The Resistant Starch Challenge: Is It The Key We've Been Looking For?

[MeSci]

I've eaten an apple nearly every day of my life. It is a "detox" staple. Same reason I crave Kombucha: glucuronidation. Crave it big time every time I feel ill.

Ah, you must be a rat then.

 

[adreno]

"I was thinking about this, not only would a rapid rise in Bifidobacterial organisms cause an excessive immune response..

Would you think it could trigger a autoimmune condition?

 

[xjhuez]

I've eaten an apple nearly every day of my life. It is a "detox" staple. Same reason I crave Kombucha: glucuronidation. Crave it big time every time I feel ill.

Me too. They didn't replicate the results with whole apples, though - just a lot of pectin. Of course it's rats, so grain of salt.

 

[Soporificat]

More general effects than just thyroid, this is carried out by more fundamental cellular machinery. As I just said:

"I was thinking about this, not only would a rapid rise in Bifidobacterial organisms cause an excessive immune response, but an increase in bioenergetics is going to do exactly the same thing, only with less specificity regarding its effects."

Nearly every hormonal response will be influenced. Slow down the RS, now!

How much should I reduce it to, do you think? If it's doing great things I don't want to stop it and allow possible pathogens any breathing room to regroup, but obviously I don't want to let things get out of control.

 

[Violeta]

I've eaten an apple nearly every day of my life. It is a "detox" staple. Same reason I crave Kombucha: glucuronidation. Crave it big time every time I feel ill.

Do you think kombucha is okay? I crave it sometimes, but I thought all those different strains weren't good.

 

[Ripley]

Do you think kombucha is okay? I crave it sometimes, but I thought all those different strains weren't good.

OMG.. I drank a potent homebrewed kombucha the other day and it gave me terrible brain fog for four days straight. I'm just getting over it now. I don't think it was a "healing crisis" either. I felt great before I took it. Drank a glass and 40 minutes later was feeling bad. Every time I took RS, it just made it worse. Was in a total daze for a few days. I think I'm just about back to "normal" now. Feeling good again. Not doing that again.

 

[brenda]

But now we cannot eat half of what is on our plate.

OMG.. I drank a potent homebrewed kombucha the other day and it gave me terrible brain fog for four days straight. I'm just getting over it now. I don't think it was a "healing crisis" either. I felt great before I took it. Drank a glass and 40 minutes later was feeling bad. Every time I took RS, it just made it worse. Was in a total daze for a few days. I think I'm just about back to "normal" now. Feeling good again. Not doing that again.

It does that to me as well. Its the same feeling l get from cilantro, mercury being chelated.

 

[Gestalt]

It does that to me as well. Its the same feeling l get from cilantro, mercury being chelated.

Or the Kombucha could be just plain toxic carrying mycotoxins or it also could have leached lead from it's stored containers/manufacturing process adding to your personal toxic load. http://www.livestrong.com/article/134737-dangers-kombucha/

My gf drank it once, and shortly after got a massive yeast infection, lesson learned, never drink again.

My nutrigenomcis doc was also really against the stuff and said it had super high levels of free form glutamates that can quickly lead to acute excitotoxicity.

 

[Violeta]

Okay on the kombucha, thanks everyone.

 

[Ripley]

Or the Kombucha could be just plain toxic carrying mycotoxins or it also could have leached lead from it's stored containers/manufacturing process adding to your personal toxic load. http://www.livestrong.com/article/134737-dangers-kombucha/

My gf drank it once, and shortly after got a massive yeast infection, lesson learned, never drink again.

My nutrigenomcis doc was also really against the stuff and said it had super high levels of free form glutamates that can quickly lead to acute excitotoxicity.

Yeah... I have to agree with @Gestalt on this one. I was detoxing heavy metals last year and had a few other symptoms (palpitations, stressed out feeling, shooting pains, etc). Nothing like that this time. And it came on quick. This was just like someone clonked me over the head with a massive brain fog bat. My wife got spacey from it too, but she only had about 1oz. I'm not aware of too many watery 4oz drinks that have the power to detox heavy metals for 4 days, but what do I know?

