JAN 29

4. JAN 29

Assigned Work

• Sonnenbergs, C 5, "Trillions of Mouths to Feed" (111-136) (25)

In-class

• Review of food biographies
• The N, S, P model

From Food Bios

• Here are some impressions I took from your food bios:

• Stories about being a picky eater.
• Interest in improving cooking skills.
• Athletes with big appetites! Fast metabolisms (now!).
• Healthy home food background, little fast food (Caribou)
• Healthy home food background, partly due to non-US cuisine.
• Nice connection with hunting and food supply.
• Great family food background, but now eating a bit more fast food, wants to expand repertoire x4
• Food challenges cooking in college after meal plan.
• Mix blessings from family food background - access to prepared food, but less home cooking.
• Great foodie parents, more than one mom a dietician or nutritional therapist.
• Music at least. Making food prep time special matters.
• Happy omnivore, many cuisines. Good cooking but too much use of prepared foods
• Good relationship with food, but maybe more snacking than ideal, pressure from "convenience" in college cooking.
• Another foodie. Strong connection to cuisine of ethnic origin but also American cuisine. Nice evolution in cooking habits, cooking a positive hobby now.
• More ready made foods these days, eating bt meals, lots of meat and starch. Waffle lover! Florence rocked your food world.
• Omnivore - background includes high end cuisine, but also fast food. Struggle with prepared foods, but now more cooking. Feels time pressure against cooking and exploration.
• Picky eater in recovery! Not a meat eater but yes to chocolate covered strawberries.

N, S, P - Fibre

• We'll study fiber more in our nutrition unit which starts next week. For today, let's make some estimates of fiber in our diets. The RDA is: Women under 50: 25–28 grams per day, Men under 50: 31–34 grams per day.

• Start with what you've eaten already today or look up values for some foods you typically eat.

• Me: 2 slices whole wheat bread: 4 grams, 1/2 cup ceci beans: 5, veg in salad: 3, fruit salad portion 2, 13 grams before dinner.

• What's you high fiber meal?

• Fiber supplements v dietary fiber sources.

• The N of fiber is clear, but what about the S and P? Visceral satisfaction of fiber. Fullness and sensation of happy gut.

Sonnenbergs, C 5, "Trillions of Mouths to Feed"

Microbiota extinction

• Not just from change in foods, fewer fermented foods, more sterile food and sterile environments.
• To improve gut diversity, eat fermented foods, foods with active cultures, and fiber. whole grains and rice. Don't sterilize your home environment. Pets and gardens help with our microbiota. (Elsewhere, food provokes an immune response. That's a good thing.) Variety is important. Different MB species like different things.
• Introduces acronym: MAC -- microbiota accessible carbs -- these are really complex carbs.

Our Microbiota: Recyclers

• Microbiota mechanisms: You are what you eat. You are what your microbiota eats and metabolizes.
• Nice metaphor of intestines to waste management. Note diffs bt small intestine and large in function.
• Life is hard for our M germs: no oxygen down there (must use anerobic processes, unlike our cells) and transit time is fast (hopefully!). So they make short chain fatty acids (SCFAs) that can metabolize in the blood stream where there is oxygen. You do get some calories from them once they are in an aerobic environment. But they are more important for us now (given that we don't have food insecurity) for their pharmacological and metabolic functions. (A reason why the "N" in NSP, should be an "H" for health.)
• Why feed the gut? Isn't that just more calories? (116) - No. people with high SCFA diets lose weight (Why? Satiety), decrease inflammation, less Western diet disease. Back to the connection between satiety and nutritional health. (N - S - P). For S, think of mouth satisfaction, stomach satisfaction, and gut satisfaction.

• Sig. claim: 117: "Providing more dietary fiber for MB fermentation would likely result in weight loss, lower inflammation, decreased Weatern diseases..."

History of research on fiber

• Field doctors: Thomas Cleave, 70s "The Saccharine Disease" "Bran Man" - his theory met with skepticism in medical community; Denis Burkitt (and Hugh Trowell) studied Westerners and Africans on fiber, stool quality, and health. 5x fiber, 2x transit. Overconsumption of refined carbs. (S&S mention here that public health attention didn't stay on refined Carbs. fear of fat, elsewhere "lipidphobia" took more attention.) "If you pass small stools, you have to have large hospitals."

• Early researchers didn't have the mechanisms. Now we do, sort of.

Carbohydrates' Bad Reputation

• Carb chemistry/metabolism basics -- 120: mono, di, poly-saccarides. also in our nutrition textbook chapters. Starches usually break down in small intestine, alot like sugar.
• Oligosaccharides: 3-9 monosaccharides. Oligosaccharides (found in legumes, whole grains, fruits and veg. also pectin and inulin (in onions) ferment in gut).

• Insulin resistance. Sugars and many starches cause insulin spikes leading to resistance. Big point here. At the level of MACs, plant chemical diversity is reflected in diversity of M. and it's products.

• 122: glycemic index and glycemic load. (We'll cover this later.) show how to look up food values. note that glycemic index isn't really an issue with most whole fruits and vegetables. Example: pumpkin has a high glycemic index, a low load. You want low load, high-MAC.

