Micromanaging your Microbes

Regular Nerd Herders may recall that I'm halfway through getting my Masters in Holistic Nutrition from Hawthorn University - or "Hippy Food School" as it's called on occasion.

It's been quite a balancing act so far. While I've never been one to buy into standard Western nutritional dogma, I'm also pretty damn skeptical when it comes to New Age pseudo science. Believe it or not, writers of holistic nutrition books sometimes make things up or conveniently forget rather large, concrete studies that disprove their theories. As a student of holistic science, it is my responsibility to differentiate the bodhi trees from the bullshit.

But it's not just the pachouli and incense set that ignores hard facts. There's a lot of truth to hippy science that The Man seems to pass by. So I get a little excited when the twain meets. Case in point, this article over on my buddy Ben's Science Blog discussing the role gastrointestinal microbes play in maintaining health and managing weight.

In a new study appearing in the journal Nutrition in Clinical Practice, researcher Rosa Krajmalnik-Brown and her colleagues at the Swette Center for Environmental Biotechnology at Arizona State University’s Biodesign Institute in collaboration with John DiBaise from the Division of Gastroenterology at the Mayo Clinic, review the role of gut microbes in nutrient absorption and energy regulation. 

According to Krajmalnik-Brown, “Malnutrition may manifest as either obesity or undernutrition, problems of epidemic proportion worldwide. Microorganisms have been shown to play an important role in nutrient and energy extraction and energy regulation although the specific roles that individual and groups/teams of gut microbes play remain uncertain.”

I'm not saying that modern medicine denies the existence of gut bacteria. However, I think they downplay its importance. The conspiracy theorist in me thinks the compulsive need to prescribe antibiotics has a lot to do with this. Western medicine loves itself some antibiotics - but the problem is, these drugs don't differentiate between good and bad bacteria. They're like a carpet bomb in your gut - and as we all know from watching Mad Max, The Road Warrior, and Beyond Thunderdome, once an infrastructure is wiped out, that which rises up in its place isn't always pretty.

Even if you don't buy the notion that your gut is a constant battleground between "good" and "bad" bacteria, how can billions and billions of organisms living inside you not have a huge impact? This article talks about fiddling with this balance to influence the way the body uses nutrients. Yes, you're still messing with biology, but I like the idea of adjusting what we have rather then dumping a bunch of xenobiotics into our systems to fix problems.

Exploiting microbes affecting energy extraction may prove a useful tool for non-surgically addressing obesity as well as treating undernutrition, though more research is needed for a full understanding of regulatory mechanisms governing the delicate interplay between intestinal microbes and their human hosts.

Of course, messing with our microbes can be taken too far, as I discussed last December, but this research is still interesting from a purely holistic perspective because the more we know about our gut bacteria, the easier it is to tailor diets that suit an individual's personal needs.

Plus, it'll further validate my hippy degree, making it all the easier for me to score chicks, I mean, help people.