Microbial Metabolite Repairs Liver Injury by Restoring Hepatic Lipid Metabolism
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Researchers have discovered that a microbial metabolite produced by Lactobacillus bacteria can repair liver injury by restoring hepatic lipid metabolism, sparking excitement among commenters who note that this microbe is commonly found in fermented foods like kefir, sauerkraut, and potentially Makgeolli, a traditional Korean beverage. Some enthusiasts are already connecting the dots between this finding and the potential health benefits of consuming probiotic-rich foods, with one commenter joking "I'll drink to that!" As the discussion unfolds, others point out that the metabolite itself could be taken as a supplement, rather than relying on colonization by the bacteria, with some drawing parallels to tributyrin, a triester of butyric acid.
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Amazing finding. The statistics on liver damage from aflatoxins said to affect potentially 5 billion people. And of course in the US, with its high incidence of obesity has liver issues due to NAFLD. Then of course the heavy drinkers are all at risk.
and eat a kraut dog. Or a Ruben. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactiplantibacillus_plantaru...
Lactobacillus Plantarum is a super common probiotic that produces 10-HSA and other important metabolites
its commercial name is also known as lp299v which has been studied for decades, tons of studies
for example: https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4344/10/2/154
lp299v is extreme safe and can be taken in mega-doses however it will not colonize in the GI so would have to be taken routinely
From the article we are talking about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactiplantibacillus_plantarum and it’s apparently the most common fermenting bacteria for silage, and shows up in sauerkraut and kimchi.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lacticaseibacillus_casei is another interesting one that got split into a separate genus. No direct action has so far been found for this genus of bacteria, but it makes the GI tract more hospitable for a large number of probiotic species and less hospitable for others like C. difficile, which is one of the nastiest post-antibiotic infections one can get. So nasty it has the French word for “difficult” in its name.
Found in cheddar cheese and yogurt. Any time I have problems or have to take antibiotics I make sure to line up some of both for recovery.
The other things seem more plausible. Purely anecdotally, my step-dad always thought he was intolerant to gluten because of his reactions to British bread, but when he spent a lot of time in France and tried bread there, he was fine.
Could be there's something about the production process of the standard British "Chorleywood loaf" that aggravates some bowels.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chorleywood_bread_process
In general, I find it quite easy to believe that a lot of mass-produced foods contain what are essentially poisons, but I'm curious about evidential links (and I'm also aware that lots of naturally-occurring foods can be poisons if eaten too much, but that's a different question)
"I travelled somewhere and things improved" has the serious complication that you changed almost everything at once and possibly removed major stress sources. You were even outside of your own home - and buildings have ecosystems themselves anyway as well as just systemic faults.
I would just add that when he got back to Britain and tried baguette style bread there he found that he could tolerate it in Britain too.
Again, I'm just reporting a story as it was told to me because I was reminded of it in response to the previous comment.
The obesity epidemic started rapidly around 1980, but it's unlikely diet changed for the worse since then.
Also, it happened to lab animals and pets as well.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/abs/10.1098/rspb.2010...
Also, it appears to be correlated with low altitudes and interventions that cause you to move to higher altitudes cause weight loss.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
> Purely anecdotally, my step-dad always thought he was intolerant to gluten because of his reactions to British bread, but when he spent a lot of time in France and tried bread there, he was fine.
The American equivalent of this (people who go to Europe and think the bread is healthier because it's easy to digest) is because we fortify wheat and the extra nutrients esp. iron cause stomach discomfort.
Far less common now as dishwashers became cheaper and more ubiquitous.
Sixty plus years here and four generations of our family and most people we know rinse off plates and glasses and vigorously dry with a fresh towel.
In contrast, antibiotics often kill a strain of a few off completely, while suppressing everything else except for a few strains that resist the antibiotic, which also creates a massive opportunity for new bacteria to colonize. And these deficits are partially heritable.
While the multi-organ approach is interesting, this reads more like a fishing expedition that found patterns in noise rather than robust biological findings.
One of the big problems with most of these metabolites is that they work better in preventing the emergence of disease pathology than they do in ameliorating it. In other words, they aren't super reverse causal for disease. You'll note that in this study, the design was pretreatment with the beneficial metabolite to prevent injury, rather than rescue once injury occurred ([0], [1]).
It's difficult to make a prophylactic pharmaceutical/intervention - the market is smaller, the therapeutic index must be larger, and the insurance reimbursement is harder to get. I hope that someone smarter can break this open at some point. Natural products are the source of over 50% of approved drugs (though weighted heavily towards antibiotics), and the gut microbiome has really not been explored enough for its natural products.
As a note on the probiotics - be very skeptical of probiotic claims. Even if the microbe actually engrafts in your GI tract (a very big if), the probability that it is producing a given 'good' metabolite is unclear. Microbes have thousands of genes and they are constantly changing metabolism (=the metabolites they excrete) as a function of an innumerable array of factors including: energetic (what food sources are in the GI at that moment?), competitive (what competitor species are they sensing?), immune (what is the host immune state?), and physical (do I sense a high diffusion environment?) factors.
[0] From the abstract: "Here, we report that oral administration of 10-HSA prevented AFB1-induced gut epithelial barrier disruption and preserved mucosal T cell populations.
[1] From the methods: "Mice were randomly assigned into three groups. One group (n = 6) was pretreated with 10-HSA (AstaTech A10837) at 100 mg/kg/day in vehicle for one week and then aflatoxin-β1 (Sigma-Aldrich A6636) dissolved in DMSO (final concentration in water was 0.1%) was added to their drinking water for 21 days at a concentration of 5 mg/L. Another group (n = 6) was pretreated with the vehicle control for 1 week and then aflatoxin-β1 was added to their drinking water for 21 days at a concentration of 5 mg/L. The third group (n = 4) served as the negative control group and received vehicle for 1 week prior to DMSO addition to drinking water for 21 days.