Category: Health Tips

Very well worth a watch.

Click to view the video: https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1ErsQNUz8a/

Not only are betaglucans good for you, new research shows another nutrient in oats helps double wound healing!

Click to view the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMk5Q_Sb1Y0

Zac’s video is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5N4kDHhqG0I

In it he makes the point that unless a supplement “moved the marker” that it was supposed to affect it was not worth spending money on it.

He had blood tests done over the course of a year and had them interpreted by a doctor to determine if the supplements he was taking affected the tested markers.

Trouble is, there might be less than 20 vitamins and less than 100 minerals but there are over 40,000 phytonutrients, only 10,000 of whiuch have been identified. And we have identified many health benefits that acrue from those phytonutrients. They were not on Zac’s list of markers to test.

And we still have no widely use test for mitochondrial function. (Mitochondria are the engines in our cells that produce energy. One of the problems people are suffering from post-Covid gene therapy shots is low energy.)

All in all Zac’s video may or may not have some data valid to his circumstances but it leaves a lot of data out of the equation.

I was reminded of this most stronly two hours after watching his video when I read this:

“Overall, most of these organizations recommend a minimum of 250–500 mg combined EPA and DHA each day for healthy adults. This can be obtained from about 8 ounces of fatty fish per week.

One study followed 11,000 people who took an 850-mg dose of combined EPA and DHA every day for 3.5 years. They experienced a 25% reduction in heart attacks and a 45% reduction in sudden death .”(https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/how-much-omega-3).

Heart attacks are a downstream effect (one of a great many) not catered for in Zac’s simplistic assessment of supplements.

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