Gut Bacteria Are Linked To Depression (wsj.com) 86
Two studies published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications found a link between several types of bacteria in the gut and depressive symptoms. The first study, titled "Gut microbiome-wide association study of depressive symptoms," reports: Here we investigate the relation of fecal microbiome diversity and composition with depressive symptoms in 1,054 participants from the Rotterdam Study cohort and validate these findings in the Amsterdam HELIUS cohort in 1,539 subjects. We identify association of thirteen microbial taxa, including genera Eggerthella, Subdoligranulum, Coprococcus, Sellimonas, Lachnoclostridium, Hungatella, Ruminococcaceae (UCG002, UCG003 and UCG005), LachnospiraceaeUCG001, Eubacterium ventriosum and Ruminococcusgauvreauiigroup, and family Ruminococcaceae with depressive symptoms. These bacteria are known to be involved in the synthesis of glutamate, butyrate, serotonin and gamma amino butyric acid (GABA), which are key neurotransmitters for depression. Our study suggests that the gut microbiome composition may play a key role in depression. The second study, titled "The gut microbiota and depressive symptoms across ethnic groups," reports: Both the microbiome and depressive symptom levels vary substantially across ethnic groups. Thus, any intervention for depression targeting the microbiome requires understanding of microbiome-depression associations across ethnicities. Analyzing data from the HELIUS cohort, we characterize the gut microbiota and its associations with depressive symptoms in 6 ethnic groups (Dutch, South-Asian Surinamese, African Surinamese, Ghanaian, Turkish, Moroccan; N=3211), living in the same urban area. Diversity of the gut microbiota, both within (a-diversity) and between individuals (B-diversity), predicts depressive symptom levels, taking into account demographic, behavioural, and medical differences. These associations do not differ between ethnic groups. Further, B-diversity explains 29%-18% of the ethnic differences in depressive symptoms. Bacterial genera associated with depressive symptoms belong to mulitple families, prominently including the families Christensenellaceae, Lachnospiraceae, and Ruminococcaceae. In summary, the results show that the gut microbiota are linked to depressive symptom levels and that this association generalizes across ethnic groups. Moreover, the results suggest that ethnic differences in the gut microbiota may partly explain parallel disparities in depression. The Wall Street Journal shared (paywalled) the findings.
I knew... (Score:2, Funny)
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Yeah, and it's bad shit, too.
Remember when poop transplants were found to combat obesity? Our gut biota is making us fat, and the one technology that can help us can't be used for that in most nations, they won't approve it. It's too profitable to blame us for not getting enough exercise or whatever, but we've all known people who don't exercise and remain thin. We've all known people who can eat ridiculous portions, and remain thin. But if we could fix it with a pill or a suppository, the diet industry wou
Re: I knew... (Score:2)
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It was a shitty one.
Re: I knew... (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Or just drop the fast calories (Score:2)
I do not disagree at all with your supposition that portion control is central. Take in fewer calories than you burn, and you lose weight.
However, I also might add that dropping the "fast" calories -- easily-digested over-processed foods heavy in sugars, seed oils, carbohydrates, and vegetable fats -- also changes your flavor palate. At least for me, when I finally gave up on sugar foods nearly entirely, I could taste Virginia tobaccos in my pipe better and finally appreciated white wine (although I am stil
Re:I knew... (Score:5, Insightful)
Canada? That'll be 100 grams [walmart.ca].
Same brand, USA, 150 grams [walmart.com].
These sorts of things trick people into thinking that the larger portions are normal.
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Well, in the US, they are the norm.
Most people, when going out to dine at a restaurant, expect to have a "doggy bag" to bring home leftovers from the meal.
Otherwise, you don't feel you got your money's worth.
I'm big on leftovers..whether from restaurants of my home cooking....mostly my home cooking as that I cook for an army and eat on it all week.
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You're absolutely right. Different norms.
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Well, in the US, they are the norm.
Most people, when going out to dine at a restaurant, expect to have a "doggy bag" to bring home leftovers from the meal.
Otherwise, you don't feel you got your money's worth.