The weird thing is that taking RS brought back the symptoms slightly. Like the bacteria in the kombucha were eating the RS and creating brain-fog juice. I'm not mycotoxin sensitive, but I did have yeast problems last year.

 

[Ripley]

I take 2tb twice a day, each dose with a probiotic: L. reuteri; L. rhamnosus; and L. acidopholus in the morning, then at night I take a Jarrowdophilus pill which has a whole range of your typical probiotics (no SBO's though).

I'll leave the medical questions to @Vegas but I wonder why people have this idea that lactic acid producing bacteria is better/safer than SBOs? Aren't lactic acid bacteria the kind that contribute to SIBO? And don't they tend to just get chewed up by stomach acids? And aren't they really difficult to change the numbers of via probiotics? I kind of feel like they are just old-school probiotics that don't do all that much (other than reduce acute diarrhea). Most people don't get enough SBOs — which are normally found in healthy guts — since most people live an overly hygienic lifestyle.

 

[Seven7]

testing my time stamp. Should say 8:17pm

 

[Soporificat]

I'll leave the medical questions to @Vegas but I wonder why people have this idea that lactic acid producing bacteria is better/safer than SBOs? Aren't lactic acid bacteria the kind that contribute to SIBO? And don't they tend to just get chewed up by stomach acids? And aren't they really difficult to change the numbers of via probiotics? I kind of feel like they are just old-school probiotics that don't do all that much (other than reduce acute diarrhea). Most people don't get enough SBOs — which are normally found in healthy guts — since most people live an overly hygienic lifestyle.

I am no expert for sure, as I'm just groping my way around, but what I understand is that Lacto and Bifido type bacteria will bind to the RS when taken with the starch, and that protects them on the way down into the colon, which is where they should be living. The RS acts as a kind of life raft. Also, I've been told that taking the RS on an empty stomach helps to clear out SIBO as it will do the same thing to the bacteria in the small intestines. It will bind with them and flush everything down into the large intestine.

 

[Soporificat]

I am no expert for sure, as I'm just groping my way around, but what I understand is that Lacto and Bifido type bacteria will bind to the RS when taken with the starch, and that protects them on the way down into the colon, which is where they should be living. The RS acts as a kind of life raft. Also, I've been told that taking the RS on an empty stomach helps to clear out SIBO as it will do the same thing to the bacteria in the small intestines. It will bind with them and flush everything down into the large intestine.

oh, and one more thing: yes, it is virtually impossible to shift bacterial populations with just probiotics, which is the whole point of the RS. The RS is a preferred food for the friendly bacteria (supposedly, anyway), etc... so by providing it you are creating a welcoming home for them, which will then shift the population of your gut towards them.

 

[Ripley]

I am no expert for sure, as I'm just groping my way around, but what I understand is that Lacto and Bifido type bacteria will bind to the RS when taken with the starch, and that protects them on the way down into the colon, which is where they should be living. The RS acts as a kind of life raft. Also, I've been told that taking the RS on an empty stomach helps to clear out SIBO as it will do the same thing to the bacteria in the small intestines. It will bind with them and flush everything down into the large intestine.

Yes. that's true. RS exhibits ligand mimicry. So, things that would ordinarily try to attach themselves to the mucosa will attach to RS. However, it's still difficult to influence a family of bacteria that numbers in the trillions with a few billions in pill. The prebiotics themselves probably do a better job of influencing those populations than the probiotics do. Soil Based Probiotics (which most people aren't exposed to these days) are easier to influence with probiotic pills due to the fact that they exist in smaller numbers in the gut.

