[News release] An International Team of Researchers Discover Strong Association Between Lifestyles of Indigenous Communities and Gut Microbial Ecologies

From the 25 March 2015 University of Oklahoma news release

…the team presents an in-depth analysis of the gut microbiome of the Matses, an Amazonian hunter-gatherer community, which is compared with that of the village of Tunapunco, who are highland small-scale farmers, as well as with urban city-dwellers in Norman, Okla.

In comparing the three groups to previously published studies in Africa and South America, the team observed a striking trend.  Human gut microbiota cluster together based on subsistence strategy more than geographic proximity.  Thus, hunter-gatherers in South America and Africa are more similar to each other than either are to rural agriculturalists or to urban-industrialists, even from neighboring populations.

It is now well accepted that human gut microbiomes are actively involved in health and that changes in our gut microbes from living more sanitized, industrialized lifestyles, has led to susceptibility to certain autoimmune disorders like asthma and allergies.

Also, it has become clear that industrialization has led to a decrease in gut microbiome diversity.  Moreover, in the gut of industrialized peoples, one particular bacteria genus is conspicuously absent, Treponema.  These bacteria have co-existed with humans and other primates for millions of years, so their absence in industrialized people is disconcerting.

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[Magazine article] Reducing Lifestyle Diseases Means Changing Our Environment

 

From the 5 February 2015 Scientific American article

How and why our bodies are poorly suited to modern environments—and the adverse health consequences that result—is a subject of increasing study. A new book The Story of the Human Body by Daniel Lieberman, chair of the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard, chronicles major biological and cultural transitions that, over the course of millions of years, transformed apes living and mating in the African forests to modern humans browsing Facebook and eating Big Macs across the planet.

“The end product of all that evolution,” he writes, “is that we are big-brained, moderately fat bipeds who reproduce relatively rapidly but take a long time to mature.”

But over the last several hundred generations, it has been culture—a set of knowledge, values and behaviors—not natural selection, that has been the more powerful force determining how we live, eat and interact. For most of our evolutionary history, we were hunter-gatherers who lived at very low population densities, moved frequently and walked up to 10 miles a day in search of food and water. Our bodies evolved primarily for and in a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

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Read the entire article here

 

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