New Study Looks at Ancestor’s Gut Microbiome to Improve Health
A fascinating new study shows our gut microbiome has been experiencing a potentially catastrophic loss of diversity over the last millennium, possibly giving rise to various common chronic diseases. Is it too late to avoid irreversible damage to our health?
While most of us don’t ever think about it, we coexist with over 100 trillion microbes, the majority of which live in our gut and are essential to our health. Though the existence of the microbiome was first recognized in the 1990s, the full understanding of its importance and mechanisms is still in its infancy.
Dr. Alex Kostic is a microbiologist at Harvard Medical School, who has been studying the microbiome as a mediator of disease. “You know, this concept of the microbiome as a community of organisms living on humans and other mammals, and playing an integral role in our physiology really is a new concept, something that people have only been studying for the past 10-15 years or so,” Kostic said. “But what we’ve come to realize, as we study the ecology of all of the microorganisms living on humans, especially in the gut, is that it’s incredibly diverse, and pathogens are really the exception to the rule. Everything else has a lot of other roles that we’re still trying to tap into, but we can be fairly confident that they’re not driving disease in people.”
In their quest for a clear picture of the microbiome, researchers have recently turned to studying its history.
“What’s really gotten me interested in the history of the human microbiome, is this concept of being able to identify, if it exists, a ‘universal ancestral human microbiome,’ something that was common to all of us before the process of industrialization,” Kostic said.
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The Wonderful Benefits of Japanese Knotweed
While the anti-cancer and brain-healing resveratrol is found in grapes, blueberries, peanuts, cashews. cocoa powder, and wine, this powerful antioxidant is wildly abundant (more than grapes) in Japanese Knotweed. Resveratrol is unusually powerful and a natural phenol, found in a unique group of micronutrients with antioxidant properties.
This puts Knotweed in an elite class of supremely healing and helpful herbs. In recent years, it’s become a vital medicinal, culinary, and ceremonial herb throughout Korea, China, and Japan, and within several spiritual communities in the United States and Europe.
This beautiful green and white plant is also extremely fertile. When planted among other vegetation, Japanese Knotweed becomes invasive and ravages the land, often consuming neighboring crops. Because it’s also difficult to eradicate, some folks consider this herb an enemy. Japanese Knotweed is also known as Itadori tea. The Japanese word itadori can be translated as “remove pain.” It’s used in traditional Chinese and Japanese medicine. Meanwhile, when foraged in the wild, its young stems are edible, albeit sour, with a flavor reminiscent of rhubarb. The plant can be found in 39 of the 50 United States.
