probiotic puzzles/Re: bacteria now!

[Guest guest]

,

Perhaps, like what Jordan Rubin says, it was the soil itself that

provided numerous beneficial bacteria. The soil would be inhaled

and also consumed on the foods that our cave brethren ate.

The soil of the last 100 years may be quite different than the more

freshly remineralized soil of thousands of years ago. If you

combine that with the fact that pesticides are now in use, we clean

our foods more carefully, and we spend more time indoors

inhaling dust rather than soil, it's no wonder we may be deficient

in certain organisms that you won't find in dairy, cabbage, etc.

-Dave

> Realizing that fermented foods are very traditional, but actually

> very recent in human evolution (fermented cabbages, dairy, etc

> apparently only emerging in the past few thousand years), I have

> often wondered what the true probiotics of human food traditions

> are. It is one of those difficult conundrums of 2 million

> year " traditions " (like eating meat) vs " since the last ice

> age " " traditions " (like fermented dairy, any grain-food

> traditions). I don't have any confident knowledge about this

> probiotic puzzle, but one of my theories is that commonly eating raw

> meat and would've kept a supply of bacteria in the diet. Maybe there

> is a decent supply of LAB in raw meat? Another possibility is that

> people got enough bacteria from incidental sources like air or water,

> or maybe on the surface of fruits of veggies, eaten raw and

> unwashed? Another possibility is that it might take very little

> externally supplied good bacteria to have good digestive health, and

> that the more concentrated probiotic foods of recent human history

> are compensations for departures from optimal diets resulting from

> the adaptation of new ingredients and methods of processing. So

> maybe people during most of human history simply didn't need much

> probiotic help? Of course, it's also possible they commonly

> suffered from awful digestive problems and died young, etc. We

> probably just don't know. I'm just articulating possibilities here;

> I have little basis for believing any of them. If anyone is more

> knowledgeable on this topic, please share, because it has been

> nagging at me for a long time! The history of probiotics and

> instestinal health over the full course of our species' existence

> would make a great research topic for a phd student in some

> appropriate field like medicine, anthropology, nutrition, etc. If

> there was a good book on this topic I'd read it tomorrow.

>

> Mike

> SE Pennsylvania

>

> The best way to predict the future is to invent it. --Alan Kay