The Perennial Q: What is the BEST DIET for PWP?

[PDConscience]

The means to determine the ultimate diet/supplements for you may have arrived (I just received my 'results & recommendations' - time will tell).

youtu.be/Lq-8Ltnv1CE(Not working as expected?)

[park_bear]

I recommend this book for diet guidance - by an M.D. and thoroughly referenced to the medical literature:

Eat Fat, Get Thin

amazon.com/gp/product/03163...

[WinnieThePoo]

Do the analysis and diet recommendations surprise you?

[PDConscience in reply to WinnieThePoo]

As suspected, my 'Results' were nowhere near as impressive as those of 'Ben' posted by MBA a couple weeks ago (below). The 'Wellness Index', 'Gut Score', and 'Metabolic Score' outlined in 'Ben's' results from last year are currently referred to as 'Metabolic Fitness', 'Microbial Richness', and 'Inflammatory Activity' (respectively) in the updated version of the app (the 'Body Score' mentioned in last year's version has since been eliminated). While my overall 'Metabolic Fitness' was determined to be 'average' (58% of Viome population), I scored a "Microbial Richness" (which is associated will 'resilience' and with having an adequate quantity/quality of microbial warriors to ward off threats) of "low". I got some consolation from my 'Inflammatory Activity' results determined to be on the 'low' end of the spectrum (the preferred outcome). In short, there's a lot of room for improvement.

The 'Recommendations' feature which outlines the food, supplements, etc., by which to tune up one's microbe population had a couple surprises. It currently categorizes a person's food recommendations as either 'Superfood', 'Enjoy', 'Minimize', or 'Avoid'. My total recommendations of 9 'superfoods' includes eggs (for 'beneficial' phospholipids), turkey (white, for tryptophan), salmon (wild caught Pacific, for EFAs and butyrate-producing bacteria), oats (for antioxident/anti-inflammatory activities of its polyphenols), yams/sweet potatoes (for potassium which 'decreases intestinal inflammation, balances intestinal PH, encourages growth of beneficial microbes and promotes a strong gut barrier), as well as sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, and sage (for similar reasons of benefit).

While I have plenty of foods in the 'Enjoy' and 'Minimize' categories to choose from, I have only 6 foods in the 'Avoid' category. Of these, I'm supposed to avoid pork (because it carries a nasty 'porcine picbirnavirus' which I'm poorly equipped to defend against), cashews (because they contain phytic acid which impairs 'absorption or utilization of essential nutrients' in those of us lacking the microbes to degrade it), as well as bell peppers, tomatoes, goji berries(!), and wild rice (for similar reasons of threat).

Ben's 'Results and Recommendations': youtu.be/zuVw8bGdLa8(Not working as expected?)

[WinnieThePoo in reply to PDConscience]

Rotten luck on the bacon sandwiches and cashews. But you have the detailed customised diet plan you think will lead you to better health . How about PD? What level of H pylori? enterobacteriacea? prevotellacea? Were you "doing anything" already (taking probiotics, eating a particular diet) or are these results "straight" based on your normal diet of the last several years?

[PDConscience in reply to WinnieThePoo]

In the nearly five years (4.5) since diagnosis, I've given a couple different diets a try to see if would affect overall energy and well being. In the past year I've shifted away from a serious attempt at a keto diet (which wasn't supplying me with any of its purported benefits) to one with a bit more protein and a lot more carbs. In other words back to a slightly improved 'Standard American Diet'. That said, my current microbe profile conforms fairly closely with the 'animal products' diet outlined in an excerpt from Viome's Ebook captioned, "You Are What You Feed Your Microbes":

“Let’s say you’re consuming a vegan diet without any animal products. If you tested your gut microbiota, you’d probably find you had a high proportion of Prevotella and other bacteria that metabolize plant-based dietary fiber. Then one day, you switch to a diet of all animal products - a ketogenic-like diet of fatty meats, eggs, and cheeses - and tested again, you’d see a shift toward fewer Prevotella and more Bacteroides.

"Another example of how great an influence your diet has on the composition of your microbiome focuses on fiber. One finding that crops up again and again in the scientific literature is that a higher intake of non-digestible fiber - found in all kinds of plant-based foods, from lentils to cucumbers to potatoes - correlates with a more diverse gut microbiota. Some have proposed that the lack of fiber in the typical Western diet (as compared to diets in other parts of the world and diets of the past) leads to a diminished community of gut microbes.”

*As mentioned above, my current 'Microbial Richness' results reads 'low' which constitutes that 'diminished community of [primarily Bacteroides genus] gut microbes'.

