Sept 27, 2012 by JOHN SUMMERLY Probiotics: Your Gut Bacteria Can Reveal Whether You Are Diabetic or Not

The number of people developing type II diabetes has risen rapidly worldwide in the last decade, and scientists estimate that just as many people could be suffering from the illness without realizing it. New research now indicates that your gut bacteria can reveal whether you suffer from the disease.







"We have demonstrated that people with type 2 diabetes have a high level of pathogens in their intestines," says professor Jun Wang from the University of Copenhagen's Department of Biology and Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Basic Metabolic Research.



Important intestinal bacteria The 1.5 kilograms of bacteria that we each carry in our intestines have an enormous impact on our health and well being. The bacteria normally live in a sensitive equilibrium but if this equilibrium is disrupted our health could suffer. In the new study, scientists examined the intestinal bacteria of 345 people from China, of which 171 had type 2 diabetes. The team managed to identify clear biological indicators that someday could be used in methods that provide faster and earlier diagnosis of type 2 diabetes. The research, which was recently published in the scientific journal Nature, also demonstrated that people with type 2 diabetes have a more hostile bacterial environment in their intestines, which can increase resistance to different medicines.



Probiotics help people restore advantageous gut microflora in order to improve many aspects of their health. With balanced gut flora, the body’s immune system dramatically improves and is better able to produce necessary nutrients, in addition to other beneficial substances.



Probiotic strains enhance adhesion, mainly in large intestinal mucus. Treatment of intestinal mucus with probiotics significantly reduces the adhesion of pathogens. The ability to inhibit pathogen adhesion appears to depend on the specific probiotics and which pathogens are on the mucosal sites.



Not only diabetes but imbalances in gastrointestinal microbial communities have been associated with many diseases, and the use of probiotics has been successfully employed to artificially restore this unbalanced flora



Probiotics prevent the expression of Escherichia coli. They protect intestinal cells from the inflammation-associated responses by counteracting neutrophil migration, probably through the regulation of chemokine and cytokine expression.



Similar studies carried out on sufferers of type 2 diabetes in Denmark also discovered a significant imbalance in the function of their intestinal bacteria and composition. Future Danish studies will examine whether intestinal bacteria is already abnormal in people that are deemed to be at risk of developing diabetes. "We are going to transplant gut bacteria from people that suffer from type 2 diabetes into mice and examine whether the mice then develop diabetes," says another of the lead scientists behind the project, professor Oluf Borbye Pedersen from the University of Copenhagen and centre director at LuCamp, the Lundbeck Foundation Centre for Applied Medical Genomics in Personalised Disease Prediction, Prevention and Care. International research team investigates gut bacteria By working together, a team scientists from the University of Copenhagen and the Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI) was able to make to several breakthroughs in the field of 'metagenomics'. Scientists working on the EU research project MetaHIT have uncovered more than 3.3 million genes from gut bacteria found in people from Spain and Denmark. These genes could play a key role in understanding and treating a range of serious illnesses. According to Professor Karsten Kristiansen from the University of Copenhagen's Department of Biology, the recent discovery is an important step in the comprehensive international research that is currently underway to investigate the interplay between intestinal bacteria and health. "The European and Chinese working on the MetaHIT project were able to make important new discoveries about the relationship between intestinal bacteria and health. The new discovery indicates a possible connection between type 2 diabetes and the intestinal bacteria in Chinese people," Kristiansen says. "It is important to point out that our discovery demonstrates a correlation. The big question now is whether the changes in gut bacteria can affect the development of type 2 diabetes or whether the changes simply reflect that the person is suffering from type 2 diabetes."



Sources:

springerlink.com

sciencedaily.com

diabetesjournals.org

nih.gov



John Summerly is nutritionist, herbologist, and homeopathic practitioner. He is a leader in the natural health community and consults athletes, executives and most of all parents of children on the benefits of complementary therapies for health and prevention.

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