No Guts. No Glory. (Part 1)

I hope that everyone feels a little more enlightened on macronutrients and I’ll try to refrain from using the “protein, carbohydrate, and fat” dietary jabberwocky  unless there is a biological/technical reason for pointing it out. If you SEE those words, please note that I am not describing food  groups (like meat or potatoes).

I really believe everyone’s health would be greatly improved if you simply didn’t use these three words in any way in making food choices.  It may seem trivial, but it’s not. Our image of these words and the cascading, general inadequate explanations of what happens when these are ingested cause a major distortion of reality.

We need to cover one more area to wrap up the macronutrient misdirection.

There is absolutely no question that macronutrients come in packages called “food” and after these last two posts, you should understand why it is futile to try to balance these in some mythical ratios. If you do, don’t be surprised if you end up with the same results of the last 40 years.  I want to challenge another notion and that concerns our evolutionarily power-hungry brain.  The computer analogy says that the brain is the CPU – it controls and makes all the decisions.

It has the master plan; but wait, I thought the big revolution of the last decade was solving our genome – the blueprint for life?

It turns out that the computer analogy, while being ‘good enough,” sort of fails when compared to reality. Every single cell has your blueprint. We were all once just a single cell and then two..and four…and fingers, toes, and nose. Much of it before the brain seized intellectual control. My daughter is 16 and I don’t think hers has taken over yet. Sometimes I wonder about mine.

The point of discussing this is many of our daily maintenance functions happen at the cellular level without the brain’s interaction. More importantly some of these functions TELL the brain what to do not the other way around.

Enter Addiction

Let’s do a simple test. I want you to vividly imagine that you are walking into a movie theater. You give your ticket to the attendant and  suddenly it hits you. That smell. Do you smell it? Popcorn, buttered popcorn, salted butter popcorn – large bucket.  As you walk over to the counter the lizard brian take over and, BAM, you plop $20 down for popcorn and a drink. Now scoop up that first bite in your hand to find it warm, greasy and it smells delicious – Are you with me? It goes into your mouth only to realize that your over zealous hand grabbed a little too much and you stuff that in there too… Can you imagine it? Can you taste it? Can you smell it?

salt. fat. sweet. Nature’s survival flavors.

Most people can make their mouth water just thinking about this scenario. So, maybe we aren’t in as much control as we like to believe. Our brain is certainly involved in all of those decisions, but there is something else at play if we dig a little deeper.  Our gut. You see, before your brain ever “learned” that these were good things, you were imprinted through your digestive system. Sweet is one of the first things and happens in the very early days of life through nursing and breast milk. Put a little sugar on a newborn’s pacifier, give it to them while standing close staring, and  you’ve made a an instant friend. It doesn’t end there and digestive system, from chewing to defecation, is important.

I want to argue that there is something much more important going on in your battle of the bulge. I believe over the next decade we’ll see that it is at the root of our surge in chronic disease and obesity. It’s our digestive system.  It’s extremely complex with a lot left to be understood.  In The Second Brain (Gershon, 1999), he lays out an incredible story of the control between the brain<–>gut. What is fascinating is it is a two-way control system.

I saw some of this first hand. When I flew on NASA’s Zero-G plane (aka the vomit comet) for a decade, I was one of the fortunate that never got sick (if you are ever with me in person, remind me to tell you about the “teacher flight” – I’d rather not write about it). For those not familiar, we take a large plane and fly a roller-coaster like flight, which basically drops you 10,000 ft.  You feel weightless for 20-30 seconds.  It was a lot of fun.  Eventually, with my business partners, we commercialized it  (gozerog.com) but, we created a flight profile that cause very few to get sick (many “lost their cookies” on the NASA flights).  The root of sickness is in the conflict between your inner ear and eyes. Your eyes see one thing, your ears tell you there’s no up and down and blahhhh in the bag (hopefully you don’t miss).

The interest here is that the body somehow interprets dizzy as an evolutionary sign of eating something poisonous and invokes the “empty the stomach” command. Once people were imprinted with that experience, just the smell of the plane was enough to start them on the path over the edge.  Similarly, think about when you are sick – do you feel hungry? In fact, don’t  you nearly always lose your appetite?

All of this is a complex, two way path between your gut and brain and what we are learning is that the gut is not just a sensory organ, but in fact send signals and the brain obeys.  How have the relatively recent advances of transportation and refrigeration changed what we eat in week, a day or even a meal? Do we think our evolutionary past was really as diverse as it is today?  All of this is only how our own digestive processes impact food.  It get’s even more complex enter:

Trillions and Trillions of Bacteria

It’s always interesting to learn something that just doesn’t fit our world view or is hard to comprehend.  I was drawn to space exploration by thinking about the magnitude and grandeure of the universe – you know, Sagans “billions of stars” (he never really said it, but it stuck).  Well here is a new thing to consider: There are 100 trillion microbes in and on your body, but “you” are composed of only 10 trillion cells. That’s right, “you” are only about 1/10th the cells moving around in your mass – the rest is THEM.

