All Videos for Gut Flora

How to Change Your Enterotype

What happens to our gut flora microbiome when we’re on plant-based versus animal-based diets?



What’s Your Gut Microbiome Enterotype?

There appear to be just two types of people in the world: those who have mostly Bacteroides type bacteria in their gut, and those whose colons are overwhelmingly home to Prevotella species instead.



Prebiotics: Tending Our Inner Garden

Why does our immune system confuse unhealthy diets with dysbiosis—an overrun of bad bacteria in our colon?



Treating Ulcerative Colitis with Diet

If the avoidance of sulfur-rich proteins and food additives can help prevent inflammatory bowel disease, might similar dietary changes help prevent relapses of ulcerative colitis?



Are Green Smoothies Bad for You?

Eating intact grains, beans, and nuts (as opposed to bread, hummus, and nut butters) may have certain advantages for our gut flora and blood sugar control, raising questions about blending fruits and vegetables.



How to Reduce Carcinogenic Bile Acid Production

The consumption of animal fat appears to increase the growth of gut bacteria that turn our bile acids into carcinogens.



Putrefying Protein and “Toxifying” Enzymes

Certain gut bacteria can “retoxify” carcinogens that your liver successfully detoxified, but these bacteria can be rapidly suppressed by simple dietary changes.



How May Plants Protect Against Diabetes?

Protective properties of whole plant foods against diabetes include antioxidants, lipotropes, fiber, and the ability to suppress the estrogen-producing bacteria in our gut.



Preventing Brain Loss with B Vitamins?

One week on a plant-based diet can significantly drop blood levels of homocysteine, a toxin associated with cognitive decline and Alzheimer’s disease. Without vitamin B12 supplementation, though, a long-term plant-based diet could make things worse.



Peppermint Oil for Irritable Bowel Syndrome

Peppermint essential oil should be considered the first-line treatment for IBS.



Why Do Plant-Based Diets Help Rheumatoid Arthritis?

Rheumatoid arthritis may be triggered by autoimmune friendly fire against a urinary tract infection bacteria called Proteus mirabilis, which could help explain why sufferers randomized to a plant-based diet experience such remarkable benefit.



Bowel Wars: Hydrogen Sulfide vs. Butyrate

Sulfur dioxide preservatives in dried fruit, sulfites in wine, and the putrefaction of undigested animal protein in the colon can release hydrogen sulfide, the rotten egg gas associated with inflammatory bowel disease.



Stool pH & Colon Cancer

Fermentation of fiber in the gut may help explain the dramatic differences in colorectal cancer incidence around the world.



Preventing Ulcerative Colitis with Diet

The toxic rotten egg gas hydrogen sulfide may explain why animal protein is associated with inflammatory bowel disease.



Preventing Crohn’s Disease with Diet

Diets centered around whole plant foods may help prevent Crohn’s disease through the benefits of fiber on the maintenance of intestinal barrier function and the avoidance of certain processed food additives such as polysorbate 80.



Juicing Removes More than Just Fiber

The majority of polyphenol phytonutrients may be bound to fiber, helping to explain the marked difference in health impacts between whole fruit and fruit juice.



Gluten-Free Diets: Separating the Wheat from the Chat

How common is gluten sensitivity? Are there benefits of gluten? Why does the medical profession explicitly advise against people who suspect they might be gluten intolerant from just going on a gluten-free diet?



Breast Cancer and Constipation

The reason why women who have more frequent bowel movements appear to be at lower risk for breast cancer may be because bile acids absorbed from our intestines concentrate in the breast and have a estrogen-like tumor promoting effect.



Eggs and Choline: Something Fishy

Too much choline—a compound concentrated in eggs and other animal products—can make bodily secretions smell like rotting fish, and may increase the risk of heart disease, due to conversion in the gut to trimethylamine.



Which Seaweed Is Most Protective Against Breast Cancer?

Nori seaweed snacks may favorably alter estrogen metabolism by modulating women’s gut flora, resulting in decreased breast cancer risk.



