Most people who are interested in the health of their microbiome have heard about resistant starch. This article is a pretty good primer on the subject: yurielkaim.com/resistant-starch/ For those who are new to this subject, resistant starch does not contribute to the true carb count of the food it comes from. It behaves similar to…

Recapitulation of Ayurveda constitution types by machine learning of phenotypic traits — Read on journals.plos.org/plosone/article You’ll need to have a basic understanding of the Ayurvedic concept of Prakriti to completely understand the relevance of this quote below. I’ll come back and add some commentary later. Suffice it to say that this type of study lends…

Maintaining five healthy habits — eating a healthy diet, exercising regularly, keeping a healthy body weight, not drinking too much alcohol, and not smoking — during adulthood may add more than a decade to life expectancy, according to a new study led by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2018/04/5-healthy-habits-may-increase-life-expectancy-by-decade-or-more/ This was a…

This is about 18 months old, but it is worth looking at again, given all of the hype in the popular press about gut health in 2019. Researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine and collaborators have published the first major results from the American Gut Project, a crowdsourced, global citizen science…

There’s a lot of hype out there about good fats and bad fats. Omega-6 fats were once criticized as unhealthy, but researchers for the American Heart Association have concluded that they are in fact beneficial to the heart.… — Read on www.health.harvard.edu/newsletter_article/no-need-to-avoid-healthy-omega-6-fats In fact, a recent article I read about the effect of fat on…

Health coaches and nutritionists may find Dr. Saxena’s differentiation of common personas helpful. She has discovered in her practice that there are five different types of people seeking health advice. Understanding who they are will enable you to provide personalized guidance that will help them comply with your lifestyle advice. Dr. Saxena: So the first…

This interesting study shows that depriving an animal of nitrogen containing foods can have a beneficial effect on the diversity of the microbiome. The primary nitrogen containing foods in the human diet are high protein animal foods. Scientists have found that extra nitrogen from a high carbohydrate, low protein diet can allow bacteria to grow…

There’s a growing body of research that the best way to ensure a diverse microbiome is to eat many different plant foods each week. Recent research at the University of California San Diego suggests the magic number is 30: https://www.humnutrition.com/blog/30-plants-per-week/ Every plant makes unique contributions to the microbiome because of the unique chemical composition of…

There are a number of prominent websites that are devoted to attacking practitioners of herbal medicine as either unqualified or dangerous or both. Many of those who make a career out of herbalism are indeed qualified. Some may have undergone formal training at a federally accredited institution (such as ND, DC, LAc). Such licensed practitioners…

Ever since reading The Human Superorganism by Rodney Dietert about a month ago, I have been obsessed with the role of the microbiome in human health. One of the things that has been mentioned frequently in my informal literature review is the role of the microbiome in creating an appropriate barrier between the external environment…