[WinnieThePoo in reply to PDConscience]

So, if I have that right, currently an "ordinary" diet, a bit skewed to meat from coming off keto, but not a microbiome management diet? And now you have the test results you will aim for a higher fibre diet? Fermented foods? Probiotic supplements? When will you measure to see if you have effected change. BTW have you seen the post "Food for thought..." ?

[jeeves19]

Please come back to us on this PD. I’m very interested although again I’ve just had a weekend of eating crap and wake up today feeling pretty good actually. C’est bizarre non?!

[WinnieThePoo in reply to jeeves19]

Yeah. Moi aussi - went to watch Stade Toulouse play Wasps on a day of croisssants and jam, french bread, crisps and prawn crackers (although some good stuff too). I think, in the absence of a true intolerance, like celiacs and wheat, then its the long term balance that counts, and short term indiscretions are ok.

[PDConscience in reply to jeeves19]

Jeeves, pls note reply (above) to WTP and others. I'll update if/when notable change occurs - cheers.

[Farooqji]

thanks for sharing

keep us updated on the results

[Farooqji]

Viome and DayTwo, tell you what foods to eat and what foods to avoid, based on your gut microbiota. Viome costs $399, DayTwo costs $299.

here's a comparison of the two

medium.com/@tdkehoe/my-viom...

[PDConscience in reply to Farooqji]

FOOD4ME Study: A recent six-month study funded by the European Union, investigated 1,500 participants in seven European countries. The participants were divided randomly into two groups. In one group participants were given personalized dietary advice based on their molecular data. In a second group participants were told to follow general dietary prescriptions, such as eating lots of fruits and vegetables, lean meats, and whole grains. Those who were in the personalized diet cohort fared far better than those in the one-sizefits-all diet group, making the researchers confident that personalized diets are the way forward.

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/275...

[WinnieThePoo in reply to PDConscience]

That study doesn't say that tailored diet based on lower level gene sequencing produces healthier people than those who just eat healthily. It says people given a tailor made diet with regular specific prompts achieved a better diet than those that just followed a loose model (like low carb, or "mediterranean")

"There was no evidence that including phenotypic and phenotypic plus genotypic information enhanced the effectiveness of the PN advice".

[jeeves19]

Mind you we have a few organisations here in the uk which purportedly tell you your food allergies (and it’s not cheap). They told me I was allergic to lots of things that I just couldn’t believe in the end, like COD !

[WinnieThePoo in reply to jeeves19]

Strictly they are intolerances not allergies since they do not provoke a histamine reaction. I used to work in pet food and had the benefit of working with a great nutrition scientist. This was a common problem with dog intolerance tests by vets. They would come back intolerant of every food. In practice many had no intolerances and the ones that genuinely had problems were down to a handful of common foods. No1 was wheat gluten. But this wasn't some abstract Perlmutter thing. They would poo blood, or get bad excema or some very obvious manifestation. The best allergy test was to eliminate the prime suspects from the diet and then reintroduce one at a time until the reaction was triggered.

[PDConscience in reply to jeeves19]

RE 'Testing Protocols' (from Viome's Ebook):

“What’s healthy for your friend or spouse may not be healthy for you. For this reason, to optimize the composition of your particular gut microbiome, you need to know its current composition—a list of the bacteria, viruses, fungi (including yeasts), archaea, bacteriophages, and parasites—and use that to determine what dietary and lifestyle changes you need to make. Traditionally, most gut microbiome tests rely on a technology called 16S sequencing. This technique sequences only a fraction of the DNA in the bacteria. This results in an incomplete view of the specific types of bacteria - the genus level only. This is problematic because it makes connections between microbes and health almost impossible to uncover, as the microbes within a single genus (e.g., Bacillus) can include both species that have beneficial effects and those that have harmful effects. Optimal health is associated with diversity at the species level, and without knowing these species you’ll be in the dark. The only way to fully understand your gut microbiome is by procuring the detailed species and strain names; the majority of 16S gut microbiome tests cannot identify these accurately, even if they claim otherwise.

"On top of this, 16S gut microbiome tests are unable to identify nonbacterial microorganisms: viruses (including bacteriophages), fungi (including yeasts), archaea, and parasites. Gut microbiome testing using 16S sequencing does not have the sensitivity to reveal all of the other nonbacterial microorganisms that play an important role in the health of your microbiome. They also don’t give any clue as to what all of the organisms are doing in your gut [and, as they sequence only DNA which can be dead/inactive versus Viome's live/active RNA sequencing, there is further room for innaccuracy]. With a 16S gut microbiome test you simply won’t be supplied the level of information you need to work with to optimize your particular gut microbiome.”

Source: bit.ly/2Kx65Ay

[WinnieThePoo in reply to PDConscience]

There is of course a stack of independent proof for the claims in that sales pitch, but nobody has yet provided the links