Category: Health Tips

I read in a newsletter sent by Laura Frontiero, “Researchers looked at the gut bacteria of more than 34,000 people across the US and UK, and found 50 bacteria that are most closely associated with good health.”

I queried ChatGPT and, in conversation it provided this:

“There is an important catch: 22 of the 50 don’t have recognised species names. They are organisms identified from their genomes in stool samples but not yet cultured and formally characterised. The paper explicitly says that only 28 of the 50 have available isolate genomes, and even 24 of those 28 lack recognised species names.

The underlying ranking data identify the organisms by SGB (species-level genome bin) because many cannot yet be assigned a conventional species name. The paper confirms, for example, that SGB15317 is Faecalibacterium prausnitzii and SGB4198 is Eubacterium siraeum.

One thing I think is particularly important

I would not call all 50 “good bacteria” without qualification.

The researchers found associations, not proof that these bacteria cause good health. The paper itself explicitly says that causal inference is not possible from these data alone.

Also, this is a fascinating result for your food-sustainability work because the majority of the 50 are effectively unnamed organisms. That means we can’t yet simply say, for example, “eat food X to grow bacterium Y” for most of them.

The paper does, however, contain information on which foods and dietary patterns are associated with these bacteria. That’s the part I think would be especially useful to you.

So what foods appear to matter?

This is where the earlier ZOE research becomes particularly useful.

For example, Faecalibacterium prausnitzii, which is number 7 in the new health ranking, was previously associated with:

fruit
whole grains
nuts
vegetable oils
dark chocolate

and negatively associated with sugary drinks and animal-derived foods. ZOE notes that this bacterium is a major fibre-to-butyrate producer.

More broadly, the ZOE research consistently points toward:

Fibre-rich plant foods:
vegetables
fruit
whole grains
beans
pulses
nuts
seeds

Polyphenol-rich foods:
berries
nuts
seeds
extra-virgin olive oil
dark chocolate
tea
coffee

Fermented foods:
yoghurt/kefir
sauerkraut
kimchi
other fermented vegetables

as food categories associated with a more favourable gut microbial profile.”

Asnicar et al., “Gut micro-organisms associated with health, nutrition and dietary interventions,” Nature 650, 450–458 (2026)

The full conversation: https://chatgpt.com/share/6aa9a53e-0a24-83ec-bd51-26b2c52c2ba2

The average American eats between 65 and 250 pounds of it a year!

Click to view the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUbEkURbakw

I was preparing my breakfast meal (home made muesli, chia seeds, an apple, paw paw, mango, raspberries, blueberries, strawberries, blackberries, kiwi fruit and some yogurt) thinking about all the goodness therein and I realised the medical cartel and I have an almost diametrically opposed business model.

The medical profession is a sickness industry. They only get paid if and when you are sick. The sicker you are, the more they get paid. Because their ‘handlings’ – drugs – come with an average of 75 side-effects, commonly one of which is death, most older folk end up being on 5+ drugs. Each additional prescription intended to handle the symptoms of the earlier one.

These drug handlings necessitate repeat visits to keep getting repeat prescriptions, often for drugs like statins that have no need or benefit or perhaps worse, the flu shot which increases your risk of getting the flu. Or the Shingles vaccine which increases your risk of getting shingles 13 fold!

Quite simply, my business model is based on delivering the best nutrition I can to help your body maintain or restore optimal health.

After all, nobody ever got sick for lack of a drug. But most diseases have their roots in totally remedial conditions:

Lack of nutrients
Overload of toxins
Inadequate exercise
Stress

Many people are (falsely) led to believe that their genes are responsible for their (adverse health) condition.

Granted, there are genetic factors. For instance the MTHFR gene mutation that affects 40% of us which prevents the assimilation of key nutrients, so if you have issues that is worth getting tested.

But the genes you inherit are only part of the story. And not even the most important part. The relatively new science of epigenetics (from ‘epi’ Greek for above and ‘genetics’ the study of heredity and the variation of inherited characteristics) has revealed that what we eat and our lifestyle are both key in determining which genes are activated and which are not.

Bottom line, the more individual correct decisions you make and actions you take, the greater the aggregated positive effect on your attitude, health and longevity.

It’s less like an additive effect (1 + 1 = 2) and more like the multiplicative effect from combining anti-oxidants. From my book, “consuming cacao with berries may triple the absorption of the anti-oxidants (found in both foods) into the blood.”

