Gut Health/Mental health: the evidence is slowly accumulating

No it wasn’t us who thought of this first. It was a piece in that brilliant mag New Scientist which first gave us this jaw-dropping moment. There may be a link between the digestive system-what we eat, how we prepare it and what else lives in it-and mental health. Maybe, just may be the researchers in this frontier field may be on the edge of finding causal mechanisms for some mental disorders. Some at least. We have started to cover this topos (don’t you love that word?)in several blogs since 2022, with growing enthusiasm. In this spirit we present this latest from Nature Briefing A gut feeling about mental health

Preliminary evidence suggests that nurturing the gut microbiota could help to resolve depression and anxiety, whether through faecal transplant, probiotics or diet. Two 2016 studies showed that transferring faecal matter from someone with depression into rodents gave the animals depression-like behaviors. “This is not how we’d thought about mental illness, as something that can be transferred the way you could catch measles,” says psychiatrist Valerie Taylor. Now researchers are working to untangle how the microbiota influence various human illnesses throughout the gut-brain axis — including effects on the immune system, the vagus nerve and the enteric nervous system.Nature Outlook | 12 min read
This editorially independent article is part of Nature Outlook: The human microbiome, a supplement produced with financial support from Yakult.

But we stress several things. Firstly, it’s early days. All too often people get carried away by excitement, and lose their grip on evidence and reason. But LSS staff and readers are above the level of mental level of conspiracy theory enthusiasts! Correlation does not prove causation, we say gentle readers. That said, the earnest and thorough research around things like neural super highways, neurotransmitter production, microbiome and mood and faecal microbiota transplants has excited our curiosity to the utmost. Next time you see one of those poor devils on the street, their life wrecked by mental disorder, think this: is their hope that one day, at least, this may never happen again?

#mental health #gut #microbiome #digestive system #schizophrenia #blood brain barrier

Faecal Pellets: Watch the good bacteria chase out the bad

Imagine you get bad news: antibiotic resistant bacteria have set up a colony in your intestine. OK here’s some worse: they could escape and invade your blood, kidneys, whatever. In which case you have real problems. This is a very real scenario which that brilliant researcher Dr Blair Merrick of Guys and St Thomas Hospital has sought to address. [1] as reported by James Gallagher of the BBC Why not, he has reasoned, get some good non resistant bacteria to chase out all those bad ones? It is his chosen method which may raise more than one eyebrow among you, gentle readers

According to Dr Merrick, the way to get the good bacteria into his subjects is via pills made of…..well, made of faecal matter, you know,,,poo. To quote James:

Dr Merrick says there are “really promising signals” that poo pills could help tackle the rising scourge of superbugs and that donor bacteria could be going to microbial war with the superbugs as they compete over food and space on the lining of the gut and either rid the body of them completely or “reduce them down to a level that doesn’t cause problems”.

We like this for all sorts of reasons. Firstly the gut really is such a good harbour of antibiotic resistant bacteria. Secondly, as in all things ecological, making its flora more diverse can only be a good thing. Thirdly, we think it has a clever little principle behind it. Antibiotic resistant bacteria have devoted a tiny bit more of their genome to this purpose than non resistant ones. In the world of ecological competition, where tiny differences can make an enormous difference to long term survival, this could be crucial. If done correctly, the good non resistant ones should out compete the bad ones.

It’s early days yet, and the early trials have only been on 41 subjects But as seasoned veterans of the long wars of antibiotics will know, we at LSS welcome every initiative, however unusual it may at first seem. We wish every success to Dr Merrick and his team and hope that their early accomplishments continue in the bigger trials to come,

_{thanks to Ms G lynch}

[1]https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clyge290l4xo

#gut #microbiome #antibiotic resistant bacteria #health #medicine

Professor Devi Sridhar: a masterclass in the antibiotics crisis

If antibiotics stop working it will be the end of modern medicine as we know it. That is the essence of this article by the redoubtable Professor Devi Sridhar of Edinburgh University. We’ve channelled her before on this blog (LSS 24 8 24; 26 1023). UK readers will recall her many appearances on TV during the COVID 19 pandemic. Her cool, calm reason was a welcome antidote to the wild hysteria, baseless conspiracy mongering and shameful ignorance of that epoch.