And consider this from Chris Kresser:

Probiotics are actually a mixed bag with SIBO because SIBO often involves an overgrowth of D-lactate-producing probiotic species, and that causes a buildup of D-lactate in the gut, and a lot of the symptoms associated with SIBO are caused by that. So, you want to avoid in many cases taking any probiotics that have D-lactate-forming species like Lactobacillus acidophilus, which is, of course, one of the most common probiotics that people take. There’s a D-lactate-free product sold by Custom Probiotics that’s helpful.

I’ve also found soil-based organisms to be helpful when SIBO is present, and the one that I like the most right now is called Prescript-Assist...I’ve actually had a lot of success with it myself and with my patients in my practice....A few months ago, I started doing some research about it. There’s one study that was double-blind, placebo-controlled that lasted for quite a long time, especially for probiotics. A lot of the studies are pretty short in duration. And essentially the theory behind it is that we evolved in an environment where we were continually exposed to these soil-based organisms. Our ancestors were not scrubbing their vegetables and fruits before they ate them. They were taking them out of the ground and maybe wiping them off a little bit and eating them. They weren’t buying them in the store after they had been scrubbed, and they weren’t scrubbing them themselves. And the other thing is that the soil diversity and quality has changed a lot since the industrialization of agriculture, and so we’re just not exposed to the same number and types of soil-based organisms to the same extent that we probably were for most of our evolutionary history. And as we’re going to discuss in a lot more detail in a later question, there’s a lot of evidence that these soil-based organisms have profound immunoregulatory effects. In other words, we evolved with them over a long period of time, and our immune systems have a symbiotic relationship with them and function much better in their presence. And so the soil-based organisms are a different approach than the lactic acid-forming types of probiotics, and I’ve found that they’re better tolerated in people with SIBO. As a fairly unrelated side note, they tend to work better for constipation than a lot of other probiotics. Oftentimes, probiotics can make constipation worse, so the soil-based organisms and Prescript-Assist, I think, is a really good choice for people with SIBO.

And then another probiotic that can be helpful with SIBO is Saccharomyces boulardii, which is a beneficial strain of yeast, and I’ve had some success with that as well. [LINK]

Soil-based organisms do not produce significant amounts of D-lactic acid, and are a better choice for this reason.[LINK]

I'm really using mostly soil-based organisms like bacillus species because I find that first of all in the literature, they have stronger antimicrobial effects than a lot of lactic acid kinds of probiotics. They’re endospore formers. So what that means is they can survive the harsh acidic environment of the stomach and make it through to the colon where they’re supposed to get to completely intact. That’s because bacillus species bacteria are wild type adopted for the human gut. They’ve been surviving that passage for a very long time. We’ve been exposed to them through soil and untreated water for a long, long time, you know, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of years so we have this kind of symbiotic relationship with that.

The last reason is that in order to really significantly change the levels of gut bacteria and have a really significant impact, you have to take more than what exists in the gut already. So as I said before, lactobacilli and bifido bacteria if you supplement with them, there are a few problems. One is that they’re not wild type adopted for the gut so they’re very susceptible to the stomach acid. They're killed by the stomach acid. Number two, because they exist in concentrations of twenty trillion in the gut, you have to take an enormous amount of them to influence the population because otherwise it's kind of like just emptying a cup of water in the ocean. Right?

The bacillus species are only present in concentrations of hundreds of millions. So if you take capsules with two to four billion, you're really dramatically affecting the population...That’s really great and really effective and the good news about these, both of these that I’m going to mention are that they’re safe to take when you have SIBO.

The other problem with bifido bacteria and lactobacillus is that when you have small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, it usually involves an overgrowth of lactic acid forming species like Lactobacillus acidophilus, and of course guess what is in most probiotics...

...So those can actually make people worse that have SIBO and...a lot patients are like oh, I don’t do well with probiotics. You know, they make my symptoms worse. I get really constipated when I take them and that’s exactly what’s happening. So that kind of patient who doesn’t do well with probiotics or fermented foods they typically do really well with Prescript-Assist or the other soil-based organisms and I will always use those in those situations. [LINK]

 

[Ripley]

oh, and one more thing: yes, it is virtually impossible to shift bacterial populations with just probiotics, which is the whole point of the RS. The RS is a preferred food for the friendly bacteria (supposedly, anyway), etc... so by providing it you are creating a welcoming home for them, which will then shift the population of your gut towards them.

