Saturday, April 19, 2014

What Do We Really Know about Gut Flora

The Surprising Gut Microbes...from Wired Magazine was a short interesting read about the gut microbes of the Hadza tribe and some Modern comparisons.  What the researchers found was highly interesting.  Bacteria that we thought was good were absent in the traditional Hadza tribe and gut bacteria we thought were harmful and in large quantities in Crohns disease were present.  Even among the Hadza tribe, men and women had very different gut flora.  Women gathered more tubers and had more gut bacteria for the digestion of fibrous veggies.  This shows that not only can the gut bacteria be influence by diet, but that different quantities of the same food can as well.

This certainly raises some interesting questions about what we have thought was healthy vs unhealthy.

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