The problem is, they charge you three prices for three meals, and then if you aren't going home, you throw away a lot of food or overeat. I blame the restaurant industry for a lot of our obesity problems in the U.S. Having more food in front of you makes you eat more food. Having everything excessively sweet and with extra sodium makes you gain weight. And so on. That, coupled with a culture in which both parents work so nobody has time to cook, etc. is the main reason we have an obesity epidemic. And
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I don't get that with modern young families...
I grew up with both parents working and we had home cooked meals 98% of the time.
Sometimes we had leftovers, but often mom would throw something in the crockpot and leave it all day, with instructions to me when I got in to add a bag of frozen veggies...in.
As I got older, since I got home first, she left me instructions on
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It's not exercise, it's portion control.
Two people who get the same amount of exercise and eat the same portions will not get equally fat from it, and your insistence otherwise contradicts science.
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your insistence otherwise contradicts science
Not in every case, but generally yes. And don't dis it until you try it.
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I did try it, that's how I know. I've tried a lot of things. People who aren't having trouble with their weight always say stupid shit like that, like they assume they're the only ones who ever tried eating right and exercising. It's both idiotic and abusive.
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human nutrition isn't currently driven by science but by industry, which has been blatantly lying to you all along. to make you a food junkie.
it is portion AND frequency control. you are eating too much, which produces excess, and you are eating too often, which inhibits burning that excess. your body can't burn fat while your insulin level is high and the only (normal) way to drop your insulin level is by not eating for a while. no shortcuts there.
while exercise is necessary it is indeed overrated as a wei
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Agree 100% with everything said here.
Especially the part about exercise. Exercise is NOT important for weight loss.
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i wouldn't say it is not important. exercise is important for many reasons, including weight loss. my point is that the eating habits are much, much more important. more exercise will improve weight loss with proper eating habits, but will have little or no effect without those habits.
to be in energy deficit (which is what weight loss is):
1) in total, you need to burn up more than you put in to lose weight, which makes sense. the math: for every 10g of fat you ingest you need to breathe out aprox 8.4g of CO
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Your description of how you reduced junk food cravings definitely doesnt match up to my own. I ate and craved plenty of junk food when I was young and far more physically active. Modern more sedentary me is the one who started cutting out junk food (so as not to put on weight) and my cravings for said junk food only went away years later once my pallet had changed. I'm not really even sure why a body would suddenly stop wanting junk food when getting lots of exercise, seems like the body would want it even
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Oops, sorry. My prior post is only in regards to exercise reducing cravings for junk food. Portion control has definitely helped me.
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Whilst it's possible some people are just born with "bad" gut bacteria that will make them fat, even if they eat very well, the chances are most people's gut bacteria are gradually being killed off, stripped away and abused by the food (and additives) we eat (someone told me that anaesthetic can do this too - so beware after an op!).
Clearly, eating just one type of food (or being majority one-type) is going to be bad - it creates a mono-culture. Likewise, eating food with some additives will likely cause is
I 'remember' differently. (Score:5, Informative)
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You can also eat a lot and stay thin. Just be sure to stay active and burn calories. The Rock eats enough for three people to live off of but he's not going to get fat because of the amount of physical exercise he does that consumes those excess calories.
But you're not going to stay thin if you're sitting on your ass in an office job shoveling calorie dense and nutr
Re:I knew... (Score:5, Informative)
The first ever FDA approval for fecal transplants was just approved this week, albeit to treat C. difficile. It just takes a long, long time for novel treatments to get approved. As for obesity, I wouldn't hold my breath; recent evidence for fecal transplants is less encouraging. That's pretty par for the course; researchers try something successfully then other researchers have trouble reproducing their results. It's perfectly normal and it happens all the time -- even when the initial science is really good. Sometimes the initial result was a fluke, other times there were important aspects of the subject population or experimental protocol which nobody sees initially. There's a lot to be sorted about before fecal transplants are something that your doctor can recommend as evidence-based treatment, starting with whether the initial promising results are even reproducible and if so for whom.
Logically speaking, it is clear that exercise is neither necessary nor sufficient to achieve and maintain a healthy body weight. That said the notion that exercise can't treat obesity overstates the evidence. Early negative results from a decade or so ago, which were widely reported in the popular media, used tiny exercises doses -- on the order of an hour or two a week. More recent studies with larger exercises doses (typically 4 hr/week or more) show significant effects, particularly in visceral fat reduction using a combination of aerobic and resistance training.