The gut is one of the places these microbes reside. Without them, you would die.  In fact, our microbiome, as it is called, is one of the next great mysteries to unravel. The Human Microbiome Project was launched by the NIH to identify and characterize the microbiomes that exist in various parts of the body. Each of us has a different microbiota, or bacterial gut make up, and this profoundly influences how you process food. The microbiome is the total genetic “fingerprint” of these microorganisms.

Understand we have to “feed” the organisms that reside in the gut and the exact balance can be related to diet. For example, Researchers at the Copenhagen University Hospital recently identified a correlation between antibiotics given in the first 6 months to infants and being overweight by the age of seven (1). When you take antibiotics you kill the good bacteria with the bad.

Thinking about just taking a “probiotic” to fix the problem?  These contain 4, 5, maybe 10 types. You likely have 500-1000 species and some estimates are ranging up to 35,000.  In April 2011, researchers defined three enterotypes, or clustered ratios of Bacteroides, Prevotella, or Ruminococcus species. Looking at individuals from Europe, Japan and Unites states, these enterotypes not only cross international and continental borders, but also race, ethnicity, age, and sex.

Beside the general information found on the HMP page of the NIH, one of the best open-source papers I found is this 2010 review article in Physiological Reviews. It’s long, but if this subject interests you, there is a lot of information. In terms of your microbiota influence on you, the authors point out:

“Nutrient metabolism by resident microbes is not carried out strictly for the host’s benefit; part of the energy extracted from luminal nutrients is designated for the microbiota itself, to maintain its numbers and fitness. It has been shown that members of the gut microbiota are able to adapt their metabolism to the conditions of the intestine, responding to substrate availability.” (3)

Of course these populations of little metabolisms all have their own byproducts, some good, some bad and we have to live with what they do. This is where food could provide a very key role in molding your microbiota make up.   While this research is expanding exponentially, one has to rethink the old saying – YOU are what you eat. What about them?

The Scoop on Poop

This is a part that edges on TMI, but unfortunately, there’s a lot of information lurking in this not so fun subject, so here it goes.  I used to love reading “The Holes in Your Nose,” The Gas We Pass” and “Everyone Poops”  to my kids. The truth is despite the stink and embarrassment of letting one go in a silent room, this is all vital to a properly functioning body. Your poop matters. In fact, it’s a great sign of what is going on inside you every day.  How long does it take to get through (transit time)? How is it shaped? Color? Smell? it all actually matters and can be a sign of healthy or not so healthy microbiota and diet.

I don’t want to get into this too much (I guess technically that would put me in deep-shit), but I do want to at least draw your attention to the daily bathroom visit. At the very minimum and I am probably going to regret writing this so don’t give me shit, but corn is a GREAT tracer particle if you want to figure out transit time from mouth to toilet.  Pick your favorite meal and swallow a tablespoon of corn, midway through. Wait and eventually there it is.

It’s sort of interesting to note that that time changes depending on meal size, frequency of eating and even hydration.  As well, it changes SIGNIFICANTLY with diet. When diet changes, for example when I began eating a mostly-vegan diet, I saw significant changes for about 6 weeks. On the other hand, if I occasionally have chicken wings or ribs, bam, it can change dramatically with one meal.

In one direction meat->vegan, gas was TERRIBLE for a time.  This is because the make up of my intestinal tract allowed a lot of undigestible oligosaccharides (remember our carbohydrate posts?) pass through the small intestine.  These saccharides are more complex than simple sugars, but less than a starch. When not broken down in the small intestine,  they make perfect food for some of the critters living in the colon and fuel these gassy tagalongs.  These are often referred to as prebiotics – including digestive resistant starch and fermentable fiber.

It is now believe these are all helpful in forming B vitamins along with short chain fatty acids. They can even promote calcium and magnesium absorption.  In the next (AND FINAL) post on the intestines, we can look at the various intestinal sections and the feed forward response.  I think you’ll see why a change in diet can really have an interesting side effect. Note that these changes need to be long enough for the beasts inside to fight among themselves and come to a new equilibrium.  For example meat/fat microbiota can be thought of as looking different than starch/zucchini.

It’s not that simple, but suffice it to say that it DOES matter. So much so, that (I’m not making this up) fecal transplants are now being looked at to control type 2 diabetes (4)!  So eat right or get a transplant – you decide what’s more pleasant: Calorie Rich And Processed (CRAP) food or taking a donation from Aunt Catherine?

All crap-jokes aside, we are only beginning to understand the implications of just how important these symbiotic beasts are in our health.  What is more important is that you will see that much more is going on than one might think, and how one digests foods is critically important to health and weight loss success.

Maybe we should be saying THEY are what we eat.

…to be continued.

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Ray

(1) Childhood overweight after establishment of the gut microbiota: the role of delivery mode, pre-pregnancy weight and early administration of antibiotics, International Journal of Obesity (2011) 35, 522–529; 

(2) Enterotypes of the human gut microbiome, Manimozhiyan Arumugam, et al., Nature 473, 174–180 (12 May 2011)

(3) Gut Microbiota in Health and Disease, Inna Sekirov, et al., Physiol Rev July 1, 2010 vol. 90 no. 3;

(4) The therapeutic potential of manipulating gut microbiota in obesity and type 2 diabetes mellitus, R. S. Kootte1, et al., Diabetes, Obesity and Metabolism Volume 14, Issue 2, pages 112–120, February 2012