The MICROBIOME
Taken from the fourth edition of “EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW TO HELP YOU BEAT CANCER” by Chris Woollams.
The past ten years has seen an explosion of knowledge in an area your UK oncologist may know little about. Over 5,000 research studies and more than 100 clinical trials all pointing to one extremely important conclusion: Your good health may well be inexorably linked to the good health of the many forms of bacteria that inhabit your body, and without which you simply cannot survive.
1. The Microbiome Published reports in both the journals Science and Nature in the last year have advocated that it is wrong to think of the human body as an entity involving 7 trillion cells and about 25,000 genes. The bacteria that live with us create a ‘Super-body’ of over 100 trillion cells and 100,000 genes. They are not parasites but symbionts – we offer them a home, warmth, comfort, food and in return they do things for us we simply cannot do for ourselves. This is the process of mutual symbiosis. The majority of these bacteria live in our gut. Our bodies have evolved with their presence. We cannot now live without them. They get ill first, then we become ill. In the latest research, restoring them to health, restores the patient´s health.
2. They stimulate the production of your immune defences When you were a child, you picked up your first bacteria as you passed through your mother’s birth canal. Then you went on an adventure. Every day you ingested yet more. Your parents thought you had yet another cold. You didn’t. You had ingested a new and ‘foreign’ bacterium, and they were witnessing your immune response. The body was forming defensive antibodies and a fight, with resultant fever, was taking place. Those defensive antibodies can last a lifetime in some cases. Children of natural birth, who live on farms, or who have animals in the home, have stronger immune systems for life, as do children who are breast fed. This ‘reaction’ is the basis for your whole immune system. It is even the basis of your immune memory and explains why it can last a lifetime (because the original bacteria is still there in your gut) but man-made vaccines have to be frequently topped up as their presence diminishes. Reactions of the body to an invader produce the white antibodies in your blood stream so that when something nastier invades your body you already have some protection. And so this goes on throughout your life. You need to ‘eat a little bit of dirt’. It protects you!
3. They are your first line of defence Every day you ingest microbes, yeasts, moulds and bacteria which, if left alone in your gut, would start to invade your body. Your friendly bacteria defend you. At night when you sleep they consume over two pounds of the nasties. In fact, yeasts are their favourite food, candida albicans in particular. They protect you from yeast infections like thrush and the side-effects like tonsillitis. And they consume microbes that can cause illness.
4. They release vital nourishment from your food Your doctor may tell you that he doesn’t want you to supplement. Rather you should eat 5 lots of fruit and vegetables a day. If you are receiving orthodox medicine involving antibiotics, drugs, and steroids, he is almost certainly wrong. These ‘orthodox treatments’ will have damaged and depleted the microbiome. They may no longer be capable of releasing certain nourishment from your foods.
Under healthy conditions these friendly bacteria, for example:
a) Help to cut up your grains to produce B vitamins like B-12, folic acid, biotin and niacin all of which are involved in the correct production of DNA. Lowered levels are linked to increased cancer risk. b) Help to produce short-chain esters which can actively block the formation of ‘bad’ cholesterol in the body. c) Help to release vitamin K from your greens – vitamin K is now being shown to aid the immune system work of vitamin D. It also helps protect the liver from metastatic activity. Without their full and healthy complement, levels of the above have been shown to be drastically reduced.
5. They help you excrete toxins, chemicals and hormones Research has shown that beneficial bacteria work with fibrous foods to bind to (chelate with) all manner of things you would rather not have in your body like heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury, or oestrogenic chemicals (your own or from external chemicals), and nitrosamines (cancer causing agents from sources as diverse as barbeques and toiletry products).
6. They actually work with fibrous foods to reduce inflammation and kill cancer cells Scientists at the American Medical College of Georgia (MCG) have discovered how fibre works in the fight against cancer. It works with beneficial bacteria in the colon to activate a receptor in the body that can kill cancer. The beneficial bacteria produce sodium butyrate from the fibre and this activates a receptor (GPR109A), which in turn has two effects: First, it blocks the COX-2 protein that causes inflammation; and secondly it sends signals out to cancer cells telling them to self-destruct. “We know the receptor is silenced in cancer but it’s not like the gene goes away,” Dr. Vadivel Ganapathy, corresponding author and chair of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology in the MCG School of Medicine, said in a statement to media. Cancer shuts down the gene by a process called DNA methylation. “Colon cancer does not want butyrate produced by bacteria to come inside so it silences the transporter. It also does not want butyrate to act on the cell from the outside so it silences the receptor,” Dr. Ganapathy explained in the media statement. “It does not want to have anything to do with butyrate. We think receptor activation by butyrate suppresses inflammation, thereby suppressing progression of inflamed cells into cancer cells.”