The problem with exercise is that a dose sufficient to be effective would constitute a significant lifestyle change for many people, That's the same reason for the non-sustainability of a wide variety of weight loss interventions that work in the short term and fail long term. This isn't a matter of deficient subject *character*, but of poor intervention *design*. These interventions promoted after they achieved short term results, but little thought was given to incorporating changes into the subjects' lifestyles *indefinitely*.
The attractiveness of fecal transplants is that they promise an intervention that doesn't require extensive daily routine modifications. If you're looking for something like that, you might ask your doctor about GLP-1 agonists like Dulaglutide (Trulicty) or Semaglutide (Ozempic). These are current used to treat Type 2 diabetes by improving glycemic control, which also has a powerful appetite suppression effect, so much so that Semaglutide was approved last year for long term weight management. These also appear to induce changes in food preferences, with many people reporting a loss of interest in high fat or sugary foods. It's early days on that yet, most of the information is anecdotal and research is only just starting to appear on food preference changes.
Full of shit? Particularly those doing TFStudy. (Score:2)
"Same urban area" my ass.
That "same urban geographic area" (note the lack of term "geographic" in the summary and the study excerpt) is - the entire city of Amsterdam. [bmj.com]
A geographic area of 219.32 km2. That one in turn being a part of a 11,372.15 km2 conurbation.
But surely, people surveyed lived in the same part of Amsterdam, right?
Yeah, about that... Can you guess which one of these groups of people, defined by their average property value in thousands of Euros, are NOT recent immigrants?
273.6+/-139.6
196.2+/-72.0
151.9+/-43.9
194.4+/-58.1
195.2+/-56.9
Do also note the mar
Fecal transplant to treat depression (Score:2)
Depressed? Find a happy person and ask them to take a dump for you... Path to happiness.
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Depressed? Find a happy person and ask them to take a dump for you... Path to happiness.
Try to find a thin one too.
Re: Impossible (Score:5, Informative)
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Replying to undo moderation
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Both the microbiome and depressive symptom levels vary substantially across ethnic groups.
According to the experts on here, there is no such thing as an "ethnic" group. Clearly these researchers don't know what they're talking about despite their education and years of experience. Thus, this study can be ignored.
And furthermore, we will have to bully their universities into firing them. But wait - we just lost Twitter! So we will need to use our backup medium, the New York Times, to do the job.
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the New York Times
Who? Never heard of them [slashdot.org].
Lewontin's Fallacy (Score:1, Troll)
For years, people have been following Lewontin and Gould in the path of insisting that there is no genetic basis for race, class, and ethnic group. Luckily The Bell Curve and The Blank Slate will detox just about anyone from that egalitarian trope.
Interesting they did not answer the correlation/causation question here: do different ethnic groups have different gut biota because they are genetically different, and therefore support a different cocktail of organisms, or because they are genetically different
"Ethnic Group" term (Score:4, Informative)
> According to the experts on here, there is no such thing as an "ethnic" group.
Colloquial English is lossy. There are populations who statistically share genetic traits in common to varying degrees. Without using fancy-pants statistical and set-theory statements that would confuse most readers and trigger TLDR, we say "ethnic groups" as a lossy abstraction. That's Life-Among-Regular-Humans-101.
I don't know if you were being facetious or not; for I haven't finished Humans 102 yet.
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I think you'll find the "experts" here say there's no such thing as race. Race is not the same as ethnic group.
When I Shit (Score:1)
I cry.
You need to be a microbiologist (Score:1)
...to even understand that article.
Sure, the overall take is gut bacteria, from what I can read mainly Eggerthella, but most of us in here are not biologist, doctors or even scientists - so to read this is kind of counterproductive as there are no suggestions to what to eat or what to avoid eating in order to prevent specific bacteria cultures that promote depression.
Frustrated me to no end to spend a long time googling for each thing, and not to mention all the words I don't stand a chance of understanding
Re:You need to be a microbiologist (Score:4, Funny)
Allow me to summarise:
The saying "Same shit, different day" is more enlightening than we thought.
Re:summary (Score:4, Funny)
Re:You need to be a microbiologist (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not the purpose of the articles. These are scientific studies investigating a theory - they aren't meant for the general public to act on.
