Peanut allergies are one of the most widespread food allergies in the United States—in fact about 3 million Americans can’t consume peanuts. Peanuts are not actually nuts but legumes, like soybeans and peas. All other nuts (walnuts, cashews, almonds, etc) are tree nuts.
While other types of allergies may wear off later in life, peanut allergies tend to stick with a person forever, with only 20% of people outgrowing them. Peanut allergies are one of the most common food allergies in children, along with milk and eggs.
RELATED: 20 Ways to Stop Allergies
With food allergies, your immune system overreacts to something harmless. You respond to normal foods as if they are foreign invaders. As a result, the body releases the chemical histamine and other compounds that can cause breathing trouble, throat swelling, itchy lips, nausea, and vomiting.
RELATED: 31 Everyday Things You Didn’t Know You Could Be Allergic To
The causes of food allergies aren’t known, but they are more common in families with other allergic conditions, like asthma and eczema. When someone reacts to peanuts, it can become a life-threatening event, especially if the person goes into anaphylaxis. Anaphylaxis is a dangerous multi-system reaction that can cause trouble breathing, a drop in blood pressure, and shock. However, rapid treatment with an epinephrine injection can reverse anaphylaxis. Autoinjectors (such as the brand name injector is EpiPen) should be carried by people at high risk as a safety precaution. It’s also important to avoid any foods that contain peanuts. Be sure to read packaged food labels for red flags, including whether a product was processed near peanuts.
Most processed foods will fail to meet salt-reduction targets set this year by Public Health England. This week, research by the Consensus Action on Salt and Health (Cash) showed how out of 28 categories surveyed, only one (bread rolls) will meet the targets. Salt is added to make processed food taste better – 75% of the salt we consume comes from this type of food.
Too much salt, which is linked to heart disease, high blood pressure, strokes and kidney disease, is causing more than 14,000 preventable deaths a year, says Cash. You would expect crisps and ready meals to have a high salt content – and you might also be aware that foods such as bread can contain a lot – but the researchers also found that sweet products, such as Galaxy Ultimate Marshmallow hot chocolate contained salt, with one serving containing 0.8g –more than a typical packet of ready-salted crisps (0.46g). With the current maximum daily recommended intake of salt at 6g – a teaspoon – easily exceeded by many, where else is salt hiding?
Cereal
One 30g serving of Kellogg’s cornflakes contains 0.34g of salt, but even the company’s very sweet cereals, such as Crunchy Nut Cornflakes and Caramel Bites granola, contains the same amount.
Crumpets
Crumpets … 1.55g. Photograph: foodfolio/Alamy
Last year, Cash found that Warburtons liked to use salt in its crumpets, with the highest being its giant crumpet, with 1.55g of salt. Eat two, and you’ve had more than half of your daily salt allowance.
Anchovies
It’s not news that salted fish contain a lot of salt. But the recommended serving size might surprise you. A single fillet is a serving – and contains 9% of your daily salt allowance. Have you seen the size of an anchovy fillet? It’s barely bigger than krill.
Pizza
Tesco Meat Feast pizza … 3.6g Photograph: Tesco
Again, this is about serving size. Do you really only eat half a supermarket pizza? A 290g Pizza Express La Reine pizza, with mushrooms and prosciutto, is supposed to serve two people, according to the manufacturer. Eat the whole thing and you’ll have consumed 3.92g of salt (65% of your RDA). A whole Tesco Meat Feast pizza will deliver 3.6g.
Pre-packed salads
Healthy, yes? It depends what you go for. Waitrose’s hot-smoked salmon and potato salad has 1.6g of salt, more than a quarter of your maximum level; Tesco’s chicken and bacon pasta salad contains two servings, each with 2.3g of salt.
Soup
Soup … 2.6g a can. Photograph: Richard Griffin/Getty Images/iStockphoto
In canned soups, ham or bacon can up the salt content (half a can of pea and ham soup from Crosse & Blackwell contains 1.3g), but many vegetable soups are just as salty. You’ll also get 1.3g of salt in half a can of Heinz vegetable soup and half a carton of New Covent Garden vegetable soup. Hands up if you only eat half a can.
Cheese
Salty cheeses, such as feta (2.51g per 100g) or halloumi (2.71g) have high levels, but other cheeses we might not think of as “salty” also contain a fair bit of salt. A 30g portion of Stilton contains around 10% of your RI, and cheddar doesn’t contain much less.
Let’s face it. For many of us, that cup of coffee in the morning is the only way to start the day. As the coffee market has diversified more and more, we have all turned our attention towards flavored coffee. But how safe is that sweet and flavorful beverage? The research comes from the University of Illinois, after a 12-year study, regarding coffee drinking habits in the US. As you will have the opportunity to see in the following paragraphs, the number of calories per cup increases significantly, when you add sweeteners, flavors, etc.
Coffee, from blessing to potential problem
A simple cup of coffee does not have too many calories, which makes it a perfect choice for those who are weight conscious. However, flavored coffee is another matter. When you add your favorites, such as sugar/sweeteners and cream, you are suddenly face-to-face with a beverage that contains a whooping amount of calories. The study undertaken by the specialists working at the University of Illinois confirmed that adding flavors to your coffee also means an additional intake of 69 calories per cup. Now comes the question: is it really worth it?
What did the study reveal?
We live in an age where obesity is a common problem, leading to life-threatening complications, such as heart attack, stroke, and even death. In such situations, more and more people turn to the best diet plan, to lose that extra weight and enjoy a good state of health. However, as it turns out, many of them have a hard time giving up their morning brew, not to mention the additional flavors used for its making.
Researchers at the University of Illinois analyzed 12 years worth of information, regarding coffee and tea drinking habits in the US. The data was provided by the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, encompassing more than 20.000 people and their coffee/tea drinking habits. It was revealed that approximately 51% of the Americans drink coffee on a regular basis, while only 26% have tea as their daily preferred beverage.
As it was mentioned above, drinking plain coffee is good and even healthy. The problems appear when you add flavors and sweeteners, upping the calorie intake. Two-thirds of the response prefer flavored coffee, adding sugar/sweeteners, cream, and other flavors to their daily coffee. By comparison, only a third of those who drink tea have the same habits. For many people, coffee is a must in the morning; in fact, there are many women who swear that this beverage is their number one weapon against the nasty morning sickness.
Why should you never drink flavored coffee?
