Veggies: Cooked or Raw?

Following the theme of Vegetable Pharm, which is best for us: cooked or raw veggies?

Photo Credit

Fighting C. Diff...and losing the battle. A Modern Day Horror Story

This article appeared in our local paper.  I've never met Linden Staciokas, though I've read her gardening column for years.

I'm amazed that fecal transplant is the 'last chance' treatment that her doc offers and even more amazed by her reaction.

As soon as I post this, I'm going to send Mrs. Staciokas a link and offer some poo for a fecal transplant.  I just found that uBiome now provides a raw data sample (hat tip, Dr. BG), so maybe her doctor can look at that and decide if I'm a good donor.

Here's a link to Chris Kresser's recent blog on FMTs and "Poop, Cure of the Future."  And an older one from Paul Jaminet. If anybody else has any good links or info, please put them in the comments for Linden to see.

Fecal transplants need to be the FIRST OPTION for C-diff, not a 'hail Mary.'  The doc almost seems defeated saying they have a near 100% success rate...why would they use anything else?

The Future of Antibiotics

This is the last in my weekly antibiotics updates.  I hope you enjoyed them.

The enormity of our love affair with antibiotics is staggering...we currently use over 7 million pounds per year of antibiotics for humans and over 26 million pounds per year for animals destined for the food chain, and this, nearly 60 years after Alexander Fleming issued numerous warnings that we should be diligent in unleashing antibiotics into the environment to prevent resistance from spreading.

In its recent annual report on global risks published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2013, the World Economic Forum concluded that:

“Arguably the greatest risk … to human health comes in the form of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. We live in a bacterial world where we will never be able to stay ahead of the mutation curve. A test of our resilience is how far behind the curve we allow ourselves to fall.”

Resilience to antibiotic administration

If I’ve painted a bleak picture these last few weeks, don’t despair.  As I’ve said, antibiotics save lives—it’s the overuse of antibiotics that cause problems.  While I hope you never get into the situation where round after round of antibiotics is prescribed, if it does happen, there is still hope.

Gut bugs are extremely adaptable.^[43] Even after many rounds of harsh antibiotics, it’s possible to regain the vigor of a healthy microbiome. In long-term studies, gut bacteria has been irrevocably mucked up for up to four years following a single antibiotic administration, although, of course, it may be different for each individual person.  During and after a prescribed antibiotic course is provided, there are immediate steps that should be taken to ensure your gut bugs are treated right and the stage is set for the beneficial microbes to out-pace the bad in the race that is soon to follow.

Effects of antibiotic use

While antibiotics have saved countless lives that would have been lost due to infection, they are a double-edged sword.  Antibiotics are prescribed to kill a particular pathogen, for instance, one causing strep throat.  Sometimes, these antibiotics are targeted to a particular pathogen, often called Gram negative or Gram positive, but more often broad-spectrum antibiotics are prescribed to hasten the healing process.

  

Antibiotic-associated diarrhea^[41] is often the result of antibiotic use and directly caused by altering the gut flora.  When the gut flora is altered, as it is with a round of antibiotics, pathogens are allowed to grow out of control and biofilms develop that protect these pathogens.

Antibiotic Proliferation

There is a staggering array of antibiotics available to the modern clinician, from the old standby, penicillin, to the newest antibiotic available. “Old” antibiotics, penicillin and the sulfonamides, are effective most of the time in treating routine outpatient infections.^[38] When enough infections that don’t respond to the ‘old standbys’ arise, new antibiotics soon follow.

Between 1945 and 1968, drug companies invented 13 new categories of antibiotics, but between 1968 and today, just two new categories of antibiotics have been added. According to the National Institutes of Health the lack of new antibiotics is threefold:^[39]

• There is not much money in it;
• Inventing new antibiotics is technically challenging;
• In light of drug safety concerns, the FDA has made it difficult for companies to get new antibiotics approved.