The scientists have concluded that patients may benefit by taking high doses of butyrate. (It tastes terrible). An alternative according to Dr. Ganapathy is to take large amounts of niacin, a B vitamin, which could have the same effect.
7. You harm them Take drugs, antibiotics and steroids and you will reduce their numbers and their abilities dramatically. Eat too much salt, vinegar (on pickles), smoke, drink too much alcohol, eat too much fat and chlorinated water and you will damage them and/or change the acidity of the gut so that their chemical reactions to release the goodness will not work efficiently. Even more worrying, of course, is that certain GM foods target and kill bacteria. The FDA in America has already expressed serious concern.
8. You don’t feed them properly We have broken our contract with them. We no longer feed them the high fibre, whole foods they love. We eat refined junk, which gives them nothing but feeds their enemies. Yeasts love glucose, for example.
9. You don’t top up their numbers We used to eat lots of these friendly bacteria in everything from blue cheese to raw milk and sauerkraut. No longer. Health authorities simply do not understand bacteria – they think all bacteria are bad, so they try to enforce a sterile world. In America there is a move to irradiate all food, even organic. Things can only get worse. Every step we take to weaken them, exposes us more to the threat of a superbug.
10. New found importance in medicine By way of an example, health authorities in the USA have been battling with the superbug Closridium difficile. It causes 14,000 deaths a year. Now they have found that using enemas made from the stools of healthy people rapidly returns the microbiome to normal and eradicates the superbug! Other hospitals have been playing with manuka honey (which can naturally kill harmful bacteria while boosting the good guys) and multi-strain probiotics.
11. Taking Probiotics And maybe therein lies the simplest answer for you. A probiotic cannot be called a probiotic unless it has been proven in research to be capable of being delivered into the intestine and to deliver its benefit. About a dozen bacteria come up time and time again in research. So if you have to have the drugs, make sure you take several different brands of multi strain probiotics. And feed them their favourite foods – high fibre, whole foods, no glucose, refined foods or pasteurised cows’ dairy.
12. Recreate your ´superbody´ And fifty years from now maybe, just maybe, orthodox medicine in the UK will understand that if the microbiome in a human’s body is damaged, the whole ‘superbody’ is under threat. If the ‘superbody’ needs to get better, don’t upset the microbiome.
Taken from the fourth edition of “EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW TO HELP YOU BEAT CANCER” by Chris Woollams. Published by CANCERactive. CLICK HERE for further details.
The past ten years has seen an explosion of knowledge in an area your UK oncologist may know little about. Over 5,000 research studies and more than 100 clinical trials all pointing to one extremely important conclusion: Your good health may well be inexorably linked to the good health of the many forms of bacteria that inhabit your body, and without which you simply cannot survive.
1. The Microbiome Published reports in both the journals Science and Nature in the last year have advocated that it is wrong to think of the human body as an entity involving 7 trillion cells and about 25,000 genes. The bacteria that live with us create a ‘Super-body’ of over 100 trillion cells and 100,000 genes. They are not parasites but symbionts – we offer them a home, warmth, comfort, food and in return they do things for us we simply cannot do for ourselves. This is the process of mutual symbiosis. The majority of these bacteria live in our gut. Our bodies have evolved with their presence. We cannot now live without them. They get ill first, then we become ill. In the latest research, restoring them to health, restores the patient´s health.
2. They stimulate the production of your immune defences When you were a child, you picked up your first bacteria as you passed through your mother’s birth canal. Then you went on an adventure. Every day you ingested yet more. Your parents thought you had yet another cold. You didn’t. You had ingested a new and ‘foreign’ bacterium, and they were witnessing your immune response. The body was forming defensive antibodies and a fight, with resultant fever, was taking place. Those defensive antibodies can last a lifetime in some cases. Children of natural birth, who live on farms, or who have animals in the home, have stronger immune systems for life, as do children who are breast fed. This ‘reaction’ is the basis for your whole immune system. It is even the basis of your immune memory and explains why it can last a lifetime (because the original bacteria is still there in your gut) but man-made vaccines have to be frequently topped up as their presence diminishes. Reactions of the body to an invader produce the white antibodies in your blood stream so that when something nastier invades your body you already have some protection. And so this goes on throughout your life. You need to ‘eat a little bit of dirt’. It protects you!
3. They are your first line of defence Every day you ingest microbes, yeasts, moulds and bacteria which, if left alone in your gut, would start to invade your body. Your friendly bacteria defend you. At night when you sleep they consume over two pounds of the nasties. In fact, yeasts are their favourite food, candida albicans in particular. They protect you from yeast infections like thrush and the side-effects like tonsillitis. And they consume microbes that can cause illness.
