iPad Notebook export for The Good Gut: Taking Control of Your Weight, Your Mood, and Your Long-term Health
Quotes from
The Good Gut: Taking Control of Your Weight, Your Mood, and Your Long-term Health
that I liked.
Each short quote is preceded by the words “Highlight” & indication of the location in the book.
Highlight(pink) – Page 4 · Location 180
Our gut is home to more than 100 trillion bacteria.
Highlight(pink) – Page 13 · Location 287
Gut bacteria live, and in fact thrive, on leftovers, primarily the complex plant polysaccharides known as dietary fiber. Whatever the bacteria don’t (or can’t) consume, for example seeds or the outer skin of corn kernels, is excreted some 24 to 72 hours after the initial esophageal descent.
Highlight(pink) – Page 16 · Location 324
The bacteria in the gut divide quickly, capable of doubling in number every thirty to forty minutes.
Highlight(pink) – Page 17 · Location 339
Those who have studied the Hadza estimate they consume between 100 to 150 grams of fiber per day. To put these numbers into context, Americans typically eat only 10 to 15 grams of fiber per day.
Highlight(pink) – Page 24 · Location 431
In mid-nineteenth-century London, people obtaining their water downstream of the Thames were almost four times more likely to get cholera than people drinking farther upstream.
Highlight(pink) – Page 56 · Location 860
Farmers have known for decades that giving low doses of antibiotics to livestock such as cattle, sheep, chickens, and pigs can increase their weight by up to 15 percent.
Highlight(pink) – Page 73 · Location 1078
The pathogenic E. coli from the undercooked hamburger you ate arrives in your digestive tract hoping for a quick and easy entrance into your intestinal wall. But as this pathogen attempts to penetrate your body’s internal surfaces, before it even tries to bushwhack its way through the mucus layer it must first contend with a gauntlet of resident microbes.
Highlight(pink) – Page 81 · Location 1187
Our personal approach to hand-washing is one example of how to be proactive about an emerging body of data, even in the absence of a definitive scientific study. We often do not have our children wash their hands before eating if they have just been playing in our yard, petting our dog, or gardening. However, after visiting a shopping center, hospital, petting zoo, or other area that is more likely to harbor pathogens from other humans or livestock, washing hands is mandatory. We also increase the frequency of washing during cold and flu season or if we have potentially come into contact with chemical residues (e.g., pesticides).
Highlight(pink) – Page 82 · Location 1201
People not inclined to owning a pet needn’t worry. Dirt is another way to increase your exposure to environmental microbes.
Highlight(pink) – Page 88 · Location 1258
You can think of that container of yogurt in the fridge as an external digestive tract, predigesting the lactose before it ever enters your mouth. This means that yogurt can be eaten by some who are lactose intolerant, but for those who can digest lactose, there is some forfeiture of calories to the bacteria.
Highlight(pink) – Page 93 · Location 1329
When studying the children at the Washington, DC, day care center, researchers found, somewhat unexpectedly, that not only did the probiotic-consuming children have lower rates of gastrointestinal infections, they also had fewer upper respiratory tract infections as well. Other trials encompassing thousands of people have also found fewer acute upper respiratory infections and less antibiotic use among probiotic consumers of all ages.
Highlight(pink) – Page 95 · Location 1353
In the West, other familiar fermented foods include sauerkraut (fermented cabbage), pickles (fermented cucumbers or other
vegetables), and more recently kombucha, a popular fermented, sweetened tea.
Highlight(pink) – Page 100 · Location 1426
Because companies can benefit from selling a probiotic without demonstrating its effectiveness, there is little incentive to explore new potential probiotics. Therefore, probiotic availability is primarily limited to just a few groups of traditional types—those that have been consumed in fermented foods for ages.
Highlight(pink) – Page 104 · Location 1477
Synbiotics are also becoming more widespread in stores, but we commonly make our own synbiotics by having a bowl of yogurt
(probiotic) with banana slices (inulin-containing prebiotic) on top. Or we top a salad containing onions (prebiotic) with a dressing made from sour cream or kefir (probiotic).
Highlight(pink) – Page 115 · Location 1622
Unlike beer and yogurt, ethanol and lactic acid are rare end products of the fermentation that takes place in the gut. The most commonly manufactured fermentation products in the gut are short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs).
Highlight(pink) – Page 115 · Location 1626
Oxygen is required to generate calories from SCFAs, and the gut is an oxygen-free environment. As we absorb SCFAs from our gut into our own oxygen-containing tissue, our bodies wring out the last remaining calories from the otherwise indigestible fiber.
Highlight(pink) – Page 130 · Location 1830
A kernel of wheat, or wheat berry, is made up of the endosperm, the bran, and the germ. The endosperm contains all the food, in the form of simple starches, to feed a newly growing wheat plant. The bran coats the outside of the wheat berry in a hard shell of fiber. The germ, a fat-filled reproductive organ that also contains fiber, germinates to create a new plant. Thousands of years ago people began using millstones to grind wheat berries into a meal, bringing about the birth of flour. However, this stone-ground wheat would be unrecognizable next to the factory-produced flour available today. …
But manufacturers struggled to keep flour fresh during the months it took to transport it from the mill to the consumer. To solve this problem, producers realized that if they removed the oily germ (the part that goes rancid) from wheat before milling, they could extend its shelf life almost indefinitely. What they didn’t know was that by removing the germ, they were also removing a large amount of the dietary fiber, not to mention all the other healthful micronutrients that are found in wheat germ. Millers then realized that by removing the bran as well, they could provide consumers with white, fluffy flour—composed entirely of endosperm—that many people considered better looking, more palatable, and easier to bake with.
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Technology has provided us “rich man’s flour” inexpensively, but our microbiota’s diet has become poorer. As
Highlight(pink) – Page 132 · Location 1864
What about the Inuit? They eat almost no fiber and are very healthy.
Highlight(pink) – Page 189 · Location 2595
For the microbiota, the aging gut can be a place of dramatic environmental shifts. The speed at which food transits through the digestive tract lessens, which can lead to chronic constipation. Age-related decline in our sense of smell and taste and a decrease in our ability to chew can dramatically change our diet to one deficient in fibrous plants and chewy meat.
Highlight(pink) – Page 214 · Location 2903
A small garden can be a conduit to increased microbial interactions. If space for a garden is limited, explore creative ways to use the space that you have. Pots on a patio or even a window-box herb garden can encourage contact with natural microbial life that occurs in soil and on plants. With space being a premium in the San Francisco Bay Area, we have converted a portion of our front yard to raised-bed garden boxes.