The reason why you should never drink flavored coffee is simple. There are simply too many hidden calories in such a beverage. Even if you use sweeteners, such as half-and-half and honey, you are still taking in more calories than normal (by comparison to plain, black coffee). You might be enjoying more flavors with your coffee, but, at the same time, you are increasing your risks for weight gain. Moreover, such a flavored beverage interferes with diets, affecting your overall ability to reach a certain weight-loss goal.
Many would argue that the milk or cream added to the coffee provides the body with calcium, but the quantity is limited, while the calories are not. Apart from that, many of the calories come from sugar, which we all know, is all about empty energy. Black coffee remains the best alternative for a healthy start in the morning, as it provides all the benefits of this delicious beverage, without any additional calories.
In recent years, there was a trend to add butter to one’s coffee, to enjoy a unique flavor. This is even more damaging, as, aside from the empty calories that come from sugar, you are also taking in more fat than it is necessary. The same is valid for cream, which has a high content of fat. At first, it might seem like the added intake is not that big but, if you are already battling with excess weight, it matters. Even if you do not have such problems, you might still find yourself gaining weight, as the intake is daily and the body cannot use such calories.
What is the solution?
The obvious solution to the problem is to quit adding all these things to your coffee. At first, it might seem impossible, especially if you have already formed a habit of ordering your coffee from one of those fancy places (you cannot even begin to imagine how many calories there are in those blended, flavorful drinks). However, if you are persistent and committed to maintaining a healthy weight, you will learn to reduce the daily intake of sugar/sweeteners, cream, and other flavors, little by little.
A plain cup of coffee can guarantee that you start your day in a healthy manner. Say goodbye to sugar, as it contains only empty calories and it strips away your energy, affecting the proper functioning of the body. Eliminate artificial sweeteners, as these are just as damaging to your health and, please, forget all about flavors that can be added to coffee or cream/butter, as you do not need those additional fats. If you want to stop gaining weight, remember that black coffee is the best way to go. No calories, only pure energy.
Final word
Tomorrow, when you wake up, try a black cup of coffee. Remember that you are taking in unnecessary calories, which will have a negative impact on the weight loss process. Keep your coffee simple and, soon, you will see a genuine difference. Your brain might be tempted to go back to its old habits, as sugar can be pretty addictive but you are stronger than that. Use your willpower in the right direction and learn how to say no to flavored coffee. On the long-term, this is one of the best decisions you can take for your body and health in general.
Acid reflux is an uncomfortable experience a lot of children of all ages frequently struggle with. While it is not a dire or severely distressing health issue at first, it does feel very unpleasant. Also, it can result in further health complications down the road like inflammation of the sinuses and throat pain, especially when ignored. The inflammation and irritation of the esophagus can lead to injury hence the presence of blood in stool.
What a lot of people do not realize is acid reflux can be easily reduced by simply the consumption of certain foods. This would mean that the child does not have to take any special medicine or drug in order to quell symptoms, considering that the intake of chemical medication can sometimes cause damage to internal organs of the child in the long run.
Following some little changes in the child’s diet along with the intake of specific natural food products, acid reflux can become a thing of the past. Listed below are five foods that can help diminish acid reflux in older children.
Fennel
Fennel is a great natural combatant against acid reflux. It is an old-age natural remedy Germans swear by when treating acid reflux in children. Fennel has many health benefits, one of which is helping greatly in diminishing both heartburn and acid reflux. Fennel seeds contain in their chemical structure a key component called Anethole, which is capable of suppressing spasm of the stomach and gastrointestinal tract, a culprit for heartburn and acid reflux.
Yogurt
Yogurt is a tasty, simple approach to put acid reflux down a notch. Your kid will surely love it. There are a lot of reasons why yogurt is particularly useful in reducing acid reflux. One main reason is being chocked full of probiotics. These are beneficial bacteria that strengthen the digestive tract. The alkalinity level of yogurt also makes it very soothing to the throat. Besides desirable digestive properties, probiotics in yogurt is known to bring many other health benefits.
Almond Milk
Almond milk, a healthy substance by itself, is great in reducing the symptoms of acid reflux. Just a glass of almond milk during an episode of heartburn or acid reflux can make all the difference. Almond milk is an alkaline substance rich in vitamins D and E, loaded with much calcium. These components help neutralize stomach acid, soothe the stomach, and reduce heartburn and acid reflux.
Ginger Tea
Ginger has always been a well-known natural remedy. To deal with acid reflux, give the child ginger tea for it helps in the absorption of stomach acid which aides in digestion. It also promotes proper regulation in the flow of stomach juices to ensure proper digestion. Ginger is also composed of anti-inflammatory properties beneficial in the reduction of inflammation and irritation.
Oatmeal
Oatmeal, a classic example when it comes to healthy, balanced breakfast, but also has benefits in the management of both acid reflux and heartburn. Its key factor in reducing symptoms of acid reflux and heartburn lies in its high fiber content. Fiber helps prevent overeating, which is a common reason for acid reflux episodes in children. Fiber can also reduce the symptoms of acid reflux by helping in absorption and regulation of the stomach’s digestive processes.
Conclusion
Acid reflux and heartburn are both unpleasant and in no way a good experience. Thankfully, its symptoms can be dealt with by simply using natural remedies. The best part about using remedies is the undeniable fact of being affordable, natural, and favorable for the body in many different ways.
My younger son has food allergies and I’m absolutely obsessive about helping him steer clear of peanuts and tree nuts. Yet somehow, last month, I brought him home a pistachio sandwich.
Let me explain: I ran to the deli to buy chicken salad, but it was next to a salad with nuts. Trying to avoid that cross-contamination risk, I pivoted and grabbed Gus, who is 10, a slice of an Italian Combo hero, stupidly without asking what was in it. One bite in he said, “My mouth feels itchy and numb.” I ripped apart his sandwich and found a meat dotted with green flecks…oh no, pistachio? A quick call to the deli revealed he had eaten mortadella—an Italian pork studded with one of his worst allergens.
Thankfully, after an injection of epinephrine and a few hours in the ER, Gus was fine. But my husband and I were traumatized. Where else were there nuts lurking? Raising a child with a food allergy sometimes feels like being a hockey goalie, to use an analogy from Gus’s favorite sport: You’re always guarding against not only the obvious threats (that Thai takeout) but also the surprise wraparound ones you never see coming (nut meat, I’m talking to you).
And, in a way, having a food allergy is a paradoxical health problem: You are perfectly healthy. And yet the wrong food, in the wrong amount, without prompt administration of the right amount of epinephrine, can kill you. To make sure that we know all the wild cards out there, I consulted Sujan Patel, MD, an allergist/immunologist at New York University Langone Medical Center in New York, and David Stukus, MD, a Columbus-based spokesperson for the American College of Allergy, Asthma, and Immunology.
