I would never need to buy a book ( up,here ) ^^^but if it’s available to read / compare with allot of already gained knowledge it’s worth doing in my opinion
I have 3 of Donna’s books and they are all backed up by where the info she publishes is obtained from. I get a newsletter from her business weekly , I’d love to be a member of her site but it’s a bit to much on the expensive side for me https://www.culturedfoodlife.com/ however there is allot of free info / podcasts / recipes on her site
If you have the kindle app on your ipad, then you just need to go to the kindle store and find a book you are interested in. It will show the price for both the ebook and a regular paper book. If you order the ebook, then it will immediately be in your library in your Kindle app. I use Bookbub.com and Bookgorilla.com to find books I am interested in. You set up a profile in the website for the type of books your want to read, and they send an email with books on sale/free every day or so, depending on how often they have them on sale. Amazon puts some books on sale/free every day, but they are only on sale for that day, so you always have to check and see if the price has gone back up again before you get one of the free books. I have over 600 books in my kindle library, most are ones I have gotten when they were on sale or free, so it is a great way to build up your health library, @Kate Ellery .
I just read an article on the damage done to the gut microbiome by Lyme disease, and the importance of restoring it as a course of treatment. The article's intro tells the story of a Functional Diagnostic Nutrition Practitioner's husband getting Lyme disease twice, and the gut & autoimmune issues the disease and antibiotics caused. This is the meat of the article: In a 2020 study published by the American Society for Microbiology, researchers found that patients with chronic Lyme disease have a distinct microbiome signature, allowing for an accurate classification of over 80 percent of analyzed cases. The report noted that this includes an increase in the bacteria Blautia and a decrease in Bacteroides. “A patient’s immunological landscape plays an important role in the development of [chronic Lyme disease],” the authors concluded. The rest is a general discussion on probiotics--from fermented foods as well as from OTC sources--with this interesting statement: Dr. Ingels said that eating fermented foods can also help improve gut health, as they are a natural source of probiotics. “I often add probiotics to help reestablish a healthy microbiome and butyrate, which is an essential nutrient that helps facilitate bacterial growth.” I had not heard of butyrate. The Cleveland Clinic defines butryate as a naturally occurring fatty acid in your body. It may have the power to improve gut health and prevent disease. A cursory skimming of various articles indicates that you can get butryate from a variety of foods, and that not a lot of research has been done regarding supplementing it. It's interesting to see the topic of gut mircobiome surface in a wide variety of articles more and more often.
This friend of ours has a bad case of MAC lung disease. She has been on complex, shifting antibiotic regimens for years and, as a result, she has a devastated gut biome. She has a very restricted diet so as not to cause to many intestinal problems. It’s sad because she loves to cook. She still makes all kinds of stuff but can eat almost none of it.
Has she tried to rebuild her gut biome? I went meatless for a period of time, and when I started eating it again I had a hard time digesting it. I've since come to the [unsupported] conclusion that when I stopped eating meat, I lost the bacteria fed by the meat, and those bacteria created the enzymes required to digest meat. Once I started eating meat again, I repopulated those bacteria, which created meat-specific digestive enzymes.
It’s almost impossible with the heavy antibiotics she’s on. If she stopped, she would most likely die in short order. She’s in a program addressed to her disease at Johns Hopkins. The only hope on the (distant) horizon looks to be phage therapy.
I wonder if the person who supposedly got Lyme Disease twice could have just had a recurrence of the original infection? Butyric acid, the origin of butyrates, is in rancid butter and it is one of the worst smelling things on the planet. I guess that makes butter an "essential nutrient".
Apparently the guy found a second tick on him. There were no further details (deer tick, lone star tick, etc.) Regarding the smell...others have made the same observation. As I read the foods that help you create butyrate, it seems that it's pretty much everything except for meats and processed foods...all the high fiber stuff.
I ordered a butyrate supplement to see if it makes any changes in my system. Butyrate is said to be important for our gut biome, as it works with prebiotics to create postbiotics¹, and it seems that nearly everything we eat creates butyrate in our systems...so supplementing may not be necessary. I ordered this from Amazon: A 2 capsule dose provides 1.2g of butyric acid, so I can start off with 1 capsule to supplement my diet. From what I read, butyric acid is foul (as @Don Alaska said) and corrosive, so it is only supplemented as Salts of Butyric Acid, being compounded with either calcium and magnesium salts (like the version above) or with sodium. Both versions are widely available. Like many supplements, I don't know if this is gonna make a difference or if it's a waste of money. But I believe that any of these products that work on your gut biome should yield observable results. ¹From Harvard Health Publishing: This term [postbiotics] refers to the waste left behind after your body digests both prebiotics and probiotics. Healthy postbiotics include nutrients such as vitamins B and K, amino acids, and substances called antimicrobial peptides that help to slow down the growth of harmful bacteria. Other postbiotic substances called short-chain fatty acids help healthy bacteria flourish. You can increase the amount of useful postbiotics in your system by increasing your intake of fermented foods, such as kefir, tempeh, and kimchi. From U.S. Health News: Other notable postbiotics include acetate and propionate. Along with butyrate, these three postbiotics constitute about 95% of the short-chain fatty acids in the body.
I suspect that butyrate is supplemented as a salt to prevent the weak acid from tying up other nutrients as well as keeping the smell down. One of my college roommates said he tried to smuggles butyric acid out of his high school chemistry lab and the vial leaked. He was suspended for a week and the school was closed for the day to air the place out. New terms are being added every year with respect to the digestive systems as more people become interested in it. The "postbiotics" used to be called bacterial byproducts, but folks don't want to talk like that. Postbiotics just sounds cleaner.
I gotta laugh at your friend's antics. Some people can get away with anything, while the rest of us have learned to not even try in the first place. I'm thinking that the amount of ghee I cook with likely provides my system with plenty of butyric acid. That Harvard Medical School article I linked to made the observation that the marketing hype for gut biome products has greatly outpaced the science. @Yvonne Smith is taking the best guaranteed approach there is on this subject. Everything trustworthy I read points back to the path she is on with her fermented foods.
The ironic thing about my friend is that he became a chemistry professor at the University of Colorado after passing through MIT. I, too, like @Yvonne Smith keeping us apprised of the fermenting foods. I haven't yet made the yogurt from L. reuteri as my dehydrator has been in constant use with veggies and herbs. It will stop sometime though.