Not Just a Man's World » Gut health

Blog-watch: Dec 2010 pregnancy updates

Ammi — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 21:00:06 +0000

It’s been a few months since the last update of news and research in the pregnancy world. In my personal life I’ve had a new niece and a new nephew arrive in the last few months so I thought it was time I heralded their arrival with a few posts I’ve seen about pregnancy. It’s a small and select collection of articles but still well-worth reading.

Let’s begin with an update from Cassandra Forsythe. Cassandra has been keeping her readers up to date with what has been going on in her life following the birth of her daughter eight months ago (I can hardly believe it is eight months already). A few weeks ago she provided us with an update on how she is getting on, including gems about her body composition and some particularly insightful points about post-exercise recovery which she has experienced over the last few months. I find it really interesting that her ability to recover from exercise has changed so much.
I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned before the fact that a natural birth is believed to give babies a better start to a healthy life. The theory is that the dirt and faeces ingested during the birthing process helps to kick-start the development of the gut flora which is eventually the basis of the immune system. However, a recent study of almost 2,000 children at a gastrointestinal outpatient clinics for celiac disease, Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis and other gastrointestinal diseases, comparing rates of C-section to vaginal delivery suggested that children delivered by C-section were 80 percent more likely to develop celiac disease. Perhaps there really is something to all of this then.
This next one really caught my eye. Have you ever heard of gestational diabetes? Apparently it is quite common for women to be diagnosed with diabetes which just comes on while they are pregnant (and I understand it goes away again afterwards). Before getting you to read the link itself, first I’d like you to read a post on Whole Health Source which considers whether we can effectively reach any conclusions about glucose tolerance in non-industrial cultures. The reason I’d like you to read it is because it provides a brilliant explanation of glucose tolerance, pre-diabetes, diabetes and the way that the medical profession tests for glucose tolerance. Then go on to read Richard Nikoley’s recent article about gestational diabetes and the paleo diet. You may have already reached the conclusions put forward by Richard (and in the quotes of Robb Wolf) as you read the introduction to Richard’s post, simply from the pre-reading of the Whole Health Source post. From my reading of it all, I understand that the crux of the issue is that people who are generally on a low-glucose diet are likely to show poor adaptations to dealing with a sudden significant intake of liquid glucose but it doesn’t mean that long-term they wouldn’t have the ability to adapt to handle glucose. On top of that, there’s an issue of whether pregnant women really should have the same glucose tolerance levels anyway.
The question of how much exercise to do during pregnancy is an area of debate an contention. While we have some excellent examples from people like Cassandra Forsythe that exercising through pregnancy is really not a problem, there will always be arguments and examples from the other side of the fence as well and recommendations appear to have historically been based on experience of seeing what has happened for various women. Researchers at John Hopkins have finally decided to do a full study into the issue, investigating endurance exercise and its impact on pregnant women and their unborn foetuses. They’ve already found out a few things (like the fact that the foetus is buoyed by the uterus and doesn’t bounce about (and flip-flop) while you jump about and exercise) and are making noises about doing some research with weight lifting as well. This all came to my attention thanks to an article from Cassandra Forsythe, and I’m sure that she will post up more as news comes out of John Hopkins.
Staying with Cassandra Forsythe for one more link, this week sees the start of a new series on her blog in which she interviews ither mothers who stayed active and healthy through their pregnancies to find out how the experience was for them, what was tough, what was easy, what the birthing experience was like, how their bodies responded to the pregnancy and similar things. In her first interview of the series, I was particularly interested by the question about stretch marks (although I’ve no idea why it caught my interest so much – perhaps because I have some slight stretch marks on my thighs from when my hips and thighs developed and grew at rapid speed when I was about 14/15 years old).
Finally, this isn’t really a set of links but a follow up to the section in my recent Dairy Intolerances post in which I wrote about my niece being moved onto goat’s milk formula. My sister had some follow up comments about the formula which she managed to source, having decided to go with goat rather than soya – it may be useful information for anyone based in the UK (or potentially for those elsewhere too) who are using formula but need or want to move off cow’s milk formula:

“Because of EU Regs, they don’t have permission to call it a formula at present, even though it was developed in New Zealand as an infant formula and is suitable from birth. The company who manufacture it are Vitacare. The website will give you a lot of information, but if you give them a call as though you were a new Mum who’d been recommended to look for a Goats based formula, they will tell you the things they’re not supposed too!