Right.. so the lactic acid probiotics are probably just a waste of time and will just probably just contribute to D-lactate forming bacteria into your small intestine (see above). The RS blooms the lactic acid bacteria in the colon far more than a pill will do anything. Plus, like most people, you are likely missing crucial SBOs, unless you make a habit of eating dirty vegetables and unwashed fermented vegetables.

 

[Soporificat]

@Ripley Personally, I've been a little reluctant to start on SBOs because some people have raised the issue that this might be dangerous for people with compromised immune systems. As a person with ME/CFS I most certainly have a compromised immune system, there is no doubt about that. However, I still want to try the SBOs because they sound so promising, particularly the ability of some of them to disrupt biofilms. I am very torn. I guess I'm kinda waiting around for other ME/CFS patients to take the plunge first, lol!

 

[Ripley]

@Ripley Personally, I've been a little reluctant to start on SBOs because some people have raised the issue that this might be dangerous for people with compromised immune systems. As a person with ME/CFS I most certainly have a compromised immune system, there is no doubt about that. However, I still want to try the SBOs because they sound so promising, particularly the ability of some of them to disrupt biofilms. I am very torn. I guess I'm kinda waiting around for other ME/CFS patients to take the plunge first, lol!

I understand. Do whatever makes you comfortable, but you wouldn't be the first ME/CFS patient to try them. Others have tried them in this thread if you dig through it. Prescript Assist is the most common one people start with. But, again, do what makes you comfortable. SBOs aren't known to be any more "dangerous" than other probiotics for immune-compromised patients. The dairy-based probiotic industry let loose some rumors about their safety, but it was just fear-mongering with nothing scientific to back up what they were saying. The fear-mongering appears to be working though, given that we are having this conversation.

If you can eat raw sauerkraut or kimchi, you should be fine.

 

[Ripley]

@Soporificat for what it's worth, here's a CFS website that recommends Prescript Assist for CFS patients.

Another individual with CFS recommends Prescript Assist here, and warns against acidophilus (see the "a change of gut flora" section).

And many people on this forum have taken it too.

So, there's that.

 

[Vegas]

So why would I have had the headaches and nausea after both sun and lamp, but now don't? I think that I was getting regular sun exposure when I got the symptoms.

There was a lack of sun for a long time recently in the UK, but I still don't seem to have had obvious adverse effects from the lamp, or the spring sun which has been quite intense.

Maybe my health has improved...?

I think that is a reasonable assumption, that your health has improved, but more specifically your gut has improved.

I generally refrain from speaking about my "detoxification" experiences, because I think (not you) that many people wouldn't accept that this as legitimate, but I found that the body can accumulate an enormous number of toxins, many of which I think are endogenously created.

I can't tell you how many times I would roll on the floor feeling poisoned, or get severe headaches that would last for days with nothing that would remedy them, people would tell me they could smell the strange odors coming from my skin, the times I would get confused or even lost places, and all the times I would drink tablespoons of epsom salts to try to desperately purge this stuff.

In retrospect though, I think the obvious reason I was so sick is not just that I had so much accumulated stuff, but because I pushed those detox channels as hard as I could while concurrently having very significant intestinal permeability. I just kept recycling stuff, and I had no business doing what I was doing while having this degree of intestinal permeability. So, I think my stubbornness to keep pushing was quite detrimental in terms of symptoms. It is my suspicion that your efforts at improving your GIT have been successful. You are keeping stuff in the gut and out of the blood, and you have likely reduced your accumulated burden of stuff.

Incidentally, I have had a heavy dose of nausea the last couple of days, which is not that common for me anymore, but this follows my weekend of sun exposure.