Avoiding Chicken to Avoid Bladder Infections

Handling chicken can lead to the colonization of one’s colon with antibiotic-resistant E. coli that may result in bladder infections in women.



Gut Feelings: Probiotics & Mental Health

We’ve known our mental state can affect our gut flora, but might our good bacteria be affecting our mental state?



Preventing the Common Cold with Probiotics?

Though prebiotics may be preferable, probiotics may reduce the risk of upper respiratory tract infections.



Preventing & Treating Diarrhea with Probiotics

Probiotics may help prevent antibiotic-associated diarrhea, and appear to speed recovery from acute gastroenteritis.



Carnitine, Choline, Cancer, & Cholesterol: The TMAO Connection

Expanding on the subject of my upcoming appearance on The Dr. Oz Show, a landmark new article in the New England Journal of Medicine shows that choline in eggs, poultry, dairy, and fish produces the same toxic TMAO as carnitine in red meat—which may help explain plant-based protection from heart disease and prostate cancer.



Flaxseeds & Breast Cancer Prevention

Young women at high risk for breast cancer given just a teaspoon of ground flax seeds a day showed fewer precancerous changes.



Titanium Dioxide & Inflammatory Bowel Disease

People eating conventional diets may ingest a trillion microparticles of the food-whitening additive, titanium dioxide, every day. What implication might this have for inflammation in the gut?



The Best Baby Formula

Exclusive breastfeeding for a full six months may, ironically, improve our children’s taste for vegetables—whereas children fed formula grow up with increased rates of inflammatory diseases such as asthma, cancer, and diabetes.



The Ice Diet

The water content of plant foods may help explain why those eating plant-based diets are, on average, so slim. Can ice be thought of as having even “fewer” calories than water, since the body has to warm it up?



Tipping Firmicutes to Bacteroidetes

Certain phytonutrients may tip the balance of healthy gut bacteria in favor of flora associated with improved weight control.



Boosting Good Bacteria in the Colon Without Probiotics

Certain good bacteria in our gut can turn the fiber we eat into an anti-inflammatory, anti-cancer compound—called butyrate—that we absorb back into our system. We may be able to boost the number of butyrate-producing bacteria by eating a plant-based diet.



Fawning over Flora

The good bacteria in our gut can digest the fiber we eat, and turn it into an anti-obesity compound—called propionate—that we absorb back into our system.



Uprooting the Leading Causes of Death

Death in America is largely a foodborne illness. Focusing on studies published just over the last year in peer-reviewed scientific medical journals, Dr. Greger offers practical advice on how best to feed ourselves and our families to prevent, treat, and even reverse many of the top 15 killers in the United States.



The Exogenous Endotoxin Theory

The endotoxemia (bacterial toxins in the bloodstream) that follows a meal of animal products and results in inflammation and stiffened arteries may come from the food itself, rather than from one’s own gut bacteria.



Viral Meat Spray

Bacteria-eating viruses (bacteriophages) have been approved as meat additives to reduce the risk of Listeria and Campylobacter found in processed meat and poultry products, but there’s a concern they could spread toxin genes between bacteria.



Flax and Fecal Flora

The trillions of good bacteria in our gut can be thought of as an additional organ—metabolizing, detoxifying, and activating many crucial components of our diet. The formation of lignans from phytonutrient precursors found predominantly in flax seeds is one such example.



Sometimes the Enzyme Myth Is True

There are a few examples of plant enzymes having physiologically relevant impacts on the human diet, and the formation of sulforaphane in broccoli is one of them.



Safest Source of B12

Since foods are effectively a package deal, what’s the best way to get vitamin B12 (cobalamin)?



Bulking Up on Antioxidants

Even when fiber and fruit and vegetable intake are kept constant, choosing foods richer in antioxidants may increase stool size, which is associated with lower cancer risk.



Just the Flax, Ma’am

Ground flax seed consumption may decrease breast cancer risk by slowing one’s menstrual cycle. It may also control prostate enlargement as effectively as the leading prescription drug.