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A deadly gut infection may come down to a sugar in ice cream
- stmfreak 9y agoJust goes to show how little the FDA can even imagine to protect us against.
- dboreham 9y agoIs this more or less "foreseeable" than speculative execution side channel timing attacks?
- Gibbon1 9y agoIf this is true, that confirms suspicious I've had that particular things in our diet can cause issues with gut flora. It's problematic for people because we have very little control over what gets added, and some additives end up everywhere.
- taeric 9y agoI thought modern views on ulcers confirmed that view. Does it not?
- Gibbon1 9y agoI apparently had a south east Asian protozoan that I picked up in the late 1980's. Stomach issues went away after a 6 week course of a rather nasty anti-protozoan. That the issue would wax and wane and I was intolerant to dairy. But not after is what made me consider that. So not just that some bug can mess you up, but that some bugs may well prefer certain chemicals in our diet. Eat a particular food and whatever starts growing and pumping out toxins or proteins your immune system has issues with.
- bitexploder 9y agoI don't know about food science, but... In infosec for a while. Not surprised at all about the recent side channels. Spectre / Meltdown are novel, but not new. Edit: I bet for people in the right field of medicine/research this is interesting but not a big surprise.
- slack3r 9y agoIn general, the FDA over-regulates rather than under regulates. A comment is too short to summarize the reasons why, but I would refer interested people to Eliezer Yudkowsky's Inadequate Equilibria ― there is a 50 page dialogue between two humans and an alien visitor on the FDA.
- smallnamespace 9y ago> the FDA over-regulates rather than under regulates. It seems more accurate to say it does both simultaneously, or that it mis-regulates. It fails to regulate some things that it should have (such as this), and it regulates other things that are better left alone. And we should expect any noisy estimator to do that in general: there are always going to be both false positives and false negatives. One thing we should be careful about though is to distinguish between arguments over the relative propensity of either, vs. the relative weighting that should be given to each. E.g. sometimes people say 'no, the FDA over-regulates rather than under-regulates', when what they really mean is that the find that specific instances of over-regulation to be very harmful, while they think that the examples of under-regulation can be ignored.
- c3534l 9y ago> In general, the FDA over-regulates rather than under regulates. I STRONGLY disagree. The FDA is underfunded and only looks into a tiny minority of cases deemed worth their effort. Walk into a "health" food store and look at how many unregulated drugs are on the shelf. They put out fires more often than they prevent them.
- notadoc 9y ago> In general, the FDA over-regulates rather than under regulates. In general, the FDA under-regulates dramatically.
- Daishiman 9y agoEliezer Yudkowsky is neither a bromatologist nor a pathologist, so as far as I' concerned his speculation on the subject has minimal value.
- dogecoinbase 9y ago
- QAPereo 9y agoIt also goes to show that Soylent was (before 1.5 at least) a bad idea. I wonder if it still is, given that they switched one disaccharide (trehalose) for another (isomaltulose).
- mirimir 9y agoWell, it could protect us by making all synthetic ingredients illegal. Because there's no way to really know that some novel ingredient is safe. But that ain't gonna happen.
- refurb 9y agoYou realize there are a number of naturally occurring chemicals that are deadly as well right?
- dmoy 9y agoNonsense! Now let me go eat this small jar of apple seeds I have saved up from a month of an-apple-a-day.
- gonzo 9y agoProbably won’t hurt an otherwise healthy adult. https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/318706.php https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/318706.php
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- mirimir 9y agoAnd people have learned not to eat them, through trial and error. Just as we're learning not to eat trehalose ;)
- mikeash 9y ago“[Trehalose is] a disaccharide made up of two glucose molecules linked with a sturdy α,α-1,1-glucoside bond, and it’s naturally found in low levels in some bacteria, fungi, plants, and invertebrates.” Oops.
- mirimir 9y agoSure, but who eats enough of those things to get enough to be problematic? Virtually all of the trehalose in food products is synthetic.