Hopefully they will learn enough from these and other studies to be able to provide some recommendations. It would be good to have another avenue to fight depression!
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Reading enough nutritional information the answer is likely "eat more fruits and veggies, less (maybe no) meat". That's not what they were researching here though.
Here's a "digestible" article on gut health comparing plant vs. meat diets. The take away is what I said...
https://www.january.ai/blog/ho... [january.ai]
It's very unlikely "bacon" is going to help mental health (other than the initial rush which is more like a drug). This is unfortunate due to tastiness, but it is difficult to call it "food" from a health p
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I think it is more individual than most studies give.....
I did a strict carniv
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What is this constipation you speak of...?
Are other people not consuming as much beer and jalapenos as I am?
I mean...that should keep anyone regular!
Not surprising... (Score:2)
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"It's often said that the bacteria and other microbes in our body outnumber our own cells by about ten to one. That's a myth that should be forgotten, say researchers in Israel and Canada. The ratio between resident microbes and human cells is more likely to be one-to-one, they calculate."
https://www.nature.com/article... [nature.com]
"Scientists have discovered that several handfuls of bacteria, fungi and other microbes live in and on each of our bodies, collectively composing 1 to 3 percent of our body mass."
https://ww [livescience.com]
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Certainly, my pleasure.
at this early stage in research... (Score:2)
On microbiome to host interaction, the only thing one can do is to try to have a microbiome as varied as posible and hope for the best.
that means, instead of getting a probiotic suplement with one type of organism trying to get a specific benefit, one shall get probiotics with the widest variety of organisms posible.
says the engineer with the bariatric sugery, which has a team of doctors closely following his health, as well as taking probiotics on a regular basis (as a matter of fact, this very morning ;
Interesting stuff, free article link (Score:3)
This is the first I've heard of this link. A previous gut bacteria link has been indicating the role gut bacteria plays in obesity. Very interesting stuff.
Free article link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/g... [wsj.com]
interesting, but! (Score:2)
Following is just an observation - pure conjecture.
Of the vegans I know, most are not happy people. Is it possible at some subconscious level, they are attempting to alter their gut biome?
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Well, one of the reasons bacteria names are so long is that there are so many species of them. "Bob" just wouldn't do.
As for vegans you report, I suspect either they're operating in an adverse environment or there's a selection bias. I've known several vegans, and they were no more unhappy than anyone else. (They did seem a bit more even in temperament, with less in the way of swings to either very happy or very sad. And some of them *did* choose diet as the thing to get missionary about.)
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they're operating in an adverse environment
They can't get the rest of the world to adopt their lifestyle. I suspect that with a personality like that, they'll always have something to be depressed about.
Re: interesting, but! (Score:1)
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Well, one of the reasons bacteria names are so long is that there are so many species of them. "Bob" just wouldn't do.
Hmmmph! I like Bob. 8^)
As for vegans you report, I suspect either they're operating in an adverse environment or there's a selection bias.
An academic environment, with exposure to both engineering/science people and more artistic people. It was probably a more supportive environment. It is possible that some might feel ostracized because they were a bit of a pill to be around.
A fair number of the vegans I've been around were rather abusive towards the "corpse eaters". We had one who was so antagonistic that we had a going away party for her. The day after she left. We all had cheeseburgers and cheese fries at a local
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I would have made sure I had some leftovers or an errand to run every single day...
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I would have made sure I had some leftovers or an errand to run every single day...
Different strokes for different folks. You do you. There was nothing mandatory about our get togethers.
But what happened was that rather than look at our co-workers as jerks or adversaries at best, we come to like each other.
A lot of us have different personal personas than work personas. I'd be one of those. My personal persona is very chill, and just wouldn't work at work. My work persona is very much work. Same with many others. So after finding out the co-workers are also human, we'd all run throug
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But what happened was that rather than look at our co-workers as jerks or adversaries at best, we come to like each other.
Oh for sure, and I would try to do that. I just wouldn't want to put up with that crap at lunch which is supposed to be a relaxing break from work.
So eventually, they became male only get togethers.
Unfortunate. Though it's kind of founded on the assumption that men can't sexually harass each other.