Chili
In 1986, a freshman at Brown University tragically died after she ate restaurant chili thickened with peanut butter. More recently, a 28-year-old dad in England reportedly died from anaphylaxsis after having a chili burger that likely contained peanuts. PB may not be a classic ingredient in this comfort food, says Dr. Patel, “but with chili cook offs and all kinds of ways to prepare things, you shouldn’t assume it is safe.”
RELATED: 31 Everyday Things You Can Be Allergic to
Still, the even more common danger in Mexican joints is the mole sauce. While mole’s most famous ingredient is chocolate (itself a potential disaster for the nut-allergic), peanuts or peanut butter may also be in the mix. “Sauces in general are dicey,” warns Dr. Patel, adding that Indian and Thai cuisines are particularly tricky. “Indian cooking uses cashews and almonds made into a paste and then used as a thickener.”
French fries
Most frites are a-ok, but when grabbing them out, do ask about the oil. Peanut oil is the go-to at some chains such as Five Guys, as well as smaller restaurants. “The interesting thing about peanut oil,” says Dr. Patel, “is that when it’s made in the U.S. it is so refined that almost nobody with a peanut allergy would react to it. But the problem is we don’t know if it is one from China, which are much less refined. We don’t tell people this because we don’t want them to take a chance.”
My family got stumped by cottonseed oil on a trip to Florida. (“Siri, is cottonseed a nut? Help!”) Nope, cottonseed oil, I’ve since learned, is not a nut, though it’s pretty terrible for your health.
Deli meat
My son’s kryptonite—mortadella—is a fancy Italian bologna that was banned from import to America for years due to an Italian outbreak of African swine fever, according to The New York Times. More expensive than bologna and speckled with fat and pistachios, it isn’t a big seller in the U.S (which almost explains how I could be half Italian-American, raised on antipasto spreads, and never heard of it). “A real fluke,” is how Dr. Patel described my son’s close call. And yet in 2016, BJ’s Wholesale Club issued a recall of deli meats for undeclared pistachios; they had been sent Citterio’s Mortadella by mistake and sold it—along with other meats sliced on the same equipment—without listing pistachio on the labels.
So how do you make sure your cold cuts don’t come with an unwanted side of nut residue? “Ask the person at the counter about any potential source of cross contact,” advises Dr. Stukus, who is also an associate professor of pediatric allergy and immunology at the Ohio State College of Medicine. And if they’re unsure, steer clear and opt for a prepackaged lunch meat with a nut-safe label.
Cocktails
Better ask what’s in that signature cocktail before you knock it back. Major vodka makers now sell bottles infused with hazelnut, almond, and other tree nuts. Frangelico gets its flavor from hazelnuts and Nocello from walnuts. And here’s a who knew: Many gins, including Bombay Sapphire, are flavored with almonds. Not even beer is completely safe. Brown ales may contain peanuts and/or macadamia, walnut, or other tree nuts.
Pet food
Is your toddler at the stage where she puts everything in her mouth? If she’s allergic to peanuts or tree nuts, watch out for your dog food, warns Dr. Patel. Pet foods are not subject to The Food Allergen Labeling and Consumer Protection Act—a law mandating that food labels clearly list out in plain English if they contain any of the top eight most common allergens (peanuts, tree nuts, milk, eggs, wheat, soy, shellfish, fish). But a scan of that puppy chow label should alert you to peanuts, he adds. (When in doubt, call the manufacturer.) Bird food almost always contains nuts, or has a nut warning. Our family’s solution is to buy food-grade sunflower seeds (labeled as nut-safe) for our outdoor feeders.
Gluten-free treats
A gluten-free cupcake or bread may seem harmless for all, but don’t be fooled: It can pack lupin, “a legume frequently used as flour in gluten-free products that can cross react with a peanut,” says Dr. Stukus. He notes that there have been many reports of people with peanut allergies having reactions from lupin. Also watch out for almond flour, sometimes used to hold things together in G-free sweets.
Another 2017 concern? Nut butters popping up in unexpected places. “I had a mom whose child had a reaction to kale chips,” shares Dr. Patel. “Randomly, they were made with cashew butter.”
To stay one step ahead, read labels every time (ingredients on familiar products can change). And, as I learned the hard way, always ask, even when it seems unlikely that a dish would contain nuts. When it comes to managing food allergies, you can never be too careful. My son knows this well: Hand him a banana and he’ll ask you, “Are there nuts in it?”
If your kid’s nail-biting or thumb-sucking habit drives you nuts, you’ll be happy to hear that a new study suggests those habits may have a health benefit.
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By Amy Norton HealthDay Reporter MONDAY, July 11, 2016 (HealthDay News) — If your kid’s nail-biting or thumb-sucking habit drives you nuts, you’ll be happy to hear that a new study suggests those habits may have a health benefit. Children who suck their thumb or bite their nails past preschool age may be less prone to allergic reactions when they reached adolescence, researchers said. What’s more, the study found that the protective effects seemed to last into adulthood. Still no one is suggesting that kids be encouraged to take up the habits, said senior researcher Dr. Robert Hancox, of the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. With thumb-sucking, in particular, there’s some concern that it can interfere with the alignment of the teeth as they come in. “We don’t wish to dismiss these concerns,” Hancox said. “But,” he added, “if a child has a habit that is difficult to break, maybe there is some consolation in the fact that there may be a reduction in the risk of allergies.” How could chronically putting your fingers in your mouth affect the risk of allergies? According to Hancox, it all relates to the “hygiene hypothesis.” The theory is that exposure to bacteria and other microbes early in life helps steer the immune system toward infection-fighting mode, and away from a tendency toward allergic reactions. But the study can’t prove that either habit directly lowered kids’ risk of becoming sensitized to allergens, Hancox acknowledged. However, he said, his team accounted for a range of things that influence kids’ odds of sensitization—including whether they were breast-fed, exposed to secondhand smoke, lived with pets, or had a family history of allergies. It’s “difficult to imagine” what other factors would explain the findings, Hancox said. At least one expert agreed that the hygiene hypothesis might explain the study’s results. Dr. Mika Hiramatsu, a pediatrician who reviewed the study, said, “This is another piece of evidence in support of the hygiene hypothesis.” She’s a spokesperson for the American Academy of Pediatrics. Hiramatsu pointed to similar connections seen in past studies: Kids who are in day care, live with pets, live on farms, or have older siblings tend to have a lower risk of allergies and asthma—suggesting that relatively germ-filled environments offer some protection. “I think this study adds weight to the idea that kids do better when they’re exposed to a variety of microbes,” Hiramatsu said. “Being in a ‘sterile’ environment is not actually the best thing for us.” That doesn’t mean parents have to let their kids “roll around in the dirt,” according to Hiramatsu. But they can “loosen up a little” about cleanliness, she said. The study findings are based on over 1,000 New Zealand children who entered the study at birth. Most were followed into adulthood. Based on parents’ reports, 31 percent of the children were either sucking their thumbs or biting their nails “frequently” between the ages of 5 and 11. Those kids were one-third less likely than their peers to develop allergic sensitization by the time they were 13. That meant they were less likely to test positive when their skin was exposed to allergy triggers like pollen and dust mites. The same pattern was still apparent at age 32, the researchers found. It’s not clear, however, what exactly that meant for people’s daily lives, Hancox said. The skin testing showed whether someone had an allergic response to a particular substance. It doesn’t necessarily mean that person was suffering symptoms day to day. The researchers did ask the study participants whether they’d been diagnosed with asthma or hay fever. And there was no link between thumb-sucking or nail-biting and the risk of having those conditions. Hancox and his colleagues report the findings in the July 11 online issue of the journal Pediatrics.More information The American College of Asthma, Allergy and Immunology has more on children’s allergies.
