This topic contains 11 replies, has 4 voices, and was last updated by Pattience 10 years, 3 months ago.
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If this sort of thing is a major concern for you, then you should also significantly increase your fibre intake. In Australia in the last couple of weeks we’ve seen some shows about the importance of gut bacteria for health. Fibre, it turns out, is the most important thing for good gut bacteria. And interestingly fibre is broken down into short chain fatty acids to make acetate which is vinegar. And this acetate is hugely significant for the prevention and reduction of many human diseases. i.e. all the inflammatory diseases including diabetes.
Around 50grams a day should be good. Its not easy eating that much fibre but its probably well worth it.
Sources of fibre: fruit and vegetables, beans lentils chickpeas, nuts and seeds, whole grains. oats.
Some people who miss out on good gut bacteria are ceasareaan babies and babies fed bottled milk instead of breast milk. they don’t get the inoculation effects that other babies do.
The western diet of highly refined foods is bad for gut bacteria health. You might have to do your own net research into this if you are from another country. If Australian, look up catalyst and “gut reaction”.
Pattience, dietary fibres are mainly non-starch polysaccharides, or complex carbohydrates. The human gut cannot digest them which explains their dietary properties. Some gut bacteria can break down some of the fibre but they certainly cannot change carbohydrates into short chain fatty acids.
As a second step, acetate is an anion of acetic acid which is found in vinegar. and it is created by some gut bacteria from sugars, not fatty acids.
Just to add to this, if you take vinegar it needs to be Organic Apple Cider Vinegar with the mother (that’s the cloudy stuff at the bottom of the bottle). Braggs is a good honest company that I trust.
I did this a few years ago – had a tbsp every morning with a tiny bit of grape juice and it did help with my blood sugar levels. Thanks for the reminder, I need to start using it again!
WEll i’ve probably explained it incorrectly but the upshot of the science show i watched about this was clear that eating fibre was the way to get the benefits of acetate. They linked fibre with short chain fatty acids, acetate and its anti-inflammatory properties. Watch the show yourself. I could rematch so that i explain it better in future.
The show was a reputable science on a reputable public broadcaster – Catalyst – Gut REaction. You can watch it on youtube.
I’ve just found this on the entry in wikipedia called Gut Flora.
“Bacteria turn carbohydrates they ferment into short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs)[10][11] by a form of fermentation called saccharolytic fermentation.[10] Products include acetic acid, propionic acid and butyric acid.[10][11] ”
I think the carbohydrates they ferment refers to fibre. “Without gut flora, the human body would be unable to utilize some of the undigested carbohydrates it consumes, because some types of gut flora have enzymes that human cells lack for breaking down certain polysaccharides.[4]”
Anyway its an interesting entry in wiki. and i hope this clears up a little what i was trying to say.
Hi Pattience, I’ve just watched the Catalyst programme and they make it sound as if gut bacteria changes fibre into fatty acids in one simple step like splitting a disaccharide into its component monsaccarides.
However, it is a complicated process with many different steps, other materials used and then eventually we come to one particular short chain fatty acid, butyric acid. This fatty acid is NOT changed into acetic acid; acetic acid is in fact the end product of a different metabolic process. Both share some of the same steps though, because the carbohydrate has to be digested by the bacteria before the bacteria can reassemble the small parts into the various end products. Not all bacteria make all end products either.
Consider the process as complicated as a tree using carbondioxide, some nitrate, water and sunshine to produce nuts high in fat and protein.
If you really want to get into it, the different steps in different bacteria are described here: http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/32/1/164.full.pdf
No i don’t need to learn the fine print. But anyway wikipedia does a fairly good job of teasing things out in a bit more detail.
I guess for a half hour tv show the message needs to be made simple. I think they were just trying to tap into the vein of what people already understand. We all know what vinegar is. But talk about the other acid products of these processes and people can’t follow it, any may tune out. Start talking about a variety of products from the process and its all getting too complicated to take in. Meanwhile there’s a whole lot else in the story to get across. Time is short.
When you think about what they are trying to achieve is its just that want people to eat more fibre and for us to know that there’s more to fibre than just cleaning out the bowels which is what most of us knew before this. yes we’d heard that fibre might be good for cancer prevention but nobody had ever tried to tell us how.
But i also feel that this story might be somewhat of a counter argument against low carb diets which can tend to be low fibre.
For me it was a timely reminder that fibre is important because i remember not so long ago hearing something along the lines that the value of fibre had been questioned or was unproven or uncertain.
It was a good programme and I enjoyed watching it. You are probably right, they have a short time to bring a complicated topic across to lay people. If they tried to explain the full biochemistry to everyone it would be a months-long show and most people would be watching something else on a different channel.
A good low cab diet is anything but short of fibre. If you cut out the refined and most starchy carbs out, you are still left with all the vegetables, in particular the leafy green ones. You will need to eat quite a lot of them to get vitamins, and a good low carb diet is therefore high fibre. The problem is that most people try to leave starchy and refined carbs out and replace them with meat and not vegetables.
Atkins does a good job of trying to make people eat a lot of vegies. I think the people at highest risk are those who don’t follow any program when they go low carb.
I think the paleo and atkins versions are both fairly healthy unless you start eating those low carb bars and other processed things. A lot of people seem to be addicted to the convenience of convenience food.
I still haven’t read a paleo book but i don’t believe in that there’s much relationship between what the paleo people ate and what paleo dieters eat.
I don’t know the current Atkins diet but my parents tried the original one on me when I was a kid to help me lose weight. Fruit and vegetables were virtually forbidden although strangely enough, corn bread was permitted but not available in Germany in the early 1970’s.
I don’t think we can eat truely “paleo” because fruit and vegetables have been bred and selected for hundreds of years to make them more palatable and nutritious. I think people would be put off if they had to chew on a wild cabbage.
There is a nice video on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMOjVYgYaG8
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