Mechanisms at work in food sensitivities???

[Polly]

Hi Buddies,

I really have trouble wrapping my brain around the whole food sensitivity issue. Maybe y'all can help me. It is easy for me to understand, for example, how certain folks react to foods containing histamine or gluten or lectins.
However, what explains the myriad of other sensitivities? Why in the world am I sensitive to sesame and carrots and raspberries and Mary Beth can't eat tapoica? All of us who have had MRT have had wide variation in our results - there seem to be few commonalities beyond the big 8. There just seems to be no rhyme or reason.

What mechanisms are involved? Do you think that our sensitive foods all have something in common.....some kind of marker, so to speak, that depends upon an individual's genetic makeup? Or could the gut flora have something to do with it? Perhaps certain levels of specific bacterial strains are necessary for tolerating certain foods. I still believe that my gut flora were permanently altered by long-term antibiotics.

I am interested in your thoughts.

Love,

Polly

[tex]

Hmmmmmm. Now that's a thought-provoking question. I'm inclined to go with the gut flora and fauna theory, especially in view of the fact that gut bacteria are capable of altering our genes. There are also a variety of other possibilities whereby they might influence the destiny of our digestive system capabilities, and our immune systems. For example, specific strains are almost certainly capable of altering the effect that various lectins might have on our digestive system, and/or our immune system.

The fact that stress can alter our gut bacteria population demographics, adds another level of complexity to the equation. As a corollary to that, perhaps certain strains of gut bacteria have the reciprocal ability to interact with, and modulate the effects of stress. After all, the enteric nervous system has a direct line to the brain.

If the little buggers weren't so tiny, it would probably be a heck of a lot easier to figure out what they're up to. As it is, we have to kind of guess what they're doing, by analyzing the end result, rather than the mechanism itself, which leaves a heck of a lot of unanswered questions.

Probably the most intriguing part of the puzzle is the fact that they're able to communicate among themselves, not only on an intraspecies level, but also on an interspecies level. There's no telling what they may be plotting and planning right now, and we have no way of knowing what they're thinking, or discussing. LOL.

I'm pretty sure that gut flora and fauna hold the key to the most important future innovations in treatments for various digestive system issues, but until we can figure out how to communicate with them, or at least figure out what sort of information they exchange among themselves, any breakthroughs may be a long way in the future.

At least, that's how I see it.

Love,
Tex

[Polly]

Hiya Tex,

I knew you'd be intrigued by this question!!!

Interesting about the intra and inter-species communication. Makes me wonder who's really in charge here. LOL! Has anyone identified how it occurs?
Probably at the cellular level. Maybe the mechanism is inherent to those "sensitized" bacteria that we get from our moms at birth. And then, once we wipe out a ctitical mass of those, the communication among the gut flora becomes screwed up. Goes haywire, so to speak, so that certain foods are seen as the enemy. Maybe the gut bacteria send messages to the immune system cells to tell them to destroy "normal" foods. I think that's how MRT works - it measures the loss in volume of a circulating white cell after being exposed to a specific food. I am assuming that what is lost from the cell are things like cytokines (those chemicals that help to fight infection). Mary Beth, please correct me if I'm all wet here.

It's kind of scary that gut bacteria can communicate directly with the brain. Maybe they somehow are involved with dementia - by directing neurons to act abnormally. Far fetched, I know. But I agree 100% with your sentence: "I'm pretty sure that gut flora and fauna hold the key to the most important future innovations in treatments for various digestive system issues, but until we can figure out how to communicate with them, or at least figure out what sort of information they exchange among themselves, any breakthroughs may be a long way in the future".

I am still intrigued by that research where they were doing gut flora transplants. Have you seen anything more about it? I wonder what the long term findings are for folks who have had it?

Always fun chewing the fat with you.