Some people, especially people, living in bustling and hustling cities, do not get to bed on time. With technological advances that keep people wired into the internet and at their offices, people are staying at work later, or staying up later in bed watching their online streaming television service. This keeps people up later and also makes it more difficult to wind down at bedtime. Proper awareness surrounding a healthy sleeping cycle can also be to blame for American’s in all cities not getting enough shut-eye. Across the board in US cities, residents are not getting their full 8 hours.
Although to many this may seem like it’s not a big deal, or that it doesn’t matter not getting enough sleep can seriously impact one’s health and quality of life. These effects can be cumulative and even felt after just one night. Some of the ways a lack of proper sleep can hinder the health are:
Unhealthy skin regeneration and premature aging
Skin is the largest organ in the body, and it is used to as a barrier between the human body and the rest of the world. What happens to the skin when the body doesn’t get enough time to restore itself? The skin does not regenerate properly, and people can end up with lack and sagging skin that is prematurely full of wrinkles.
Increased risk for obesity
For people to keep up their energy they need to either eat or sleep. Deprived people are shown to eat more calories through their day to keep them going when they are feeling slow and sluggish. This increase in calorie consumption can lead to weight gain and obesity. Getting the full 8 hours can reduce food cravings and keep the body at a healthy weight because it is not relying on calories to keep itself running.
Abnormal circadian rhythms
Humans run on circadian rhythms that regulate the entire body. Abnormal patterns throw the circadian rhythms off their cycle which can cause sickness, fever, and hormonal imbalances. Getting to bed and waking up on time with 8 hours keeps the circadian rhythms in harmony.
Increased risk for depression
Inadequate zzz’s can aggravate depression symptoms and increase someone’s risk of feeling depressed. People become irritable, less likely to exercise, and the brain cannot regenerate itself without enough bedtime, all of which can contribute to feelings of depression.
Inability to perform productively
The brain restores itself at night, and without enough shut-eye, the brain’s signals are not performing at their peak, leading to decreased performance at work and at all levels of life.
References:
What Time Does America Go to Bed – Homes.com Health.com
I was standing in a lift at Washington University in St Louis, with Professor Jeff Gordon and two of his students, one of whom was holding a metal canister.
“Just some faecal pellets in tubes,” she said.
“They’re microbes from healthy children, and also from some who are malnourished. We transplanted them into mice,” explained Gordon, as if this was the most normal thing in the world.
The lift doors opened, and I followed Gordon, his students, and the thermos of frozen pellets into a large room. It was filled with rows of sealed chambers made of transparent plastic. Peering inside one of these chambers, I met the eyes of one of the strangest animals on the planet. It looked like just a mouse, and that is precisely why it was so weird. It was just a mouse, and nothing more.
Almost every other animal on Earth, whether centipede or crocodile, flatworm or flamingo, hippo or human, is a teeming mass of bacteria and other microbes. Each of these miniature communities is known as a microbiome. Every human hosts a microbiome consisting of some 39 trillion microbes, roughly one for each of their own cells. Every ant in a colony is a colony itself. Every resident in a zoo is a zoo in its own right. Even the simplest of animals such as sponges, whose static bodies are never more than a few cells thick, are home to thriving microbiomes.
But not the mice in Gordon’s lab. They spend their entire lives separated from the outside world, and from microbes. Their isolators contain everything they need: drinking water, brown nuggets of chow, straw chips for bedding, and a white styrofoam hutch for mating in privacy. Gordon’s team irradiates all of these items to sterilise them before piling them into loading cylinders. They sterilise the cylinders by steaming them at a high temperature and pressure, before hooking them to portholes in the back of the isolators, using connecting sleeves that they also sterilise.
It is laborious work, but it ensures that the mice are born into a world without microbes, and grow up without microbial contact. The term for this is “gnotobiosis”, from the Greek for “known life”. We know exactly what lives in these animals – which is nothing. Unlike every other mouse on the planet, each of these rodents is a mouse and nothing more. An empty vessel. A silhouette, unfilled. An ecosystem of one.
Each isolator had a pair of black rubber gloves affixed to two portholes, through which the researchers could manipulate what was inside. The gloves were thick. When I stuck my hands in, I quickly started sweating.
I awkwardly picked up one of the mice. It sat snugly on my palm, white-furred and pink-eyed. It was a strange feeling: I was holding this animal but only via two black protrusions into its hermetically sealed world. It was sitting on me and yet completely separated from me. When I had shaken hands with Gordon earlier, we had exchanged microbes. When I stroked this mouse, we exchanged nothing.
The mouse seemed normal, but it was not. Growing up without microbes, its gut had not developed properly – it had less surface area for absorbing nutrients, its walls were leakier, it renewed itself at a slower pace, and the blood vessels that supplied it with nutrients were sparse. The rest of its body hadn’t fared much better. Compared with its normal microbe-laden peers, its bones were weaker, its immune system was compromised, and it probably behaved differently too. It was, as microbiologist Theodor Rosebury once wrote, “a miserable creature, seeming at nearly every point to require an artificial substitute for the germs [it] lacks”.
