University of Virginia researcher Eyleen O'Rourke features prominently in a recent Charlottesville Daily Progress article about how diet and gut microbes influence pharmaceutical activity.  For those of us versed in nature's awesome complexity this is a ho-hum piece that shouldn't even make the news.  But for the medical research community, this is jaw-dropping stuff.

             O'Rourke's  team has found that diet and gut microbes vary from person to person and interact differently to the same drug, which explains why one person gets better on a certain regimen and another gets sicker.

             "We understand very little about all of the variables of diet and their outcomes," she said, adding "the idea was to get a glimpse of how deep this goes and if we can target the diet to improve medical outcomes.  We were specifically looking to see if we could modify diet to improve the outcome of cancer treatments, some of which prove toxic for some patients and not others."

             What they found was "mind-blowingly complex" and included the notion that "if you habitually eat potato chips and French onion chip dip, you can expect a lot of microbes to grow that thrive on that combination."   In other words, your gut microbes actually lobby your brain to crave things they desire. 

             "Part of the competition between the microbes is to control the host to make the  host do what is most beneficial for them.  One of the aspects of poor nutrition is how it affects the microbes and how the microbes then impact how the human body grows.  Once you have a healthy pool of microbes, it's important to keep it.  The change in the health and composition of microbes has a direct effect on the health of the individual."

              Although she didn't say it, apparently if you eat really good stuff it grows microbes that thrive on good stuff and they ask your brain to tell your mouth to ingest more good stuff.  That is such an amazing concept I can scarcely believe it.  I would not have thought about gut microbe differences in a million years.  And that they would be so self-serving, my my, tsk tsk tsk.

             How long do you think it will take these researchers to figure out what foods make healthier gut microbes?