Love,

Polly

[mbeezie]

Polly,

I agree with Tex. I think the gut flora is a major player. From what I've read there are a few causes of loss of oral tolerance, such as

Dose of the antigen
High-dose results in lymphocyte anergy/deletion
Low-dose results in activation of regulatory T cells
Form of the antigen
Soluble antigen is more tolerogenic than particulate
Genetics of the host
Normal flora of the host
Age of the host
Neonates have stronger immunologic reactions

http://f1.grp.yahoofs.com/v1/QJdwTn4rYN ... an2005.pdf

Since we all have different genetic makeup and are all exposed to different and varying levels of antigens, we will all have different expressions of oral tolerance. Use of antibiotics and exposure to more and more chemicals in our environment surely plays a role.

Mary Beth

[tex]

Polly,

Bacteria apparently didn't/don't develop by the process of what we consider to be normal "evolution". The evidence indicates that they are able to control their own evolution, rather than their evolution being determined by their environment, as in the conventional concept of evolution. Since they transfer genetic material by conjugation, rather than by sex, that implies that every bacterium on the planet can exchange genetic material with every other bacterium. Evidently they communicate by chemical methods, and their utilization of biofilms enhances that capability, (along with providing other benefits). Here's a rather long, but extremely interesting article, (IMO), that explains some of these unique characteristics. As this article points out, their ability to exchange genetic material globally, brings into question the conventional notion of separate bacteria species:

http://www.miller-mccune.com/science/ba ... -us-23628/

I wasn't aware that, among all their other functions in the body, they control, (or at least significantly influence), blood levels of cholesterol and other lipids.

I found this to be an interesting observation:

Approximately 25 percent of people treated with antibiotics for an infection develop diarrhea.

That applies to everyone, not just those of us with MC.

This is a very interesting way to look at the etiology of C. diff infections.

But a more ecological approach is beginning to offer hope. P. aeruginosa and C. difficile are common residents of human bodies and under normal circumstances are benign. So what turns them into enemies? Most of the time, says John Alverdy, an intestinal and critical-care surgeon at the University of Chicago, bacteria “have to have a reason to hurt you.” Surgery is just such a reason. A surgical patient’s normal metabolism is altered; usually nutrients are provided intravenously instead of through the digestive system, so in a patient being fed by an IV drip, the gut bacteria perceive their sustenance disappearing. A decline in available nutrients alarms them. And surgery triggers the release of stress compounds that bacteria also sense, Alverdy says. Chemotherapy and radiation have similar effects. When threatened, bacteria become defensive, often producing toxins that make the host even sicker. They also tend to speed up their acquisition of and purging of genes when under external selection pressure, of which antibiotics are an obvious and powerful example.

The red emphasis is mine, of course. Regarding stool transplants:

Although there are not many peer-reviewed studies of this rather disturbing concept, a review in the July 2004 Journal of Clinical Gastroenterology by Australian researcher Thomas Borody found that in a large majority of the cases reported in the medical literature, fecal transplants resulted in almost immediate and long-lasting relief for people suffering from inflammatory bowel conditions and for those with chronic antibiotic-induced diarrhea. (There’s definitely a market for fecal transplants. When one scientist mentioned the success of the procedure in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, he was inundated with calls from desperate patients begging for the treatment, even though he does not practice the therapy.)

I found this to be extremely interesting:

Researchers from Arizona State University and the Mayo Clinic noted that in obese people, there appeared to be a cooperative relationship between hydrogen-producing bacteria and the one archaean resident of the human gut, a hydrogen-consuming, methane-producing organism. The archaean partner makes fermentation of indigestible polysaccharides (which are complex carbohydrates) more efficient, and the extra fermentation products are converted to fat by the intestines. It appears that obese people’s gut microbes are just too good at their jobs.

And finally, here's a thought-provoking observation from the article:

But this raises the question: Is some nonhuman software organizing the teamwork of all those nonhuman semi-smart robots, aka bacteria? For this would be the truly radical argument: that bacteria — demonstrably integrated deeply and broadly into the entire planet, shaping its geochemistry, creating substrates and chemical processes that support the development of complex organic molecules, regulating the cycling of energy and nutrients both in “higher” organisms and their environments — constitute a kind of distributed awareness encompassing the whole planet. That not only are bacteria in a given local environment busy texting each other like mad, but the entire planet may consist of a giant Microbial World Wide Web.

Maybe we only exist to serve their purposes.

Love,
Tex