[...] This is the only goats based formula [in the UK] and is over double the price of cows based formulas and soya formulas. The main formulas that are out there on the cow side are SMA, Aptimal and Cow & Gate. All three do a version for constipation and colic. All three [also] do a version for extra hungry babies. And SMA and Aptimal do a soya based one. Cow & Gate may, but I can’t remember seeing it.”

As I said in the introduction, just a small number of links but hopefully some really interesting and useful material for those of you who are pregnant. I’ll leave you with an impressive video of a pregnant woman – I don’t want to give the game away though…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzPhG92Ci-o

Blog-watch: low carb diets

Ammi — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 20:00:37 +0000

I had a rant on a links post the other week about the misguided concepts that people have over what constitutes low carb or high carb diets. One of the most common questions I get from people is that carbs are a necessity and how do I cope with no carbs in my diet.

Misconception number one is that carbs are a necessity. Methuslah tried a 7 day virtually zero carb experiment a while ago and coped absolutely fine with no noticeable problems.

Misconception number two is that I have no carbs in my diet. I challenge people by asking them what they think vegetables are. In response I generally get a blank look. People seem to think that vegetables and fruit are a macronutrient category of their own and don’t contain carbs.

These common misconceptions concern me so I’ve pulled together some links to articles and posts from the last few months covering the issues related to carbohydrates.

Should we be making more effort to avoid carbs for the sake of our health?

A study published in March noted that junk food creates compulsive eating, sharing a similar biomechanism with cocaine and heroin. NephroPal has taken this a step further, looking at the content of junk food and specifically the addictiveness of sugars, starches, grains and other high carb foods. I’ve written about experiencing this addictiveness last Christmas when I tested being non-Paleo.
Fats were given a reprieve when a meta-analysis in March comparing the food intake of nearly 350,000 people against their risk of developing cardiovascular disease suggested that processed carbohydrates rather than saturated fat may be the problem. Another study of the diets of over 35,000 Italians was comparable to this, showing a potential link between high glycemic load foods and the risk of coronary heart disease. This news even made it into the general press (both CNN and the BBC as a start), though how long people will remember it before they go back to their low-fat whole-grain diets is difficult to predict. If the science in the articles is a bit too confusing, try the more readable explanation by Helen Kollias on Precision Nutrition.
I’ve written about fermented and sprouted grains and foods before so I was pleased to see a detailed article on Whole Health Source which went through the detail relating to grain fibres and heart problems, especially pre-existing heart problems. It’s well worth a read, even for those Paleo buffs who wouldn’t be seen going anywhere near a grain, since this is crucial understanding for conversing with those who don’t understand the Paleo diet.
For a couple of really helpful summaries about what carbs do to the body (and what happens when you strip them out), try the articles on the Heart Scan Blog about “Slash Carbs … What happens?” and “Glucophobia: The Novel”. They are really good quick-read summaries. If you want a real-life experience of what a low-carb lifestyle can do to your body, Dr Davis also posted up the story of one of his patients.
If you are wondering about doing resistance training and a low carb diet as a woman, an experiment done on overweight women suggested that a low carb ketogenic diet in combination with resistance training reduced body fat without significantly changing lean body mass. This suggests that if you are overweight then a low carb ketogenic diet combined with resistance training would work well. However, this doesn’t help any of us who are not overweight when we start out.
I’ve done a good job of being rude about grains and I flagged up at the beginning that fruit and veg are also carbs. However, there are some excellent benefits to eating your fruit as well. Brian St Pierre wrote about fruit outperforming vegetables in helping to prevent macular degeneration. This is an important lesson for all of us. Even those of us on a low carb diet still need to consider the benefits of some of the carbs we are avoiding and consume them in appropriate quantities to obtain some of these benefits.
For women it seems that there may also be a connection between carbs and infertility. Or rather, Dr Michael Fox has found that putting women who are having fertility problems onto a low-carb diet often gives fantastic results.
Finally, if people still don’t believe that reducing carbs would be a good idea then try suggesting they jump on the celebrity bandwagon. After all, Ellen DeGeneres claims that her secret to staying in tip-top shape is due to a low-carb, grain-free, sugar-free diet. Does this sound like a familiar diet to anyone?
For those who are now convinced that you should at least give up the grains to reduce the high GI carbs, Mark Sisson has provided some tips on giving up grains. He’s also posted up some thoughts on “low carb flu”, a name for that brain fogginess that accompanies the first few days or weeks hwile you convert to a lower carb lifestyle.