Most microbes do not make us sick. At worst, they are hitchhikers. At best, they are invaluable parts of our bodies
The woes of the germ-free mouse vividly show just how invaluable the microbiome is. Most of us still see microbes as germs: unwanted bringers of pestilence that we must avoid at all costs. This stereotype is grossly unfair. Most microbes do not make us sick. At worst, they are passengers or hitchhikers. At best, they are invaluable parts of our bodies: not takers of life but its guardians. They help to digest our food, educate our immune systems, protect us from disease, sculpt our organs, guide our behaviour, and maintain our health. This wide-ranging influence explains why the microbiome has, over the last decade, become one of the hottest areas of biology, and why Gordon – arguably the most influential scientist in the field – is so fascinated by it.
By studying our microbial companions, he is trying to unpick exactly how the microbiome is connected to obesity and its polar opposite – malnutrition. He is studying which species of microbes influence these conditions, and how they in turn are influenced by our diets, our immune systems, and other aspects of our lives. Ultimately, he wants to use that knowledge to manipulate the microbial worlds within us to improve our health.
Jeff Gordon may be one of the most respected scholars of the human microbiome, but he is also one of the hardest to get in touch with. It took me six years of writing about his work to get him to answer my emails, so visiting his lab was a hard-won privilege. I arrived expecting someone gruff and remote. Instead, I found an endearing and affable man with crinkly eyes, a kindly smile, and a whimsical demeanour. As he walked around the lab, he called people “professor” – including his students. His aversion to the media comes not from aloofness, but from a distaste for self-promotion. He even refrains from attending scientific conferences, preferring to stay out of the limelight and in his laboratory.
Ensconced there, Gordon has done more than most to address how microbes affect our health. But whenever I asked Gordon about his influence, he tended to deflect credit on to students and collaborators past and present – a roster that includes many of the field’s biggest stars. Their status testifies to Gordon’s – he’s not just a king, but a king-maker, too. And his figurehead status is all the more remarkable because long before the microbiome crossed his mind, he was already a well-established scientist who had published hundreds of studies on how the gut develops in a growing human body.
Professor Jeff Gordon, one of the world’s leading experts on the human microbiome, talks to students at Washington University in St Louis. Photograph: Mark Katzman
In the 1990s, he started to suspect that bacteria influence this process, but he was also struck by how difficult it would be to test that idea. The gut contains thousands of species of microbes. Gordon aimed to isolate parts of this daunting whole and examine it under controlled conditions. He needed that critical resource that scientists demand but biology withholds: control. In short, he needed germ-free mice – and lots of them – so he bred them himself. He could load these rodents with specific microbes, feed them with pre-defined diets, and do so again and again in controlled and repeatable conditions. He could treat them as living bioreactors, in which he could strip down the baffling complexity of the microbiome into manageable components that he could systematically study.
In 2004, Fredrik Bäckhed, a member of Gordon’s team, used the sterile rodents to run an experiment that would set the entire lab on a focused path – one devoted to understanding the connections between the microbiome, nutrition, and health. They inoculated germ-free mice with microbes harvested from the guts of conventionally raised rodents. Normally, the sterile rodents can eat as much as they like without putting on weight, but this ability disappeared once their guts were colonised. They didn’t start eating any more food – if anything, they ate slightly less – but they converted more of that food into fat and so put on more pounds.
Mouse biology is similar enough to that of human beings for scientists to use them as stand-ins in everything from drug testing to brain research; the same applies to their microbes. Gordon reasoned that if those early results apply to humans, our microbes must surely influence the nutrients that we extract from our food, and thus our body weight. That was a powerful insight. We typically think of weight as a simple balance between the calories we take in through food and those we burn through physical activity. By contrast, the idea that multitudes of organisms in our bodies could influence that balance was outlandish at the time. “People weren’t talking about it,” says Gordon.
And yet, in 2004, team member Ruth Ley found another connection between microbes and weight, when she showed that obese people (and mice) have different communities of microbes in their guts. The most obvious difference lay in the ratio of the two major groups of gut bacteria – the firmicutes and the bacteroidetes. Obese people had more firmicutes and fewer bacteroidetes than their leaner counterparts. This raised an obvious question: does extra body fat cause a relative increase in firmicutes – or, more tantalisingly, does the tilt make individuals fatter? Is the connection, as Gordon likes to put it, causal or casual? The team couldn’t answer that question by relying on simple comparisons. They needed experiments.
The mice that got microbes from lean donors put on 27% more fat, while those with obese donors packed on 47% more fat
That’s where Peter Turnbaugh came in. Then a graduate student in the lab, he harvested microbes from fat and lean mice, and then fed them to germ-free rodents. Those that got microbes from lean donors put on 27% more fat, while those with obese donors packed on 47% more fat. It was a stunning result: Turnbaugh had effectively transferred obesity from one animal to another, simply by moving their microbes across. “It was an ‘Oh my God’ moment,” said Gordon. “We were thrilled and inspired.”
These results showed that the guts of obese individuals contain altered microbiomes that can indeed contribute to obesity, at least in some contexts. The microbes were perhaps harvesting more calories from the rodents’ food, or affecting how they stored fat. Either way, it was clear that microbes don’t just go along for the ride; sometimes, they grab the wheel.
They can also turn it in both directions. While Turnbaugh showed that gut microbes can lead to weight gain, others have found that they can trigger weight loss. Akkermansia muciniphila, one of the more common species of gut bacteria, is over 3,000 times more common in lean mice than in those genetically predisposed to obesity. If obese mice eat it, they lose weight and show fewer signs of type 2 diabetes.
Gut microbes also partly explain the remarkable success of gastric bypass surgery – a radical operation that reduces the stomach to an egg-sized pouch and connects it directly to the small intestine. After this procedure, people tend to lose dozens of kilograms, a fact typically accredited to their shrunken stomachs. But as a side-effect, the operation also restructures the gut microbiome, increasing the numbers of various species, including Akkermansia. And if you transplant these restructured communities into germ-free mice, those rodents will also lose weight.
Experiments on mice using gut microbes could lead to a greater understandinding of the causes of obesity. Photograph: Deco Images II/Alamy
The world’s media treated these discoveries as both salvation and absolution for anyone who struggles with their weight. Why bother adhering to strict dietary guidelines when a quick microbial fix is seemingly around the corner? “Fat? Blame the bugs in your guts,” wrote one newspaper. “Overweight? Microbes might be to blame,” echoed another. These headlines are wrong. The microbiome does not replace or contradict other long-understood causes of obesity; it is thoroughly entangled with them.