- mmagin 9y agoIt gets worse. Apparently you can pass this off as "natural flavor" in the US: http://nagaseamerica.com/news_release/treha-trehalose-available-as-a-natural-flavor-through-improved-production-process/ http://nagaseamerica.com/news_release/treha-trehalose-availa...
- kijin 9y agoFood labeling in the US is a joke. Find a country with stricter regulations and see how the same product is labeled there. You'll find all the shady ingredients and percentages that were either missing or only vaguely specified in the US version.
- sjg007 9y agoRight but in this case trehalose is global..
- morsch 9y agoSpecifically, as far as I can tell, this is how trehalose has to be labelled in the EU (article 2): http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A32001D0721 http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A3...
- team_america 9y agoThere's another aspect to antimicrobial resistance and this article that nobody wants to talk about. Surely it will get downvoted on HN, but it's something to take serious: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2213716517300796 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221371651... The problem is that these people were screened upon arrival, at which point they've already been in contact with others. There's a reason we always screen people applying for visa's before arrival.
- m3kw9 9y agoSo am I right to summarize that because of the type of sugar used which allows the ice cream to stay solid at a higher temperature, it was easier to have the deadly bacteria thrive on the type of sugar used?
- QAPereo 9y agoRather, two strains of C. Diff have enhanced trehalose metabolism. It’s 5e trehalose you eat which feeds it well, in your gut. The ice cream itself was/is safe in terms of pathogens.
- InclinedPlane 9y agoNot only are the bacteria more likely to survive, they release more toxins when they are using trehalose. This might be a defensive mechanism based on the evolved assumption that presence of trehalose indicates the presence of competing hostile bacterial colonies.
- justinph 9y agoWOW! I had c. diff (it sucked, a lot) and this really fills in some gaps for me. Before my gut was destroyed by c. diff, I used to eat more ice cream, no doubt containing this sugar. Obviously I can't say for certain, but I can see how this helped the pathogen gain a hold in my gut.
- nickpsecurity 9y agoYou said you "had" c. diff. How did you get rid of it?
- justinph 9y agoEnded up getting the FMT.
- philipodonnell 9y agoI notice they had to add the bacteria to the mice to do the test. I wonder if some of the instances when drugs work on mice but not in human trials are due to the different gut bacteria at work?
- bastawhiz 9y agoThere are any number of reasons why drugs don't work on humans when they do work on other animals. It could be gut bacteria, but it could just be that the animal has some other physiological trait that causes the drug to be more or less effective. In this case, they weren't testing a drug, they were testing the deadliness of the bacteria. It doesn't matter _how_ toxic the bacteria is to humans relative to mice, it only matters that the bacteria is more deadly (or less deadly) to the mice when the sugar is present.
- dwills 9y agoA missing piece of information is that trehalose is a rather new additive. It was very expensive to manufacture until about 20 years ago when a new cheaper process to make it was found. And voilà, because it appears safe and is somewhat useful, it starts showing up in all sorts of products without any labeling indication. And the fallout is just now being noticed. One of the commenters used the phrase "food science" ... hah! We're the guinea pigs!
- jeroen 9y ago> With tinkering, syrup scientists at Japan’s Hayashibara chemistry company finally figured out a novel enzymatic method to make it on the cheap from starch. The method brought costs down to just $3 per kilogram. By 2000—just before the rise of C. diff.—the company got approval from the US Food and Drug Administration to use it as an additive in food. Approval for use in Europe came the following year. Manufacturers started pouring trehalose into a variety of foods, from pasta to ground beef to ice creams.
- bunderbunder 9y agoNot missing. In paragraphs 5 and 6, the article explains how, just before c. diff infections started to get more common, a new method for producing it that dropped the price by over 99% was developed.
- sjg007 9y agoI wonder if Japan had higher c.diff rates before global use since trehalose was common there first.
- ehnto 9y agoWe really are the guinea pigs. The supplement and sports nutrition industry can essentially mix whatever sounds good for marketing and throw it over the wall.
- defo_nonconvex 9y agoThank Orrin Hatch.
- smnplk 9y agoWe sure are guinea pigs. Maybe this kind of shit caused my thyroid autoimmune disease.
