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Musings Report #23 6-6-15 Why Working in your Garden Might Make You Healthier, and Other Mysteries of the Microbiome
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For those who are new to the Musings reports: they are basically a glimpse into my notebook,the unfiltered swamp where I organize future themes, sort through the dozens of stories and links submitted by readers, refine my own research and start connecting dots which appear later in the blog or in my books. As always, I hope the Musings spark new appraisals and insights. Thank you for supporting the site and for inviting me into your circle of correspondents.
Why Working in your Garden Might Make You Healthier, and Other Mysteries of the Microbiome
Like me, you probably probably associate "garden" and "health" through the positive psychological effects of nurturing and harvesting plants, or the positive nutritional effects of eating organic veggies and fruits you've grown yourself.
But recent research on the human microbiome--the vast complex of microbes that live within us that help digest our food--suggests a much more intimate connection between our well-being and the health of our microbiome.
The importance of the microbiome reached the public three years ago in a spate of articles such as Your Microbiome Community Brings New Meaning to "We the People."
Advances in our understanding since then were summarized in 10 short articles in the March 2015 edition of Scientific American magazine. I recommend reading the entire series. (Hopefully your public library has a copy, or you can buy a digital copy for $5.99.)
It is now apparent that our microbiome affects not only our digestion but our immune system and response, our mental health and auto-immune diseases such as food allergies and asthma. What struck me as revolutionary is the synergistic feedback between our mind and body and our microbiome.
It is increasingly clear that many of the lifestyle (non-communicable) diseases that plague the modern world (heart disease, diabesity, etc.) are directly connected to the poor health of our microbiome.
Unsurprisingly, the more diverse the microbiome, the healthier it tends to be. Equally unsurprising, diets confined to a narrow spectrum of processed foods low in fiber result in an equally narrow spectrum of "good" microbes.
In effect, the modern diet of low-fiber processed foods and carbohydrates starves our microbe to the point that it can no longer provide the immune protection it supplied us when we ate a wider variety of unprocessed foods.
Our exposure to potentially beneficial microbes is also important--hence the health benefits of working with soil. Children who grow up on small farms where they are in close contact with soil and animals have a strikingly low rate of asthma and other auto-immune diseases compared to city-dwelling children who stay indoors most of their lives. This strongly suggests that exposure to soils and the outside world are critical in assembling a diverse, healthy microbiome.
Our microbiome changes with what we eat and where and how we live. Unfortunately, once our microbiome falls into a funk (as a result of a diet stripped of fiber and diverse nutrients), it is difficult to re-establish a healthy microbiome.
Fortunately, it is never too late to boost the diversity and health of one's microbiome. Eating a diet rich in fiber helps, as does exposure to healthy soils and the outside natural world that harbors a wealth of beneficial microbes.
It is thus no overstatement to say that the health of the soils we live with and nurture have a direct connection with our own health--not just nutritionally, but in our susceptibility to auto-immune disorders and digestive ailments as well as a host of other inflammation responses that characterize auto-immune diseases.
The many links between the microbiome our our complex immune system were especially revelatory, and they reminded me of the strong connection between exercise and our immune system and diabesity. When we exercise to exhaustion, even in short bursts, that work signals the body's immune system to rebuild tissues and reduce inflammation in positive ways.
In auto-immune disorders and lifestyle illnesses, the body's chronic inflammation is never reduced; the feedback provided by exercise and the microbiome are missing, and so the inflammation persists, deranging the immune response and degrading the organs and our well-being.
The research into exercise and the microbiome are filling in the blanks as to why exercise, exposure to a variety of soils and outdoor life, and a healthy, diverse diet rich in fiber are all essential to health--not just of the body, but of the mind as well.
Microbes in the Gut Are Essential to Our Well-Being
Among Trillions of Microbes in the Gut, a Few Are Special
Mental Health May Depend on Creatures in the Gut
Dietary effects on human gut microbiome diversity
Summary of the Blog This Past Week
Memo to the Fed and its Media Tool Hilsenrath: We're Not Here to Enrich Your Corporate Cronies 6/5/15
Cancel the F-35 and Build 21st Century Air Superiority with Drones 6/4/15
Being Healthy Is Unprofitable 6/3/15
Liberation Is Unprofitable 6/2/15
Is Our Economy's Cinderella Carriage About to Turn Into a Pumpkin? 6/1/15
Best Thing That Happened To Me This Week
Watched Kurosawa's 1963 classic movie "High and Low" again. The film, based on an Ed McBain story of a botched kidnapping, took an entire year to shoot and edit. Toshiro Mifune, identiofied with Samurai films by most Western fans, plays a modern-day businessman facing financial and professional ruin if he pays off the kidnapper. Though the film naturally has uniquely Japanese elements, it is a universal story of loyalty, duty and obsession.
Market Musings: Keeping an Eye on Oil
WTIC oil is at an interesting place, having bounced from the low $40s to $60. I've sketched two potential scenarios:
1. A retest of $42-$45 support, followed by another leg up that break above $60 resistance and hits the upper boundary of the expanding wedge/triangle.
2. Price breaks support around $45 and plummets to a new low. (Many analysts have a target around $33; others see the potential for even sub-$30 prices.) This new low would tag the lower boundary of the expanding wedge, setting up a retest of the $45 level, which would then become resistance.
A third scenario that seems unlikely, given the global recession that's gathering steam and OPEC's decision to maintain production at current levels, is a "pause that refreshes" in the $50s and a new leg up to $80.
We'll know which scenario is most likely once we see where price settles in the next downleg.
From Left Field
Korean Artist Beautifully Illustrates What Real Love Looks Like -- expressive and touching without being overly maudlin...
Here’s Why Elite Business Schools Like MIT Are Vectors of Elite Fraud -- in our current worship of MBAs, this isn't mainstream...
Paris Bridge’s Love Locks Are Taken Down -- fad for displaying personal shows of affection almost collapse the bridge--there's a metaphor here for the entire modern ethos...
Brazil's economic catastrophe -- BRICs growth was not as sustainable as many reckoned...
For American pundits, China isn’t a country. It’s a fantasyland. -- so true. Some guy hangs around a fancy Shanghai hotel for a few days and declares his faith in the "China story"....
McDonald’s To Open A Restaurant Run By Robots In Phoenix -- interchangeable commodity labor will be performed by machines...
Cheaper Robots, Fewer Workers --video series
LUCKY LUCIANO: Criminal Mastermind -- interesting parallel to corporate raiders...
Boeing just unveiled an amazing new electromagnetic pulse weapon -- targeted EMP--very useful, but is there a defense we can use against copycats?
If European Countries Were US Corporations -- Uber at $50 billion matches the GDP of Luxembourg, Cambodia or El Salvador...
I'm a liberal professor, and my liberal students terrify me This new understanding of social justice politics resembles what University of Pennsylvania political science professor Adolph Reed Jr. calls a politics of personal testimony.
This blood test can tell you every virus you’ve ever had -- a lot...
The Lost Man In 1948, a man was found on a beach in South Australia. The mysterious circumstances of his death have captivated generations of true-crime fanatics. --interesting long read...
"What stands in the way becomes the way." Marcus Aurelius
Thanks for reading--
charles |
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