I hope you’ve found these links interesting and useful. Are you someone who thrives on a low carb diet or are you more carb tolerant than I am?

Blog-watch: gut health and fermented foods

Ammi — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 21:00:59 +0000

I tried an experiment the other week. I had half a cabbage left over from the tuna coleslaws when I was staying away from home on business, so I thought that this would be the time to try making sauerkraut.

It is meant to be very easy to make and I have Mark Sisson to thank for the instructions. In the end it all went a bit wrong, and I suspect it was mostly because I didn’t cut it up finely enough (or have it packed down tightly enough).

Sauerkraut - the failed experiment

The experiment got me thinking about fermented foods and their health benefits.

If you subscribe to the Paleo or Primal way of thinking, then eating fermented foods makes perfect sense. After all, there is very little in the way of natural refridgeration in the wild (unless you live in Antarctica) and it is easy to imagine that people would end up eating foods when they were a little past their best. Loren Cordain, the author of The Paleo Diet doesn’t recommend fermented foods, however this is one area where I struggle to agree with him.

The gut connection

The gut is one of the core parts of our immune system. Logically, the main ways in which bacteria can enter the body is through our mouth or nose. From there they pass through the digestive system, including the gut, and should be passed out of the body at the other end. However, if there is damage to the gut wall then these bacteria can leak out of the gut into the blood stream and provoke infections in the body.

Leaky gut is wide-spread in modern society. It describes the condition where the permeability of the gut membrane is compromised. This can be caused by a host of things including parasites in the gut or yeasts (such as candida) growing on the gut lining. As the yeast grows further into the lining it bores holes into it. Once the gut lining is permeable the gut will start to allow harmful bacteria into the bloodstream but may also allow small particles of food and other matter into the bloodstream as well.

Leaky gut can be resolved by removing the irritants from your diet, which may be done through sprouting or fermenting those foods with antinutrients, and once you have removed the problem-causing foods you still need to heal the gut and a well known way to do this is through probiotics. These can often be found in fermented foods.

Some useful reading on gut health and fermented foods

I’ve collected together below some articles that I’ve come across or rediscovered recently that go into more detail on the issues of gut health and also fermented and sprouted foods, including how these items may help with improving the integrity of the gut.

Dr. Bryan Walsh wrote an article for Testosterone Nation that talks about each of the parts of the digestive system in turn, explaining what they do, what can go wrong and how you can solve the problems.
The Whole Health Source recently did an article which included a section about preventing gastrointestinal problems. One of the recommendations is to include raw fermented foods in your diet.
Mark Sisson has done a long and detailed article on fermented foods, including information about some of the benefits.
For information about sprouted foods then I recommend reading through this Precision Nutrition article by Ryan Andrews. It includes some really good background information on anti-nutrients as well.
Ultimate Performance have put it all together. The article explains why good gut health is important for athletes and how to deal with diagnosing, repairing and improving your gut health.
For those who prefer listening to technical information, Robb Wolf answers questions about Leaky Gut in response to the first question (at about 6 minutes) in episode 14 of the Paleolithic Solution.

Hopefully this will provide some useful starting reading on an area that is, in my opinion, of utmost importance to everyone, both those who train and those who don’t.