Gut microbe imbalance and diabetes

Aaron_K123

Yeah sounds like you got some poor treatment but also that you have a rational view of the whole situation. I'm glad you ended up getting it sorted and hopefully you will be as good as new in the near future. I imagine it is incredibly frustrating to have poor health due to mistakes made from people you entrust with your health.

BinaryPulsar

Aaron_K123 wrote: »

Yeah sounds like you got some poor treatment but also that you have a rational view of the whole situation. I'm glad you ended up getting it sorted and hopefully you will be as good as new in the near future. I imagine it is incredibly frustrating to have poor health due to mistakes made from people you entrust with your health.

Thank you! I really appreciate that!

LokiGrrl

Aaron_K123 wrote: »

Lets put it another way. If repopulating your gut microbiome with a different mix of species had an effect on diabeties then people who were on antibiotics would occasionally be "cured" of type II diabeties. Anytime you take a long course antibiotic which millions of people daily you essentially eradicate your microbiome and after the treatment is over you will have some digestive issues until your microbiome becomes repopulated likely with a different mix of species, whatever happens to take over from that initial eradication. If simply mixing up your gut microbiome or altering it significantly could influence insulin resistance to the point of "curing" type II diabetes then we would expect to see "cure" with some significant frequency after treatment with any antibiotic.

Your gut microbiome aids in food digestion, it is not mystical or magical. Unless you can explain why changing food digestion would alter a low-affinity insulin receptor or the protein binding characteristics of insulin on what basis do you hold this belief?

I'm not sure this is true. Different antibiotics target different species, and there's not one that's effective against every single species. It will surely change up the mix, but it's not eradicating the whole thing and starting fresh.

I don't think changing your gut flora would cure diabetes, but I have read some interesting things on gut flora transplants that make me believe that further study is definitely worth pursuing in terms of what it could do for IBS and absorption disorders, and possibly even obesity.

lemurcat12

From what I've read it seems the association with obesity is not "my gut biome caused me to get fat" but that what one eats affects gut biome. If the person changes their diet to a more nutrient dense one (assuming they didn't get get fat eating extra portions of a healthful diet, although one could), their gut biome will change.

This is obviously different from the problems caused by antibiotics, and especially for the people with conditions that require extensive antibiotic use that destroys the gut population in significant ways, which is where things like transplants seem promising.

ForecasterJason

I think there are ways that gut bacteria can indirectly affect diabetes, but I don't know about a direct link. Given the implications that gut bacteria has for stress and sleep, and the resulting consequence of those factors on blood sugar control, I would say that correcting gut flora imbalances may be able to provide help for some diabetics.

RalfLott

<gut>

skymningen

ForecasterJason wrote: »

I think there are ways that gut bacteria can indirectly affect diabetes, but I don't know about a direct link. Given the implications that gut bacteria has for stress and sleep, and the resulting consequence of those factors on blood sugar control, I would say that correcting gut flora imbalances may be able to provide help for some diabetics.

Disclaimer: I work in this field.
It is way too early in the morning and I am still at home and don't have full access to my collection of publications, so no links here for now. Yes, it does. You have to keep in mind that there are multiple forms of diabetes as well, some of them it is (at least in some cases) yet unknown what causes the problem. But it has been shown that abundance of different gut bacteria is associated with diabetes. Now, correlation does not show causality, but it has also been shown that improving the gut flora could help patients to take need less medication and generally be less impacted by the disease. It is not a cure, sure, but it is definitely going to be part of the treatment in the future.

skymningen

lemurcat12 wrote: »

From what I've read it seems the association with obesity is not "my gut biome caused me to get fat" but that what one eats affects gut biome. If the person changes their diet to a more nutrient dense one (assuming they didn't get get fat eating extra portions of a healthful diet, although one could), their gut biome will change.

This is obviously different from the problems caused by antibiotics, and especially for the people with conditions that require extensive antibiotic use that destroys the gut population in significant ways, which is where things like transplants seem promising.

