“I hope that in the next 20 years, we can help 10 million people to lose weight and regain health by changing the structure of flora through diet control according to the ‘enterogenic hypothesis of chronic diseases’.” This is the “one dream” of Professor Liping Zhao of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and he has written this dream in his blog.
In the bulletin board of the home page of the blog, there is also a paragraph that agrees with Nobel Laureate Lederberg’s view that “human is a superorganism with symbiotic microorganisms” and studies the relationship between the second genome of the human body, the DD microbiome, and health, as well as the relationship between the middle and lower genomes. The relationship between the microbiome and health and the regulation of this relationship by Chinese medicine. Li Haihui of the Emergency Department of Xingning People’s Hospital Professor Zhao Liping has a blog on Science.com called “Flora Regulation for Health”.
The new view of human body DD human body is a “super organism”, human genome and microbiome work together to influence the immune, nutritional and metabolic processes of the human body Before you get to the refreshing “gastrointestinal hypothesis of chronic diseases”, you first need to listen to Professor Liping Zhao of the School of Life Sciences and Technology at Shanghai Jiao Tong University explains the “new view of the human body”.
Nobel Laureate Riedberg called the human body a “superorganism” because, from a cellular point of view, the human body is not just a body made up of human cells, but a complex system made up of human cells and symbiotic microbial cells. The number of cells of bacteria is surprisingly 10 times more than the number of human cells.
From the genetic point of view, there are two “genomes” in the human body: one is the human genome, which is inherited from the parents and encodes about 25,000 genes, called the “first genome”; the other is the sum of genetic information of more than 1,000 symbiotic microorganisms, called the “first genome”. The other is the sum of the genetic information of more than 1,000 symbiotic microorganisms in the human body, called the “microbiome”, which can also be called the “metagenome” and encodes more than 1 million genes.
Human symbiotic microorganisms live mainly in the intestine, called the “intestinal flora”. The human body is sterile while in the mother’s body and only after birth does it begin to acquire commensal microorganisms from the environment. The intestinal flora matures and stabilizes by about 3 years of age, and the body’s immune system matures at this time, developing immune tolerance to normal members of the intestinal flora and accepting them as part of the body. From then on, the intestinal flora will be with us for life, affecting our life, sickness and death. It can be said that the intestinal flora is an acquired “second genome”.
The human genome and microbiome work together to influence the immune, nutritional and metabolic processes of the human body. Changes in the health status of a person will lead to changes in the composition of the symbiotic microorganisms in the body; changes in the composition of the symbiotic microorganisms in the body will also lead to changes in the health status of the body.
So, is the intestinal flora a health partner or a culprit of disease? Honestly, gut flora is both friend and foe. Gut flora can produce pharmacological activities, such as anti-inflammatory, analgesic and antioxidant, and toxicity, such as cytotoxicity, genotoxicity and immunotoxicity. “Intestinal flora occupies an important position in the physiological metabolism of the human body, a ‘super organism’, and if we are not careful and cannot treat these small beings well, they can turn around and become ‘triggers’ that cause various diseases ‘” Professor Liping Zhao said.
The enterogenic hypothesis of chronic diseases DD structured abnormal intestinal flora is likely to be the direct cause of obesity, hypertension, diabetes, coronary heart disease, stroke and other metabolic diseases caused by improper dietary structure Although there is a “new view of the human body” as the basis for understanding the “enterogenic hypothesis of chronic diseases Although there is a “new view of the human body” as the basis for understanding the “enterogenic hypothesis of chronic diseases”, you may still feel a sense of shock when you hear Prof. Liping Zhao’s view because you have long been accustomed to the traditional nutrition explanation of chronic non-communicable diseases such as obesity.
“Obesity is a very complex problem and cannot be explained only by ‘excessive energy intake’. Obesity is essentially a disease triggered by dysbiosis in the structure of the intestinal flora, and it can also cause diabetes, cardiovascular disease, colon cancer, breast cancer and many other chronic diseases.” He said, “If we don’t put the role of intestinal flora in human nutritional health in an important position, then the diseases that human beings are currently facing due to the improper structure of diet and nutrition are inevitable!”
This theory is known as the “enterogenic hypothesis of chronic disease”. This hypothesis believes that under the destruction of improper diet, the structure of intestinal flora becomes dysfunctional, various toxin-producing harmful bacteria rise and beneficial bacteria protecting the intestinal barrier decline, resulting in toxins entering the bloodstream, causing cellular toxicity, genetic mutations, and immune disorders, leading to common chronic diseases such as neurodegenerative diseases, cancer and metabolic diseases.
According to the definition of the Chinese Encyclopedia, a scientific hypothesis is “a speculative statement about the problem under study based on existing scientific knowledge and new scientific facts. It is an essential method of thinking that pushes understanding from the known to the unknown, and then changes the unknown to the known, and is an important form of scientific development.”