Mass Production of Antibiotics

Since the discovery of antibiotics, natural products have been used as killers of disease causing bacteria.  This has prevented untold pain, suffering, and created a revolution in healthcare, however, it is now outdated and these early antibiotics are now largely ineffective. As new pathogens emerge, scientists struggle to keep up with ways to kill them. The “new” pathogens in this scenario being pathogens that have evolved resistance genes from unfettered use of antibiotics.  Antibiotics are now manufactured in three ways^[35]:

• Collected from live microorganisms
• Semi-synthetically produced from natural products
• Chemically synthesized based on the structure of natural products

Evolution in Action—Right Before your Very Eyes!

With every dose of antibiotics a person receives, the microbes that survive the medicine will be “antibiotic resistant.”  These antibiotic resistant microbes can then be passed to other people and even a fetus.  A person may have never had a course of antibiotics in their entire life, yet harbor many antibiotic resistant pathogens.  These resistant bacteria are transmitted in three ways:^[28]

• Consumption of animal products (such as meat, eggs, and milk)
• Close contact with animals or humans who harbor antibiotic resistant microbes
• Through the environment, as in water contaminated with animal or human waste

The Evolution of Antibiotic Resistance

Microbes developed interactive signalling systems over billions of years.  Scientists do not have a complete grasp on how antibiotics are produced or what they do in the natural world. There are several theories that involve gene transfer, evolutionary selection, and competition. At first it was believed that microbes produced antibiotics when competing microbes encroached on their territory, but this explanation was proved wrong when microbes began producing antibiotics in a laboratory setting with no other microbes present.

The Winds of War

Though the discovery of antibiotics went largely unnoticed, World War II changed everything. By 1945 Fleming’s penicillin was in full production as were many of the antibiotics pioneered by Waksman.  In fact, a large supply of penicillin was a prerequisite for the D-Day invasions of Normandy. At a time of great national pride the production of antibiotics was delegated to the War Department. A memo was sent to the manufacturers of antibiotics in 1943^[16]:

"You are urged to impress upon every worker in your plant that penicillin produced today will be saving the life of someone in a few days or curing the disease of someone now incapacitated. Put up slogans in your plant! Place notices in pay envelopes! Create an enthusiasm for the job down to the lowest worker in your plant."

Antibiotic Pioneers

In 1928, Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming was fiddling around with a strange mold he found growing on a Petri dish. This mold was known as Penicillium notatum and after an accidental exposure of the Penicillium to a Petri dish containing Staphylococcus (an infectious microbe), Fleming discovered that the exposure resulted in destruction of the Staphylococcus. This was an amazing discovery and he soon learned he now had the power of life and death over a wide range of Gram-positive bacteria that had been stymieing doctors for centuries!  Fleming toyed with the moldy medicine for well over a decade with little success in making a commercially viable, purified form of his invention: penicillin.

50 Shades of Gross

Haha, had to share this.  I know it's bad form to just cut and paste what others have written, so I will try to paraphrase from here as best I can. 

The author of this short piece, Katherine Dahlhausen, has dug up 50 "germ-phobic" tactics people use to avoid getting nasty microbes on them.  I'll admit, I still do a few of these.  I think that the underlying point here, though, is that we shouldn't have to be so 'anal' about avoiding germs.  In fact, avoiding all of these stray microbes has probably led us to the shape we are in.  Here's her list...how many do you do?  

Antibiotics and Antibiotic Resistance

The antibiotic era is not confined to modern day. Tetracycline, an antibiotic first isolated from Actinobacteria in the dirt, is a cheap antibiotic that has been used to treat pneumonia, acne, and other infections.  It was first discovered in the 1940’s and by the 1950’s, tetracycline-resistant bacteria had quickly emerged.^[7] Ironically, tetracycline has been isolated from the bones of ancient skeletons from Sudan dating back to the year 350 AD and late Roman period skeletons from ancient Egypt. The tetracycline in these instances is presumed to have been introduced by the diet or through the use of botanical herbs or healing soils used as medicine, but no trace of tetracycline resistance has been found in these areas after thousands of years of consumption^[8].