4. They release vital nourishment from your food Your doctor may tell you that he doesn’t want you to supplement. Rather you should eat 5 lots of fruit and vegetables a day. If you are receiving orthodox medicine involving antibiotics, drugs, and steroids, he is almost certainly wrong. These ‘orthodox treatments’ will have damaged and depleted the microbiome. They may no longer be capable of releasing certain nourishment from your foods.
Under healthy conditions these friendly bacteria, for example:
a) Help to cut up your grains to produce B vitamins like B-12, folic acid, biotin and niacin all of which are involved in the correct production of DNA. Lowered levels are linked to increased cancer risk. b) Help to produce short-chain esters which can actively block the formation of ‘bad’ cholesterol in the body. c) Help to release vitamin K from your greens – vitamin K is now being shown to aid the immune system work of vitamin D. It also helps protect the liver from metastatic activity. Without their full and healthy complement, levels of the above have been shown to be drastically reduced.
5. They help you excrete toxins, chemicals and hormones Research has shown that beneficial bacteria work with fibrous foods to bind to (chelate with) all manner of things you would rather not have in your body like heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury, or oestrogenic chemicals (your own or from external chemicals), and nitrosamines (cancer causing agents from sources as diverse as barbeques and toiletry products).
6. They actually work with fibrous foods to reduce inflammation and kill cancer cells Scientists at the American Medical College of Georgia (MCG) have discovered how fibre works in the fight against cancer. It works with beneficial bacteria in the colon to activate a receptor in the body that can kill cancer. The beneficial bacteria produce sodium butyrate from the fibre and this activates a receptor (GPR109A), which in turn has two effects: First, it blocks the COX-2 protein that causes inflammation; and secondly it sends signals out to cancer cells telling them to self-destruct. “We know the receptor is silenced in cancer but it’s not like the gene goes away,” Dr. Vadivel Ganapathy, corresponding author and chair of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology in the MCG School of Medicine, said in a statement to media. Cancer shuts down the gene by a process called DNA methylation. “Colon cancer does not want butyrate produced by bacteria to come inside so it silences the transporter. It also does not want butyrate to act on the cell from the outside so it silences the receptor,” Dr. Ganapathy explained in the media statement. “It does not want to have anything to do with butyrate. We think receptor activation by butyrate suppresses inflammation, thereby suppressing progression of inflamed cells into cancer cells.”
The scientists have concluded that patients may benefit by taking high doses of butyrate. (It tastes terrible). An alternative according to Dr. Ganapathy is to take large amounts of niacin, a B vitamin, which could have the same effect.
7. You harm them Take drugs, antibiotics and steroids and you will reduce their numbers and their abilities dramatically. Eat too much salt, vinegar (on pickles), smoke, drink too much alcohol, eat too much fat and chlorinated water and you will damage them and/or change the acidity of the gut so that their chemical reactions to release the goodness will not work efficiently. Even more worrying, of course, is that certain GM foods target and kill bacteria. The FDA in America has already expressed serious concern.
8. You don’t feed them properly We have broken our contract with them. We no longer feed them the high fibre, whole foods they love. We eat refined junk, which gives them nothing but feeds their enemies. Yeasts love glucose, for example.
9. You don’t top up their numbers We used to eat lots of these friendly bacteria in everything from blue cheese to raw milk and sauerkraut. No longer. Health authorities simply do not understand bacteria – they think all bacteria are bad, so they try to enforce a sterile world. In America there is a move to irradiate all food, even organic. Things can only get worse. Every step we take to weaken them, exposes us more to the threat of a superbug.
10. New found importance in medicine By way of an example, health authorities in the USA have been battling with the superbug Closridium difficile. It causes 14,000 deaths a year. Now they have found that using enemas made from the stools of healthy people rapidly returns the microbiome to normal and eradicates the superbug! Other hospitals have been playing with manuka honey (which can naturally kill harmful bacteria while boosting the good guys) and multi-strain probiotics.
11. Taking Probiotics And maybe therein lies the simplest answer for you. A probiotic cannot be called a probiotic unless it has been proven in research to be capable of being delivered into the intestine and to deliver its benefit. About a dozen bacteria come up time and time again in research. So if you have to have the drugs, make sure you take several different brands of multi strain probiotics. And feed them their favourite foods – high fibre, whole foods, no glucose, refined foods or pasteurised cows’ dairy.
12. Recreate your ´superbody´ And fifty years from now maybe, just maybe, orthodox medicine in the UK will understand that if the microbiome in a human’s body is damaged, the whole ‘superbody’ is under threat. If the ‘superbody’ needs to get better, don’t upset the microbiome.
Taken from the fourth edition of “EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW TO HELP YOU BEAT CANCER” by Chris Woollams. Published by CANCERactive. CLICK HERE for further details.