Another of Gordon’s students, Vanessa Ridaura, demonstrated this in 2013 by using mice to stage battles between the gut microbes of lean and obese people. First, she loaded these human microbial communities into two different groups of germ-free rodents. Next, she housed the mice in the same cages. Mice readily eat each other’s droppings and so constantly fill their guts with their neighbours’ microbes. When this happened, Ridaura saw that the “lean” microbes invaded guts that were already colonised by “obese” communities, and stopped their new hosts from putting on weight. The opposite invasions never worked: the obese communities could never establish themselves in the gut when the lean ones were already there.
It’s not that the lean communities were inherently superior at taking hold in a mouse’s gut. Instead, Ridaura had tipped the battles in their favour by feeding her mice with plant-heavy chow. Plants contain a wide variety of complex fibres, and microbe communities from lean guts contain a wider range of fibre-busting species than those from obese guts. So, when the obese communities colonised lean guts, they found that every morsel of fibre was already being devoured.
By contrast, when the lean communities entered obese guts, they found a glut of uneaten fibre – and flourished. Their success only evaporated when Ridaura fed the mice with fatty, low-fibre chow, designed to represent the worst extremes of the western diet. Without fibre, the lean communities couldn’t establish themselves or stop the mice from putting on weight. They could only infiltrate the guts of mice that ate healthily. The old dietary advice still stands, over-enthusiastic headlines be damned.
An important lesson emerged: microbes matter but so do we, their hosts. Our guts, like all ecosystems, aren’t defined just by the species within them but also by the nutrients that flow through them. A rainforest isn’t just a rainforest because of the birds, insects, monkeys, and plants within it, but also because ample rain and sunlight fall from above, and bountiful nutrients lurk in the soil. If you threw the forest’s inhabitants into a desert, they would fare badly. Ridaura’s experiments emphasised that although the microbiome can help to explain what makes us fat or lean, it offers no simple solutions. And that’s something the team learned a second time, by studying a very different condition, in a very different part of the world.
Malawi has among the highest rates of child mortality in the world, and half of these deaths are due to malnourishment. One form of malnourishment, known as kwashiorkor, is especially severe and hard to treat. From an early age, a child’s fluids leaks from their blood vessels, leading to puffy swollen limbs, distended stomachs, and damaged skin.
Kwashiorkor has long been shrouded in mystery. It is said to be caused by protein-poor diets, but how can that be when children with kwashiorkor often don’t eat any less protein than those with marasmus, another form of severe malnutrition? For that matter, why do these children often fail to get better despite eating protein-rich food delivered by aid organisations? And why is it that one child might get kwashiorkor while their identical twin, who shares all the same genes, lives in the same village, and eats the same food, gets marasmus instead?
Gordon thinks that gut microbes are involved, and might explain the differences in health between children who, on paper, look identical. After his team carried out their groundbreaking obesity experiments, he started to wonder: if bacteria can influence obesity, could they also be involved in its polar opposite – malnutrition? Many of his colleagues thought it unlikely but, undeterred, Gordon launched an ambitious study. His team went to Malawi and collected regular stool samples from infants until the age of three; some had kwashiorkor, while others were healthy.
The team found that babies with kwashiorkor don’t go through the same progression of gut microbes as their healthy counterparts. Typically, these microbial communities change in the first years of life, in dramatic but predictable ways. Just as new islands are first colonised by lichens, then shrubs, then trees, so too is the infant gut colonised by waves of species that arrive in standardised patterns. But in kwashiorkor infants, microbiomes fail to diversify and mature correctly. Their inner ecosystems become stagnant. Their microbiological age soon lags behind their biological age.
When Gordon’s team transplanted these immature communities from children with kwashiorkor into germ-free mice, the rodents lost weight – but only if they also ate chow that mirrored the nutrient-poor Malawian diet. If the mice ate standard rodent chow, they didn’t lose much weight, no matter whose bacteria they were carrying. It was the combination of poor food and the wrong microbes that mattered. The kwashiorkor microbes seemed to interfere with chemical chain reactions that fuel our cells, making it harder for children to harvest energy from their food – food that contains very little energy to begin with.
The standard treatment for malnutrition is an energy-rich, fortified blend of peanut paste, sugar, vegetable oil and milk. But Gordon’s team found that the paste only has a brief effect on the bacteria of children with kwashiorkor (which perhaps explains why it doesn’t always work). As soon as they reverted to their normal Malawian diet, their microbes also boomeranged back to their earlier impoverished state. Why?
All ecosystems have a certain resilience to change, which must be overcome to push them into a different state. That’s true for coral reefs, rainforests, grassland – and a child’s gut. A poor diet could change the microbes within the gut. The dietary deficiencies could also impair the child’s immune system, changing its ability to control the gut microbiome, and opening the door to harmful infections that alter the gut communities even further. These communities could themselves start to harm the gut, stopping it from absorbing nutrients efficiently and leading to even worse malnutrition, more severe immune problems, more distorted microbiomes, and so on.
This is what microbiome scientists call dysbiosis – a state where the entire microbial community shifts into a harmful configuration. None of its members causes disease in its own right; instead, the entire community is at fault. It’s not clear exactly why the microbiomes of malnourished infants stall in their development in the first place. There are many possible reasons including antibiotic exposures, gut diseases, and poor diets, which vary from person to person. What’s clearer is that once microbiomes end up in a dysbiotic state, it can be hard to pull them back.
But Gordon is trying. His student Laura Blanton, the same woman who I met carrying that thermos of mouse droppings in the lift, recently implanted mice with microbes from either healthy infants or underweight ones. She then housed rodents from both groups in the same cages, allowing them to swap their microbiomes. When they did so, the normal communities from the healthy infants invaded and displaced the immature communities from the malnourished ones.
Blanton found that five species of bacteria from the healthy microbiomes were especially good at colonising the immature ones. When she fed this quintet to mice carrying the microbiomes of malnourished children, the rodents put on weight in a normal, healthy way. Rather than breaking down the amino acids in their diet for energy, they instead converted these nutrients into flesh and muscle.
