Emergency Physician, Educator, Researcher, interested in the microbiome, evolution, and medicine
My colleagues and I are currently studying the effects of sleep disorders on – you guessed it – gut microbiota. Sleep is one of the last frontiers in the study of lifestyle-related risk factors for chronic diseases. For instance, it has been well established that smoking reduces lifespan and increases […]
A student brought this article to my attention: A biodemographical study of life span in pre-industrial Finland has provided evidence that boys are impose a longevity cost to their mothers (but not their fathers). In other words, the more boys a woman has, the shorter her lifespan. It has been […]
Update 3/2/13: The authors of the PLOS One have elaborated on their results showing a link between sugar intake and diabetes in a blog entry entitled: Interpreting our findings from today’s study on sugars and diabetes They write: “The bottom line is that this is one of several studies from […]
Miriam Barlow published a study on a new methodology to reverse resistance evolution in E. coli. Read my synopsis of this article at the Evolution and Medicine Review.
The New York Times today has a nicely written article on the gut microbiota-breastfeeding-autoimmune connection by Moises Velasquez-Manoff. NYT has another piece on breastfeeding, mode of delivery (e.g. C section versus vaginal birth) and gut microbiota. Microbiota research has really become mainstream! JA
How important is mismatch anyway? The editors at EM Review brought my attention to this article by Marlene Zuk. Well worth the read.
Over the last 2 years, a wealth of evidence has accumulated supporting the notion that nutrients have predictable effects on the gut microbiota. These observations formed the rationale for our recently published Nutrient Signaling manuscript, published in the Quarterly Review of Biology, with updated observations here. Moschen and colleagues recently […]
Developmental programming is thought to be a source of many adult diseases, including obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. The notion that early life experiences, including nutrient transfer from the mother in utero, can shape the risk of later adult diseases has been termed the “predictive adaptive response”. This relationship first […]
John Hawks has a nice post covering some of the tradeoffs in human evolution that have left us vulnerable to vertebral fractures, foot problems, etc. Read his post here. Read the Science Magazine entire piece here.
This is the final installment on alternative metabolism of glucose during insulin resistance. In this post, I will describe how the addition of fucose to proteins – fucosylation – influences the risk of infection and modulates the microbiota. Fucose is a 6 carbon monosaccharide – like glucose, mannose, fructose, and […]
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