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But what happened was that rather than look at our co-workers as jerks or adversaries at best, we come to like each other.
Oh for sure, and I would try to do that. I just wouldn't want to put up with that crap at lunch which is supposed to be a relaxing break from work.
Okay, I got it.
So eventually, they became male only get togethers.
Unfortunate. Though it's kind of founded on the assumption that men can't sexually harass each other.
Which is true. Men do harass men, women men, and women women, And back in the day when I was playing a lot of Ice Hockey, a lot of the ladies at work had difficulties keeping their paws off me. Apparently skater's butt is irresistible. Especially when my hands were in a "glove box" and I couldn't stop what I was doing. I never felt damaged, but occasionally had to tell one to knock it off because I was doing something delicate. But that isn't today's narrative.
As well, many of my lady f
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Which is true. Men do harass men
I think one of us is misreading the other - it cannot be both!
Verboten now
I guess it depends on the office. I hug female (and male) colleagues, though generally at events outside the office.
a normal woman is left feeling kind of lonely at the office, restricted to interacting with other women while men avoid them.
Not just that, but there are times advancement is more difficult for women because of that kind of situation. It's not good, and I hope we can get to a place where sexual harassment is not tolerated, but that doesn't infringe on normal human relationships.
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Which is true. Men do harass men
I think one of us is misreading the other - it cannot be both!
Verboten now
I guess it depends on the office. I hug female (and male) colleagues, though generally at events outside the office.
a normal woman is left feeling kind of lonely at the office, restricted to interacting with other women while men avoid them.
Not just that, but there are times advancement is more difficult for women because of that kind of situation. It's not good, and I hope we can get to a place where sexual harassment is not tolerated, but that doesn't infringe on normal human relationships.
People will sort things out if given the chance. Before #metoo, things were relatively normal. But after all men were considered identical to douchebags Weinstein and the asshole working for NBC, and men lost their careers on an accusation with no due process - normalcy was killed.
As for the concept that women are lacking advancement - I worked in an academic environment. I was asked to accept no promotions in order to promote a woman, because of her sex. (quota requirement) We violated the rules in prom
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Yeah there's a pay gap, but it isn't what people think it is. Meaning women do get paid less, but if you take enough other factors into account, it's completely or almost completely explained by factors other than sex. Which is not to say there's no problem, but rather that it is far more complicated than just "companies need to start paying women more."
Associated (Score:4, Insightful)
Fries = Legal Ecstasy (Score:1)
When I have a bad day, there's nothing better for cheering me up than a batch of large fries. Of course if I do that often, I get chubby....er.
This is also applies to constipation (Score:2)
the further north, the worse? (Score:3)
On the one hand, I rather suspect that the further north a population is located, we'd likely find more and more homogenous gut biomes, as historically those populations not ONLY were eating more fats and meats (more of a necessity in colder climates) but also foods that have been heavily preserved either by salt, drying, or other aseptic methods. I'd imagine those foods would have far lower bacterial diversity intrinsically.
I'm curious what they'd find doing this analysis on Eskimo populations, who (as I understand) are basically exclusively meat/fat diets, at least a huge part of the year.
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Historically there was also a lot of preservation through fermentation, which is all but aseptic - to the contrary, the recipes create environments favourable to microorganisms (mostly lactobacillus species) that don't kill humans, but outcompeted those species that made the food go bad or outright toxic.
Surströmming or Hákarl anyone? Or maybe Kiviak?
Interestingly, Wikipedia lists a lot of fermented fish [wikipedia.org]
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Which behavioral differences did they control for? (Score:1)
Cue the nutrition weirdos... (Score:2)
You just know that the phony nutrition weirdos are gonna come out of the woodwork saying that their soy-based, gluten-free, non-GMO "plan" is the "only" way to solve the problem... for a nominal service fee.
Personality? (Score:2)
It's a pity (Score:2)
That ubiome was a fraudulent company whose servers ended up being seized by the FBI. They provided relatively cheap microbiome scans. If they'd actually been legit (and certainly they were listed as legit by the NIH at one point), they would have been very helpful.
I did actually get results from them, but those results are no longer available to me - the FBI has the computers, last I heard, and they haven't fired them up to provide customers access to what results they did have. No idea whether those result
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