| ▲ | dimes 3 hours ago |
| Just to play devil’s advocate, isn’t it also possible that the preference for a monotonous diet is driven by gut makeup? |
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| ▲ | Aurornis 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| The microbiome might have some modulating effect, but the fidelity of gut-brain axis communication isn’t so strong that our gut microbiome is driving us around with highly specific inputs. The theories for how gut-brain axis modulation works include altering the balance of nutrients that get absorbed and modulating the vagus nerve, primarily. For someone with autism it might be possible that altering some of these balances could make the condition better or worse, but that’s all theory without much foundation. What is known, however, is that diet has a massive impact on the microbiome. Even the mechanism for that is obvious: Bacteria thrive on different foods, so if you eat more of one class of nutrients and less of another then the microbiome proportions will adjust based on which ones thrive on that diet. |
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| ▲ | dimes 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I’m not going to pretend to be an expert here, but I remember a study that found gut bacteria composition predicted whether or not an individual was chocolate-craving or not in individuals eating identical diets: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17929959 | | |
| ▲ | Aurornis 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | You have to be careful with microbiome research because it’s a buzzword that gets crammed into a lot of research papers to imply something bigger. This is a single paper from Nestle Research Center (yes that Nestle) from 2007 that doesn’t even cite a number of people sampled in the abstract. They didn’t run any experiments trying to change the diet or microbiome. They just correlated dietary preferences with some markers that might be correlated with the microbiome. The paper does not say anything about how changing the microbiome might change preferences. The simplest and most well tested explanation is that dietary preference are driving the microbiome. There’s a lot of woo-woo microbiome discussion out there that misses the really obvious basics of how the microbiome comes to exist and thrive: What you eat is what the microbiome eats, so changing what you eat will change the composition of bacteria that thrive. People who prefer chocolate are correlated with people who prefer sweet diets. High sugar intake is proven to alter the microbiome. | |
| ▲ | mrtesthah 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It makes sense for chocolate given that cocoa flavanols are prebiotic fiber for GABA-secreting bacteria which of course affects the parasympathetic nervous system. | | |
| ▲ | Aurornis an hour ago | parent [-] | | The paper didn’t say that the microbiome was driving food preferences. It measured some bio markers and some dietary preferences and claims some correlation. The correlation is that what you eat fuels the microbiome. So your diet influences the microbiome by fueling or starving different bacteria. Complex theories about causality going the other way through complex chains of flavonoids to bacteria to neurotransmitters to the parasympathetic nervous system sound impressive with all of the big words, but it’s such a complex theory that would need other testing to even begin to understand if there was something there. Testing the other direction is easy and obvious. You can grow many bacteria in a Petri dish and see that some grow better or worse with different nutrients. |
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| ▲ | toddmorey 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Yes! My son who has autism would eat anything we put in front of him until age 3, when his weight, appetite and health suddenly and alarmingly crashed. Ever since that episode, he's had a much more restrictive diet and food preferences. Night and day. They never successfully identified what happened. Just diagnosed it generally as failure to thrive. |
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| ▲ | jtc331 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | There’s some research on sudden onset autism being treated with antifungals; so at least sometimes a sudden change may be the result of something very specific in the gut. | | |
| ▲ | Aurornis 28 minutes ago | parent [-] | | There is not reasonable evidence supporting the idea that autism can be treated with antifungals. Case reports are unreliable due to placebo effect. The antifungal myth has been tested by too many well-meaning parents with no results. |
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| ▲ | stephenitis 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| You seed the gut with nutrients. having lots of fiber and a varied diet increases the number of species that an adult has which is between a couple hundred to a thousand or so.
Our guts are generally dominated by a bunch of beneficial bacteria. which for many is not the case for a variety of social economic or behavioral reasons. Add in with explosions of bacterial populations due to alcohol or sugar and you can see how we can change our gut biome drastically from week to week. |
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| ▲ | therobots927 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | I’ve noticed I really need to keep alcohol and sugar consumption in check. Sometimes it seems like one drink is enough to kick off a gut ecosystem collapse, and other times my gut is more resistant to the effects. Definitely trying to increase fiber consumption significantly. | | |
| ▲ | swores 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | How are you judging the impact of things on your gut/microbiome? | | | |
| ▲ | formerly_proven 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Simple starches and sugars (the former being rapidly converted into the latter) are probably the most harmful ingredient once we exclude actual poisons. And they’re just as normalized with most food being primarily composed of them, even though normal people barely need them. |
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