Diet and Disease

What we eat affects how we live - disease free or with diseases. Several of the scientific research and clinical & epidemiological studies warn us about the ill effects of artificial, over-cooked, fried and so called fast food. Yet rarely such information impact our food choices or eating habit.

The choices we make with what to fill our platter does not depend on a logical and well thought out decision making process. Most of the times immediate urge to sooth taste buds leads to bad choices. On other occasions real limitations of availability of healthy options affects our choices. In any case we end up filling our tummies with so called junk food, which we know will harm us.

Image curtsy: thehealthsite .com

We all know that eating green vegetables, colorful, seasonal and fresh fruits, and home prepared healthy meals are good choices. But most of us opt for calorie loaded, frozen, preservative added and overcooked meals on some pretext. We spend more or less equal amount of time and money in procuring either types of food items but if only a little thinking about long-term effects of these choices is practiced, we can save ourselves from many health problems. 

Scientific studies indicate that junk food items affect and alter physiology of our body cells drastically and propel them towards a state where only disease can develop. The high calorie besides being stored in body as increased weight, also fires the mitochondria excessively which leaks many highly reactive molecules called free radicals that destroy the basic fabric of our cells, the proteins, DNA and other molecules. These damages are initially small and do not cause major problems. With time, however, they accumulate and till then it becomes too late and managing the after effect becomes difficult, costly and some times irreversible. 

Image curtsy: tdmu.edu.ua

The plants from where we derive most of our food supply including cereals, vegetables, fruits, herbs and spices possess many molecules, which evolved simultaneously with our own evolution. The prehistoric day-to-day interaction and co-evolution has resulted in a perfect bio-compatibility  of these molecules with our body cells and their functions. It provide certain definite advantages compared to drastically modified artificial meals which contain many synthetic chemicals.

The plant derived bio-molecules have been shown to be effective in preventing and/or treating a number of pathological conditions. For example, studies show that Lycopene, a molecule from tomato, could prevent heart diseases, strokes and even prostrate cancer in humans.  The examples of Turmeric derived curcumin, ginger, garlic,  and some other spices have filled the scientific literature. In all societies and cultures such examples are in plenty, and we just need to take note of them and make conscious decisions regarding what we bring to our plates.

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We must realize that wrong choices and modern food habit is creating consistent problems for our own health leading to increased incidence of metabolic diseases including obesity, diabetes, insulin resistance, cardiovascular diseases, cancer, and Alzheimer disease among others. An intelligent choice made once creates opportunity for repeat of similar choices, and same is true if one makes bad choices.

Therefore, our goal must be to eat healthy, live healthy and have a long and disease free life. This indeed is a life long investment to have a graceful aging without major disease and of course bitter pills. The choice is ours and so does the outcome :)

Gut microbes linked with obesity and weight gain!

If you are obese and wondering how did you accumulated all that weight, well you could blame it to the bacteria living in your gut.

A new research has shown that inbred germ-free mice quickly gained weight when given gut bacteria derived from obese human twins than those mice which received gut bacteria from the lean twins. Scientists tested at least four such human twin pairs-derived gut microbes in the mice which all received the same kind and amount of the food.

Image curtsy: http://blog.fooducate.com/ 

The study suggests that the gut microbiota, which include plethora of microbes such as bacteria, fungi, archea living in the intestine, can affect the metabolism and thus weight gain.

Scientist know that humans and microbes live in close association with each other, so much so that in number our body harbors far more microbial cells, nearly 100 trillion, than our own cells, in the ratio of 1 to 10. Although these numbers may look frightening to a layman but they actually live in a mutually beneficial relations with our body.

Some of them live as commensals - living but not causing any harm, symbiotic –mutually helping each other and some of them may live as pathogens, causing harm such as well known pathogenic diseases.

It is therefore logical that if so many organisms are in or on us, they may also affect how we function as an organism, they should then also affect our metabolism, so to say.

And they do! It is known that any disturbances in our intestinal environment could lead to the growth of harmful microbes which may lead to chronic inflammatory diseases including obesity, metabolic disorders and infections.

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Scientist have shown earlier that an antibiotic-resistant gut bacteria, Clostridium difficile, known to affect and killing thousands in America, can be treated by transplanting microbiota from a healthy individual into an infected persons gut.

Scientists have also shown that the gut microbes also amend our immune system which helps us identify the foreign pathogens, antigens and harmful substances and eradicate them. The increasing cases of allergic and autoimmune disease in the developed countries are arguably believed to be related with disturbance in microbial habitat, our body, due to the hygienic living, leading to emergence of “hygiene hypothesis” to explain these increased incidences.

Previously, scientists have also experimentally shown that when the intestinal flora of the lean mice was given to the obese mice, they successfully controlled and decreased the body weight in obese mice. 

The study led by Jeffrey I. Gordon at Washington University in St. Louis, MO found that when mice with the lean microbiota were made to cohabitate with mice having obese microbiota much before they gained weight, and found that the populations of bacteria in the obese-type mice changed to those of their lean cage-mates, and that their weight did not increase as well. It is known that mice eat each other’s faeces, so this allowed the replacement of ‘obese’ microbiota, but this migration was unidirectional and microbiota from obese mice did not colonize in the lean mice gut.

Image Curtsy: www.vaccinationnews.com

However, interestingly enough, scientist also discovered that besides this there is strong correlation between the diet we take and how the gut microbes behave. When the researchers fed the mice a low fat diet rich in fruit and vegetables, the gut microbes from lean mice migrated to those with the obese type. But, when a high-fat diet low in fruits and vegetable was fed to mice, the microbe transfer did not occur and obese-type mice went on to gain weight.

This and many other studies clearly indicate that our relationship with the microbes is very intricate and scientists are unraveling these intricacies slowly but steadily. However, a lot remains to be learnt about various other players including genetics, environment, diet and diseases in the interaction of microbes and our body which benefits as well as harm each other.