This promising experiment suggests that the team might be able to create a probiotic cocktail of specially chosen bacteria that can turn a dysbiotic gut into a healthy one. But there’s reason to be cautious. Despite the hype that surrounds them, current probiotics – products that contain supposedly beneficial microbes – confer few big health benefits, because they contain small amounts of bacteria and consist of strains that are bad at taking hold in the gut. Gordon knows that if he wants to concoct better products, he must find ways of giving the incoming microbes a competitive advantage in their new homes. Maybe that means pairing the probiotics with foods that will nourish them. Maybe it means treating the human hosts as well as the microbes they carry, or training their immune systems to accept the newcomers.
Gordon is optimistic but cautious. As he sees it, studying the microbiome will ultimately help us to better treat conditions that are still mysterious and often intractable. But as he has said to me on more than one occasion, he’s wary of the intense hype that clouds the microbiome world. “I talk about the importance of sobriety and humility,” he says. “There’s lots of hope and expectation around this transcendent view of ourselves.” But he and other microbiome researchers still need to show that their discoveries can help people.
Bifidobacterium are used as a probiotic to promote good digestion, boost immune function, and increase resistance to infection. Photograph: Phototake/Alamy
Discoveries by Gordon and others have created the perception that the microbiome is the answer to everything. It has been linked to an absurdly long list of conditions that includes Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, irritable bowel syndrome, colon cancer, type 1 diabetes, type 2 diabetes, coeliac disease, allergies, atherosclerosis, autism, asthma, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, depression, anxiety, rheumatoid arthritis, stroke, and many more.
Many of these proposed links are just correlations. Researchers often compare people with a particular disorder to healthy volunteers, find microbial differences, and stop. Those differences hint at a relationship but they don’t reveal its nature or its direction. Studies by Gordon and others go one step further. By showing that transplanted microbes can reproduce health problems in germ-free mice, they strongly hint at a causal effect.
Still, they provide more questions than answers. Did the microbes set symptoms in motion or just make a bad situation worse? Was one species responsible, or a group of them? Is it the presence of certain microbes that matters, or the absence of others, or both? And even if experiments show that microbes can cause diseases in mice and other animals, we still don’t know if they actually do so in people. Beyond the controlled settings of laboratories and the atypical bodies of lab rodents, are microbial changes really affecting our everyday health? When you enter the messy, multifaceted world of dysbiosis, the lines of cause and effect become much harder to untangle.
There is still a lot about the microbiome that we do not understand, and some of what we think we know is almost certainly wrong.
Remember how obese people and mice have more firmicutes and fewer bacteroidetes in their guts than their lean counterparts? This famous finding worked its way into the mainstream press and the scientific literature – and it’s a mirage. In 2014, two attempts to re-analyse past studies found that the F/B ratio is not consistently connected to obesity in humans. This doesn’t refute a connection between the microbiome and obesity. You can still fatten germ-free mice by loading them with microbes from an obese mouse (or person). Something about these communities affects body weight; it’s just not the F/B ratio, or at least not consistently so.
It is humbling that, despite a decade of work, scientists are barely any closer to identifying microbes that are clearly linked to obesity, which has received more attention from microbiome researchers than any other. “I think that everybody is coming to the realisation that, unfortunately, a really compelling simple biomarker, like the percentage of a certain microbe, is not going to be enough to explain something as complicated as obesity,” said Katherine Pollard, who led one of the re-analyses.
These conflicting results naturally arise in the early days of a field because of tight budgets and imprecise technology. Researchers run small, exploratory studies comparing handfuls of people or animals in hundreds or thousands of ways. “The problem is that they end up being like the Tarot,” said Rob Knight, another leading microbiome scientist. “You can tell a good story with any arbitrary combination.”
Human geneticists faced the same problem. In the early 21st century, when technology hadn’t quite caught up with ambition, they identified many genetic variants that were linked to diseases, physical traits, and behaviours. But once sequencing technology became cheap and powerful enough to analyse millions of samples, rather than dozens or hundreds, many of these early results turned out to be false positives. The human microbiome field is going through the same teething problems.
It doesn’t help that the microbiome is so variable that the communities in lab mice can differ if they belong to different strains, come from different vendors, were born to different mothers, or were reared in different cages. These variations could account for phantom patterns or inconsistencies between studies. There are also problems with contamination. Microbes are everywhere. They get into everything, including the chemical reagents that scientists use in their experiments. But these problems are now being ironed out. Microbiome researchers are getting increasingly savvy about experimental quirks that bias their results, and they’re setting standards that will shore up the quality of future studies. They are calling for experiments that will show causality, and tell us how changes in the microbiome lead to disease. They are looking at the microbiome in even greater detail, moving towards techniques that can identify the strains within a community, rather than just the species.
They are also setting up longer studies. Rather than capturing a single screenshot of the microbiome, they are trying to watch the entire movie. How do these communities change with time? What makes them resilient or unstable? And does their degree of resilience predict a person’s risk of disease? One team is recruiting a group of 100 volunteers who will collect weekly stool and urine samples for nine months, while eating specific diets or taking antibiotics at fixed times. Others are leading similar projects with pregnant women (to see if microbes contribute to pre-term births) and people at risk of developing type 2 diabetes (to see if microbes affect their progression to full-blown disease).
And Gordon’s group has been charting the normal progression of microbes in healthy developing babies, and how it stalls in kids with kwashiorkor. Using stool samples collected from Bangladeshi and Malawian children over their first two years, the team has created a score that measures the maturity of their gut communities and will hopefully predict if symptomless infants are at risk of developing kwashiorkor. The ultimate goal of all of these projects is to spot the signs of disease as early as possible, before a body turns into the equivalent of an algal reef or a fallow field: a degraded ecosystem that is very hard to repair.
Children wait for water at a borehole near Malawi’s capital Lilongwe. Photograph: Mike Hutchings/Reuters
“Professor Planer!” said Jeff Gordon. “How are you?” He meant Joe Planer, one of his students, who was standing in front of a standard laboratory bench, complete with pipettes, test tubes and Petri dishes, all of which had been sealed in a transparent, plastic tent. It looked like one of the isolators from the germ-free facility but its purpose was to exclude oxygen rather than microbes. It allowed the team to grow the many gut bacteria that are extremely intolerant of the gas. “If you write the word oxygen on a piece of paper and show it to these bugs, they’ll die,” said Gordon.
Starting off with a stool sample from a Malawian child with kwashiorkor, Planer used the anaerobic chamber to culture as many of the microbes within it as possible. He then picked off single strains from these collections, and grew each one in its own compartment. He effectively turned the chaotic ecosystem within a child’s gut into an orderly library, dividing the teeming masses of microbes into neat rows and columns. “We know the identity of the bacteria in each well,” he said. “We’ll now tell the robot which bacteria to take and combine in a pool.”