Check out my book: https://howtolivethehealthiestlife.com/

or my greens powders: https://www.yourgreens.com.au

Discover the 5 breakfast foods you may want to rethink after 60 and 5 better options that can help support muscle health, strength, and mobility.

(Tom: One thing the video does not emphasize enough is that over 60 year olds need to pass a 30 gram protein intake threshhold at breakfast to activate muscle growth. This must contain 2.6 or more grams of the amino acid Leucine. That would require 5-6 eggs!

Whey protein is high in Leucine so adding that to your breakfast routine is a good call.

As is my Protein Blend: https://www.healthelicious.com.au/NutriBlast-Protein-Blend.html)

Click to view the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFGNuLXmvoc

He couldn’t remember meeting you. Not after five minutes, not ever. Every handshake was the first. Every conversation dissolved the moment it ended. And yet, in a quiet testing room in Montreal, something impossible was happening: he kept getting better at a task he swore, every single time, he had never done before.

For a while it made no sense to anyone. If the man remembered nothing at all, how could he be improving with practice? Was he faking? The puzzle sat at the center of one of the great mysteries of the brain — and the person who cracked it wasn’t a household name. She was a neuropsychologist named Brenda Milner, born in Manchester, England, on July 15, 1918.

And here is the first astonishing thing: as of today, she is still alive. At 108 years old, she is one of the oldest working scientists on Earth, still turning up at her lab at McGill University’s Montreal Neurological Institute well past the age of 100. The discovery she made in the 1950s is now taught in nearly every introductory psychology course in the world — and she has lived long enough to watch it become a foundation stone of an entire field.

Her patient was known to the public for decades by two initials: H.M. His real name, Henry Molaison, wasn’t revealed until after his death in 2008. In 1953, desperate to stop the epileptic seizures that were wrecking his life, Henry underwent an experimental operation in which the surgeon removed parts of both sides of his brain’s medial temporal lobes — including a small, seahorse-shaped structure called the hippocampus.

The seizures eased. But something else broke, catastrophically. From that day on, Henry could no longer form new lasting memories. He could hold a thought for a moment, carry on a normal conversation, recall his childhood — but the present slipped through his fingers the instant it happened. He would read the same magazine with fresh interest again and again. He would be introduced to the same doctor hundreds of times, always for the “first” time.

Here is what most people miss. Brenda Milner didn’t just document a tragedy. She asked a question no one else had thought to ask.

At the time, scientists believed memory was one thing — a single system handled by the brain as a whole. Henry seemed to prove that if you damaged it, memory failed. But Milner wondered whether that was the whole story. So she gave him a deceptively cruel little test: a mirror-drawing task. Henry had to trace a line between the two outlines of a star — but he could only see his hand and the paper reflected in a mirror, so everything was reversed. To move his pencil left, he had to move his hand right. It’s punishingly hard; most people fumble for days before it smooths out.

She had him try it. Then again the next day. And the next.

Every single time, he looked at the star and told her, with complete sincerity, that he had never attempted anything like it in his life. He had no memory at all of the previous days. And every single time, his hand was steadier and faster than the day before.

After about three days, Henry could trace that mirrored star almost perfectly — a smooth, practiced motion — while insisting he was doing it for the very first time. His mind remembered nothing. But his body, somehow, remembered everything.

Milner later called it one of the most exciting moments of her life. That single observation shattered the assumption that memory was one unified thing. It wasn’t. There were at least two separate systems: one for conscious memories — the facts, the faces, the events of a life — which depended on the very structures Henry had lost, and another for skills, the “how-to” knowledge of the body, which lived somewhere else entirely and had survived his surgery intact. You could lose the ability to remember your own experiences and still learn brand-new abilities. Knowing what and knowing how were two different kinds of knowing.

The ripples are almost impossible to overstate. The discovery reshaped how doctors understand amnesia, dementia, and brain injury. It transformed rehabilitation, showing that patients who can’t remember their therapy sessions can still, through repetition, rebuild real skills. It helped launch the entire field of cognitive neuroscience. Milner’s own student, Suzanne Corkin, went on to study Henry for nearly fifty more years, and his case became the single most important patient study in the history of memory research.

Henry Molaison spent his life unable to hold on to a single new day. Yet by patiently taking test after test he would never remember taking, he taught the world more about how memory works than almost anyone who ever lived. And the woman who saw the truth hiding in plain sight is, incredibly, still here to have witnessed all of it.

Sometimes the breakthrough isn’t finding a new answer. It’s realizing the question everyone was asking was the wrong one.