In this pair of provisions of scientific hypothesis, expresses two layers of meaning, one is that scientific hypothesis has the nature of speculation, hypothesis, not yet part of the scientific facts verified by practice; second is that scientific hypothesis is different from the unfounded subjective arbitrary assumptions, but based on the known established scientific knowledge and new scientific facts, is on the basis of these distilled scientific problems, and on the basis of a variety of scientific knowledge using analysis It is based on established scientific knowledge and new scientific facts, and is based on these foundations to distill scientific questions, and on a variety of scientific knowledge using analysis and synthesis, induction and deduction, analogy and imagination to form the basic ideas to answer the question.
The “enterogenic hypothesis of chronic diseases” has become a hypothesis because of the established scientific knowledge and new scientific facts. According to Prof. Liping Zhao, recent advances in research have shown that structurally abnormal intestinal flora may be a direct cause of metabolic diseases such as obesity, hypertension, diabetes, coronary heart disease and stroke, which are caused by improper dietary structure.
The Gordon group at the University of Washington has reported since 2006 in Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and other journals that the intestinal flora of obese mice can convert plant fiber, which the body cannot digest, into short-chain fatty acids for absorption and use by the body, increasing the body’s ability to obtain calories from food. The bacteria can also directly regulate the gene expression activity of the human fat metabolism pathway, reducing fatty acid oxidation and increasing the de novo synthesis of triglycerides. Transplantation of gut flora from obese mice to normal germ-free mice, which can become obese, suggests that the obesity phenotype can be transferred between individuals with the flora; whereas germ-free mice fed a high-fat diet are not obese, suggesting that some factor produced by the gut flora is necessary to initiate host obesity.
The Busling group of the French National Academy of Medical Sciences and its collaborators reported in 2007 in the journal Diabetes that high-fat foods significantly reduce bacteria that protect the intestinal barrier, such as bifidobacteria, and significantly increase endotoxin-producing bacteria, thereby increasing the amount of endotoxin entering the bloodstream, causing low-grade chronic inflammation and eventually leading to a range of metabolic disorders such as insulin resistance. If oligofructose is added to the feed while feeding a high-fat diet to maintain the bifidobacteria population, chronic inflammation can be significantly reduced while avoiding weight gain as well as insulin resistance.
Professor Liping Zhao said, “Although this is work done with animal models and what is the case in humans needs to be studied, this series of work provides a new perspective to explain the etiology of metabolic diseases and brings new hope for effective prevention and treatment of these diseases.”
Flora Regimen for Health DD The human microbiome is plastic, and a sensible diet can restore an imbalanced flora structure to normal For the individual person, the human genome is unique and difficult to change; in contrast, changing the microbiome is relatively easy to do. “If you put a change in your diet, you can see a significant change in the intestinal flora.” Professor Liping Zhao said, “The evidence that continues to emerge leads me to believe that the vast majority of people can achieve a healthy life if they have a very sensible dietary structure.”
Why are diets so important? This is because the human body is like a biological reactor, and the bacteria that live in the intestine weighing 1D2 kg also need a lot of nutrition to keep multiplying to maintain their numbers in the intestine, otherwise they will be excreted by the body every day, and then there will soon be no bacteria left in the intestine. “Therefore, we eat every day, not only for ourselves to eat, but also to meet the nutritional needs of the intestinal flora.”
However, of the food that is eaten every day, only the components that cannot be digested may reach the colon, such as plant polysaccharides (including cellulose, hemicellulose, pectin, resistant starch, etc.) and foods that are eaten too much to be digested (including fats, proteins, carbohydrates, etc.). Therefore, the composition of the food left to the intestinal flora determines what kind of bacteria can grow in the large intestine. If you eat a lot of animal foods, a lot of fats and proteins enter the large intestine before they can be completely digested, which increases the number of disease-causing bacteria in the intestine, reduces the friendly bacteria that protect the intestinal barrier function, and eventually decreases the intestinal barrier function, leading to an increase in antigens of pathogens in the blood and stimulating the body’s immune cells to produce an inflammatory response. The long-term, low-grade, systemic inflammation will eventually destroy insulin receptors and damage blood vessel walls, leading to diabetes, coronary heart disease, and other diseases. Our ancient healers have intuitively recognized this problem. Sun Simiao, the king of medicine, once said that the key to health is to “make rice fat into the belly, not make wine fat into?” . Modern Chinese medicine also has “fecal toxicity into the blood, a hundred diseases,” the saying is about this reasoning. The hypothesis of the intestinal origin of chronic diseases can provide new scientific ideas and advanced technical methods for digging and organizing the valuable experience of traditional Chinese medicine in health care and disease prevention.
The reason why modern diet structure makes many people sick is that too much fat and protein enter the large intestine and too little carbohydrate, which destroys the intestinal flora. In turn, if we can establish a reasonable dietary structure, we can regulate the intestinal flora, change the direction of the human body toward obesity and metabolic diseases, and bring health back to us.
This is not an optimistic vision of Prof. Liping Zhao, but a scientific experiment that he has physically carried out. “During the nearly 20 years from the graduation of my doctorate to the end of 2006, I weighed 90 kg and had a waist circumference of 115 cm, while many indicators such as blood pressure and blood lipids were higher than normal, as well as a relatively serious fatty liver. Now, through targeted regulation of the flora structure with TCM health food, my weight dropped to 73 kg and all indicators returned to normal levels, which eventually completely changed my body shape and health status.”