He pointed to a machine inside the plastic, a mess of black cubes and steel rods. Planer can programme it to suck up the bacteria from specific wells and mix them into a cocktail. Grab all the Enterobacteriaceae, he might say, or all the Clostridia. He can then transplant these fractions back into germ-free mice to see if they alone can confer the symptoms of kwashiorkor. Is the whole community important? Will the culturable species do? A single family? A single strain? The approach is both reductionist and holistic. They’re breaking down the microbiome, but then recombining it. “We’re trying to work out which actors are responsible,” said Gordon.
A few months after I saw Planer working with the robot, the team had narrowed down the kwashiorkor community to just 11 microbes that replicate many of the disease’s symptoms in mice. None of these were harmful on their own. They only caused a problem when acting together – and even then, only when the mice were starved of nutrients. The team also created culture collections from healthy twins who didn’t develop kwashiorkor, and identified two bacteria that counteract the damage inflicted by the deadly 11. The first is Akkermansia, which is being studied as a way of reducing body weight, but seemingly guards against malnutrition too. The second is Clostridium scindens, which tamps down inflammation by stimulating certain branches of the immune system.
Opposite the tented bench, there was a blender that could take foods representative of different diets and pulverise them into rodent-friendly chow. (On a piece of sticky tape, affixed to the blender, someone had written “Chowbacca”.) Gordon’s lab could now explore the behaviour of Akkermansia and Cscindens, either in test tubes or in the gnotobiotic mice, and work out which nutrients the microbes needed. This allowed the team to compare the effects of the same microbes when fed a Malawian diet, or an American one, or on sugars from breast milk that have specifically evolved to feed beneficial microbes. Which of these foods works best? And which genes do the microbes switch on? The team can take any one microbe and create a library of thousands of mutants, each of which contains a broken copy of a single gene. They can put these mutants in a mouse to see which genes are important for surviving in the gut, liaising with other microbes, and both causing or protecting against kwashiorkor.
What Gordon has built is a causality pipeline – a set of tools and techniques that, he hopes, will more conclusively tell us how our microbes affect our health, and take us from guesswork and speculation to actual answers. Kwashiorkor is just the start. The same techniques could work for any disease with a microbial influence.
It is the right time to be doing this work. Our planet has entered the Anthropocene – a new geological epoch when humanity’s influence is causing global climate change, a loss of wild spaces, and a drastic decline in the richness of life. Microbes are not exempt. Whether on coral reefs or human guts, we are disrupting the relationships between microbes and their hosts, often pulling apart species that have been together for millions of years. Gordon is working hard to understand these partnerships to better forestall their untimely end. He is not just a scholar of the microbiome; he is one of its stewards.
Main photograph of faecal bacteria: Science Photo Library
This is an edited extract from I Contain Multitudes,published by Bodley Head
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If you’ve never done a very low calorie diet or even a pure water fast, you may have some trouble relating to this:
Science has proven that eating little to no food could actually be the key to getting rid of hunger and cravings, two major issues that annoy us heavily during just about any weight loss diet.
In other words, extreme diets like water fasting could ultimately be easier to handle than some of the way less restrictive weight loss diets.
And just for the record, I’m not writing this to convince you to go on some extreme diet, but because I think this really is an amazing phenomenon.
Zero food CAN equal zero hunger and cravings
In one study[1], they measured the intensity of hunger and cravings in two groups of people:
A water fasting group (people in this group ate no food at all).
A standard dieting group (people in this group ate a “balanced” weight loss diet).
And here’s the amazing thing that happened:
At the end of two weeks of going completely without food, the feelings of hunger and cravings dropped close to zero in the water fasting group. But in the standard dieting group, the hunger and cravings didn’t drop at all (they kept going strong throughout the diet).
One more study[2], in which people ate no food for as long as 117! days, also confirmed that “Hunger was virtually absent” during a water fast.
So no matter how hard that may be to believe, science has shown that the key to getting rid of hunger could actually be staying away from food altogether.
Now, let’s take a look at some of the diets that were less restrictive than water fasting (but still pretty restrictive).
A 400-calorie diet causes less hunger than a 1200-calorie diet
One study[3] compared a very restrictive diet (500 calories per day), to a “balanced” weight loss diet (1200 calories per day).
Even though people on the standard weight loss diet ate more than twice as many calories, they still reported stronger hunger than people who were on the more restrictive 500-calorie diet.
Another study[4] proved that a 400-calorie diet was able to reduce appetite, hunger, anxiety, and preoccupation with food in comparison to a balanced 1200-calorie weight loss diet (even though the diet allowed for three times as many calories).
So there you go. Against all common sense, modern science proves less food CAN mean less hunger.
Can any low calorie diet/fast reduce your cravings?
No, not exactly.
When it comes to hunger and cravings during rapid fat loss dieting, it’s not just about how much food you eat, but mostly about the kind of foods you eat.
So, unless you’re willing to completely give up food and do a pure water fast, low calorie diets will only decrease your hunger if you use a specific combination of foods.
We’re talking mostly protein-rich foods (not all of them will do the trick, but here’s a short list to get you started) and some other substances that have been proven to reduce appetite (like caffeine, for example).
But going into all the details would definitely be beyond the scope of this article.
The whole point I’m trying to get across here is, you should never dismiss a diet just because it seems too restrictive for you.
Or in other words, just because a food plan looks less restrictive on paper, that doesn’t automatically mean it will actually be easier to follow.
Does hunger really disappear 100% during water fasting?
Before I ever tried water fasting, I honestly thought I could never pull off something as extreme as going completely without food for days.
And when you try fasting for the very first time, things can get a little scary. Especially in those first couple of days, when you’re still transitioning into ketosis.
But once you get through that awkward first stage, hunger DOES become a lot easier to handle.
Now, this is just my personal experience, but once I get a few days deep into a fast, I sometimes feel like I no longer care about food at all. I literally feel like I could go on without food for weeks if I chose to.
But the truth is, even though water fasting can numb your hunger and cravings (while delivering insanely fast weight loss results), it certainly isn’t without flaws.
The number one problem with water fasting is the rapid destruction of “structural protein”, the basic building blocks of your muscles and vital organs[5].
So, while water fasting does have the amazing ability to virtually eliminate your hunger, I certainly can’t recommend it as a sustainable (long term) way to lose weight. But you can go here to learn more about a type of fast that was specifically designed to reverse that unnecessary destruction of your muscle mass and vital organ tissue.