Her article is a reprise of the main points we and other campaigners have been making for years. Over-prescription; lack of research; widespread public ignorance. The tireless Professor Sally Davies is name-checked. Of course: for she has done so much to proclaim this pressing danger. But the real problem for Devi is widespread abuse of antibiotics in farming industries. To produce short term higher yields in livestock such as cattle and pigs. Leading us to eat more meat, which in turn gives us obesity, go on diets that fail, high cholesterol, heart attacks., go on more failed diets…….our fingers fail on the keyboard in sheer despair.

So let’s take one key learning point from Devi’s razor sharp mind, because maybe we haven’t emphasised it enough here down the years. The real problem is that new classes of antibiotics are needed :

Developing similar versions to existing antibiotics isn’t enough because they won’t be as effective against pathogens that have developed resistance: we need totally new classes of drugs. And a recent World Health Organization report noted that since 2017, while 13 new antibiotics have obtained authorisation, only two represent a new chemical class.

Here is the nub of the problem. It wont get any easier, because the best research teams are multinational, and international co-operation is breaking down rapidly. Things like phages and AI may help. Serendipitous searching in nature, in places like gardens or the jaws of Komodo dragons {LSS passim)may could also be marginally helpful. But in the last analysis, disputes about who imports which computer circuit from whom distract attention from the real question. A woman dying from childbirth needs an antibiotic, not a smartphone to photograph it.

[1]https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/apr/02/antibiotics-stop-working-prescription-gp-animal-farming

#antibiotic resistance #medicine #science #health #bacteriophage #komodo dragon

Processed Foods: Reader Feedback

Photo by Anna Tukhfatullina Food Photographer/Stylist on Pexels.com

Today we reproduce the comment of our regular reader Ms Gaynor Lynch, on our recent piece about processed foods. Many thanks to her for taking the time to contact us:

Ultra-processed foods are bad for you – full stop. They are highly addictive and affect your brain chemistry so that you crave them more. Emerging research suggests ultra processed foods are particularly bad for not just the gut but the heart and brain as well, with mood and cognition badly affected.

Professor Tim Spectre is the go expert on the gut https://zoe.com/post/tim-spector-gut-tips,

There is an excellent excellent article in National Geographic on brain health but there is a pay wall. It may be available through your library service.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/premium/article/ultra-processed-foods-damage-brain-depression-anxiety-cognitive-decline#:~:text=Although%20many%20ultra-processed%20foods%E2%80%94soda%2C%20candy%2C%20energy%20bars%2C%20fruit-flavored,brain%2C%20with%20mood%20and%20cognition%20taking%20a%20hit.

Abstract of research article in the journal Neurology on associations between ultra-processed food consumption and adverse brain health outcomes. Free, paywall to full article.

https://www.neurology.org/doi/10.1212/WNL.0000000000209432

We at LSS think that this whole issue is only going to grow in the next few years and welcome the thoughts of any other readers who might care to join the debate

#nutrition #obesity #food #diet #sustainability #health #heart

Good news on antibiotics coming thick and fast this spring

More good news on antibiotics research for you today, gentle readers. And this time it’s the subtlety of the extra thinking that has captured our attention. Up to now antibiotics-and many other therapies- have been more of a bludgeon than a rapier. Yes they do a lot of good, smashing away dangerous bacteria from your system. But they can do a lot of bad, by killing all those beneficial bacteria in your biome, which help you digest your food, as well as performing many other Good Works. But what if we could design an antibiotic which only does the good stuff, while keeping harmful side effects to a minimum? According to Nature Briefings, Smart Antibiotic spares the Microbiome, lolamicin may do just that:

An antibiotic called lolamicin targets disease-causing Gram-negative bacteria without disturbing healthy gut bacteria. Broad-spectrum antibiotics against these pathogens wreak havoc on the gut microbiome and can allow potentially deadly Clostridioides difficile to take over. Mice infected with antibiotic-resistant Gram-negative bacteria survived after being given lolamicin, whereas almost 90% of those that didn’t receive the drug died within three days. Lolamicin did not seem to disrupt the gut microbiome and spared mice from C. difficile infections.Nature | 4 min read
Reference: Nature paper

For more stories like these, update your preferences to sign up to our free weekly Nature Briefing: Microbiology.

(We took their link a little further today, so you can see that they offer a special service for those who want to follow this whole trope more closely)

As you know we at LSS tend to be a tad wary of huge new, all-field-encompassing, breakthroughs. What we like is when someone tweaks existing learning in a small but significant way. This seems to be one such, and good luck to the researchers concerned.

#antibiotics #microbiology #microbial resistance #research #microbiology