- DrewRWx 9y agoIt was living downwind of a pesticide-ridden cabbage field that did it for me.
- smnplk 9y agoHey, sorry for late reply. How are you managing your condition ?
- DrewRWx 9y agoSorry for my even later reply. It took a couple surgeries to remove my thyroid and lymph nodes it had spread to. And a few rounds of radioactive iodine treatment and scans to get the parts that had spread through my lymphatic system. My last treatment was 10 years ago during high school and I've thankfully scanned clean since. Management has been staying on a relatively high thyroid hormone replacement dose and periodic radioactive iodine scans. Worst case scenario, the scan requires a grueling couple weeks off of my medication and on a low-iodine diet so that any remaining thyroid cells are completely starved and ready to absorb the radioactive dose. Best case, the recombinant thyroid-stimulating hormone, Thyrogen, is available and my insurance is willing to pay for it because it reduces prep to a pre-scan injection.
- randomdrake 9y agoStudy: Dietary trehalose enhances virulence of epidemic Clostridium difficile Citation: J. Collins, C. Robinson, H. Danhof, C. W. Knetsch, H. C. van Leeuwen, T. D. Lawley, J. M. Auchtung & R. A. Britton. Nature 2018-01-03 online. Link: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25178 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25178 DOI: 10.1038/nature25178 Abstract: Clostridium difficile disease has recently increased to become a dominant nosocomial pathogen in North America and Europe, although little is known about what has driven this emergence. Here we show that two epidemic ribotypes (RT027 and RT078) have acquired unique mechanisms to metabolize low concentrations of the disaccharide trehalose. RT027 strains contain a single point mutation in the trehalose repressor that increases the sensitivity of this ribotype to trehalose by more than 500-fold. Furthermore, dietary trehalose increases the virulence of a RT027 strain in a mouse model of infection. RT078 strains acquired a cluster of four genes involved in trehalose metabolism, including a PTS permease that is both necessary and sufficient for growth on low concentrations of trehalose. We propose that the implementation of trehalose as a food additive into the human diet, shortly before the emergence of these two epidemic lineages, helped select for their emergence and contributed to hypervirulence.
- stevebmark 9y agoDon't overlook that first paragraph, fluoroquinolones are some of the most dangerous antibiotics available, but prescribed for common infections (which they shouldn't be). Fluoroquinolones kill most human gut bacteria (irreversibly) except c.diff, leading to overgrowth.
- cableshaft 9y agoI got prescribed Ciproflaxin once, a fluoroquinolone, and was just told it was an antibiotic, not warned about any potential side effects from the doctor, just acted like it was just like every other antibiotic I ever took, and I was to take it for 30 days straight. I thought it was weird when the information page that came with the pills said "do not exercise while taking this medication and for at least a month afterwards", as well as a long list of side effects. I took the first dose, and the very next day I started feeling tingly neuropathy in my extremities. I kept taking the medication for a few days while being worried about it, and it started spreading to other parts of my body. I started reading anecdotes online about how Cipro destroyed people's bodies, snapped tendons (especially the achilles tendon, one of the weaker tendons apparently, hence the don't exercise warning), and has side effects that last for years afterwards and getting even more paranoid about it. Day 7 I start feeling the tingling in my face, and that prompted me to call the doctor. They got me on a non-fluroquinolone for the rest of the 30 days. I have had periods of neuropathy on and off for years after that, including in my face, for the past four years since. It seems to have become less frequent recently though, finally. Mind you, this is after taking only 7 pills total four years ago. It's so dangerous, and pretty much every doctor I've told this too since have been surprised that it could cause such problems. FDA had to issue a warning (unfortunately after I was prescribed), telling doctors not to prescribe it for minor infections, and saying it had potentially permanent serious side effects, involving tendons, muscles, joints, nerves, and central nervous system: https://www.fda.gov/Drugs/DrugSafety/ucm500143.htm https://www.fda.gov/Drugs/DrugSafety/ucm500143.htm
- adrianN 9y agoShould doctors ever prescribe antibiotics for minor infections unless the patient is in some kind of high-risk group?