people need to hear more of. Almost none of us are ever going to realistically adopt a hunter-gatherer lifestyle again. We need more data on how to get close to that within the confines of modern life. There's some great material out there now, but only very recently.
I personally really enjoyed this discussion on this between Andrew Huberman and Justin Sonnenberg (Professor of Microbiology & Immunology at Stanford University): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouCWNRvPk20
The book "Fiber Fueled" by Will Bulsiewicz is an excellent source of information regarding the gut microbiota and its importance. I highly recommend it.
I wonder what the result looks like if you test people who eat produce from a home garden or if it's typically not enough to make a difference and you'd have to live outdoors. Similarly, people still eat significant amounts of foraged berries and mushrooms in some places - it does not have to be all industrial even if you live in a city.
A forager friend of mine has just completed participating in a gut biome study (in conjunction with the UK Zoe project), where he and other foragers have been only eating wild foraged food for 3 months. A pretty good achievement for him (although he lost about 20kg over the 3 months). He blogged daily photos of what he ate on insta: https://www.instagram.com/rural_courses/
I suppose it's best to start with 1 or 3 months of 100% foraged food like they are doing. If that works, later experiments can find out whether less than 100% is enough.
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.
Just a quick note:
You have to see your gut flora as an actual flora - like a forest. It doesn't get sunlight, you feed it nutrients. Whatever doesn't get fed dies, and what gets fed multiplies.
Now the more wishiwashi things is that some effects have been noticed, like if you have a biome that loves straight sugars, it will lead you to want to keep feeding it sugars, since you're very efficient at getting energy out of it, since you've cultivated a large amount of bacteria that does that well. Some can also affect their environnement to help themselves and damage others.
So it's tough to starve the "bad" and feed the "good".
Ideally, your gut would be used (and optimised) to a whole and full diet that gives you all nutrients.
All this to say - you can take probiotics if you want, but if you don't feed the bacteria you put in there, it's gonna die. So you have to both change your diet AND take probiotics.
A way to do both? Lactofermenting! Just take some foods you like, lactoferment them and eat the non pasturised food. You are selecting for bacteria that feeds on foods you like, and putting both them and their food in your gut. They are going to thrive, while your old flora won't like it.
I recommend making your own sauerkraut or kimchi to start, takes 10 minutes and 5 days of waiting. Costs 2$. Expext to get farty - that's the bad stuff dying and releasing gas.
That just my ramblings and I don't have solid sources on hand, but if you read up on poop transplants this kind of makes sense.
Edit: If you're into sourdough, making a starter is basically selecting for wheat digesting bacterium. So you're kinda doing the same with your flora! (Sourdough isn't a source of probiotics since it's cooked, it's just an analogy)
Not exactly. Probiotics tend to have transitory effects, so you have to keep taking them to see the benefits.
You'd need to significantly change your diet and lifestyle to have a chance at generating any positive changes to your gut microbiome that will persist.
Even then, it seems to be much more difficult to change things after an early age. Unless you get some magic fecal pills.
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.
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).
I think it's pretty tough to not nuke the whole flora, all I've heard about it was people taking long courses of antibiotics had very little flora and could develop digestive issues, and at that point transplants make sense.
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.
Would you say the same about all the other benefits of modern life (especially medicine, on-demand energy supply and the degrees of freedom)? Because those are a direct consequence of the kinds of social organization that followed from agriculture.
You might think differently if someone teleported you into a Papuan clan whose patriarch/matriarch exiled you for some arbitrary reason.
I feel like if we moved to sustainable permaculture, and made the rules of land ownership more equitable, we'd solve a lot of the problems that get blamed on 'agriculture'.
Seems we either manage to do that, or we become a permanent underclass in a toxic dustbowl within decades.
Tuber farmers who can't do anything but eat the day's harvest get by on much simpler culture than grain farmers. Landlords with granaries? Tubers can't be stored, so the idiot building palaces is wasting time. Kings and armies marching to claim faraway fertile lands? Rich city ruling over neglected grain basket region? They can't eat anything from faraway land. Festivals, astrology? Those won't help for perennial crops. Accounting? Not helpful for food.
And that's how religions got spreaded over.
Also, I think as bread was taken as "sacred", at least in Christianism, I think that could be related to the fungus (or mold) in some cereal/bread such as ergotism releasing hallucinations and "visions" of virgins/daemons and so on.
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/