Measuring MACs

• Nitrition labels don't give you information about glycemic load or MACs no standard measure of dietary fiber (note discrepancies from above.) 124. So author’s prefer MACs as a term since it focuses on what the MB can eat from your carbs.
• Undernourished gut bacteria can start eating the mucus lining of the gut. (This was also in a segment of one of the gut movies.). Feed them or they'll eat you!

• RDAs: 29/38 grams. Actual Americans average: 15 grams/day. (Recall our African brothers and sisters at 100+ /day!) 126: Notes that not all complex carbs are available to the MB. Take away: More MACS, more fermentation, more SCFAs.

• Research discovering enzyme in nori, a seaweed based sushi wrapper: found in Japanese guts. Helps digest fish. Note: Terrior. Local adaptation of the M.

Rich and Poor MB

• 128: Dutch research on rich and poor M. richness of M correlates with anti-inflammatory effects, thinness, low insulin resistance, metabolic potential for pro-carginogenic compounds. French study interesting because it suggests that dietary change can quickly alter M diversity (richness).
• Gordon's twin study on obesity. also famous 2013 FMT mouse research: need M and M-supporting diet, not just the bacteria. Note caveat 129. Can't just benefit from the microbes alone. Fecal transplant with poor diet killed off beneficial bacteria.

Refining MACs out of the diet.

• What's wrong with refined cereal seeds (130). Wheat bread vs. Wheat berries. The form of the food matters to the fiber count. Highly milled whole wheat flour will behave differently in your gut that rough milled. Much industrial whole wheat is very finely ground.
• Industrial bread products even if they are called "whole wheat" must removes oils for shelf life.
• CF. whole wheat bread: 2g fiber. Cooked unmilled wheat berries (like my Farro/veg salad).
• What about the Inuit?
• What about excess gas? Interesting consolations.
• 135: Note their dietary advice. A high MAC, non-industrial omnivorous diet.

Some writing concepts

• A general challenge of good writing -- Getting outside of your head -- looking at the writing as if you didn't write it.

• Here are a few good writing concepts to look for in the samples on the handout.

• Flow -- How well does one sentence follow another? Do you notice places where flow is interrupted?
• Good starts -- Without good introductions and signals of organization and thesis readers are disoriented and confused. Set context by framing the topic. Tell your readers where you are going to take them. Go ahead and tell them your main point.
• Efficient writing -- Literally, how much you say with so many words. Awkward phrasing and limited word choice reduce efficiency.

• Review of Assignment Rubric

SW1: What's important about your microbiota?

• Stage 1: Please write an 800 hundred word maximum answer to the following question by Wednesday, February 5th, 2025, 11:59pm.

• Topic: We've been following science research on the microbiota and connecting that research to practical questions about our diets. Drawing on these resources in some detail, explain the role and functions of the microbiome and the ways it is connected with other majors bodily systems. Select from the research you have read to make your own statement on the importance of the microbiome to healthy eating.

• Advice about collaboration: Collaboration is part of the academic process and the intellectual world that college courses are based on, so it is important to me that you have the possibility to collaborate. I encourage you to collaborate with other students, but only up to the point of sharing ideas, references to class notes, and your own notes, verbally. Collaboration is also a great way to make sure that a high average level of learning and development occurs in the class. The best way to avoid plagiarism is to NOT share text of draft answers or outlines of your answer. Keep it verbal. Generate your own examples.

• Preparing your document for submission to the dropbox:

1. To assure anonymity, you must remove your name from the the "author name" that you may have provided when you set up your word processing application. For instructions on removing your name from an Word or Google document, [click here].
2. Please format your answer in double spaced text, in a typical 12 point font, and using normal margins. Do not add spaces between paragraphs and indent the first line of each paragraph.
3. Do not put your name in the file or filename. You may put your student ID number in the file, but not in the filename. Save your file in .docx format with the name: Microbiota.
4. Please add a "word count" at the end of your writing.
5. To turn in your assignment, log into courses.alfino.org, click on the “#1 - Points - SW1” dropbox.
6. Please try to meet the deadline for this assignment. We will be moving on to peer review and it is important to have all of the papers in for that work.

• Stage 2: Please evaluate four student answers and provide brief comments and a score. Review the Assignment Rubric for this exercise. We will be using the Flow and Content areas of the rubric for this assignment. Complete your evaluations and scoring by Sunday, February 9, 2025, 11:59pm.

• To determine the papers you need to peer review, use the animal list I sent you by email. Find your animal name on the list and then review the next four animals. If you get to the bottom of the list before reaching 4 animals, go to the top of the list and continue.

• Use this Google Form to evaluate four peer papers. Submit the form once for each review.

• Some papers may arrive late. If you are in line to review a missing paper, allow a day or two for it to show up. If it does not show up, go back to the key and review the next animal's paper, continuing until you get four reviews. Do not review more than four papers.

• Stage 3: I will grade and briefly comment on your writing using the peer scores as an initial ranking. Assuming the process works normally, most of my scores probably be within 1-2 points of the peer scores, plus or minus.

• Stage 4: Back-evaluation: After you receive your peer comments and my evaluation, take a few minutes to fill out this quick "back evaluation" rating form: [1]. Fill out the form for each reviewer, but not Alfino. You must do the back evaluation to receive credit for the whole assignment. Failing to give back-evaluations unfairly affects other classmates.

• Back evaluations are due TBD, at midnight.