Actually it has been shown (by Ruth Ley, I would have to check which publication it is) that if you transform the gut microbiome of (genetically closely related) obese mice to lean mice the lean mice do get fat. So there is definitely both: You gut microbiom can cause you to gain or lose weight easier or harder, but if you try to do that by altering your lifestyle it will also changed based on diet, activity level, alcohol intake and so on. Research in this is still ongoing. I am kind of a part of it (not directly working with obese people, but I am involved in studies which try to determine the general relation of lifestyle and gut microbiome).

lemurcat12

That post is a year old.

I am aware of those studies, and was (or of similar ones) a year ago, but I think that's different from "my gut biome caused me to get fat."

You affect your gut biome to a great deal by what you eat, one, and, two, we may crave what we crave based on gut biome (I think it has to be more complicated), but we aren't mice, we are humans, and can control what we eat and how many calories.

From personal experience, it's possible to change your diet dramatically without much trouble and it's obviously possible to control one's weight (lose or gain) without changing gut biome.

Not saying it's not important or interesting to study.

skymningen

lemurcat12 wrote: »

That post is a year old.
You affect your gut biome to a great deal by what you eat, one, and, two, we may crave what we crave based on gut biome (I think it has to be more complicated), but we aren't mice, we are humans, and can control what we eat and how many calories.

This is done on mice because you can control exactly that the "transmission" mice and control get the same food. With humans, it is much harder to study, but there have been some similar experiments by a company in the US. (Not published of course, as they are trying to develop a dietary supplement based on it.) "My microbiome made me do it" is not a good excuse for being overweight, but it can definitely be part of the cause. You changing your diet and losing weight does change the microbiome and there are studies going on right now which will most likely show that the success of maintenance after losing is highly dependent on how close to "lean human like" your microbiome got during the weight loss.

This thread might be old, but the topic is pretty hot right now.

RalfLott

@skymningen, your insights as an insider are appreciated. I'm (mostly) all ears.

lemurcat12

skymningen wrote: »

lemurcat12 wrote: »

That post is a year old.
You affect your gut biome to a great deal by what you eat, one, and, two, we may crave what we crave based on gut biome (I think it has to be more complicated), but we aren't mice, we are humans, and can control what we eat and how many calories.

This is done on mice because you can control exactly that the "transmission" mice and control get the same food. With humans, it is much harder to study, but there have been some similar experiments by a company in the US. (Not published of course, as they are trying to develop a dietary supplement based on it.) "My microbiome made me do it" is not a good excuse for being overweight, but it can definitely be part of the cause. You changing your diet and losing weight does change the microbiome and there are studies going on right now which will most likely show that the success of maintenance after losing is highly dependent on how close to "lean human like" your microbiome got during the weight loss.

This thread might be old, but the topic is pretty hot right now.

Not saying it's a bad topic. It's just hard to respond when someone comments on something you posted a year ago, and you no longer remember the context.

Here's a question:

If you get more calories from foods, presumably it's because your gut biome is able to break down the foods more effectively, no? Or is there some other cause?

So someone might get LESS than expected from foods, but you'd never be getting extra calories beyond what's in the foods from the same foods.

The foods hardest to break down would seem to be whole foods (fiber, for example), and indeed people who switch to a higher fiber diet may have trouble at first, and people with higher fiber (and more diverse produce in general) diets have much more diverse gut biomes, as I understand it (and that's generally considered good).

This seems to suggest that people with more diverse (healthier or "leaner") gut biomes would be more effective at turning food into calories, rather than less. That's why I tend to suspect the difference with humans (the poop pill things) relates more to cravings -- which I think is hard to separate from cravings born out of habit.

Curious -- and would love a link to study reports -- what the theory is as to mice gaining on the same calories and food, if that is controlled (it's not an ad lib one where the mice eat as much as they eat).

skymningen

lemurcat12 wrote: »

Curious -- and would love a link to study reports -- what the theory is as to mice gaining on the same calories and food, if that is controlled (it's not an ad lib one where the mice eat as much as they eat).

I am terribly busy at work today, but I will try and set aside some time during the weekend to collect a "best of" of my publication list for this topic. Probably a good thing to prepare for my PhD thesis work anyway.