- Author: Amy Quinton, UC Davis
Scientists make the first large-scale estimate of live microorganisms consumed in the U.S. diet
Our diets provide us with the building blocks we need to stay healthy and fight disease. The nutrients in foods and beverages can be tallied up to know if we are getting what our bodies need. Yet what if a nutrient has been overlooked? For instance, friendly microbes in raw and fermented foods have not been measured as part of our diets — until now.
“Ultimately we want to understand if there should be a recommended daily intake of these microbes to keep us healthy, either through the foods or from probiotic supplements,” said Maria Marco, a professor in the food science and technology department at UC Davis. “In order to do that, we need to first quantify the number of live microorganisms we consume today in our diets.”
Marco co-authored a new study with a group of scientists that examined the number of living microbes per gram of more than 9,000 different foods consumed by nearly 75,000 adults and children. It found that around 20% of children and 26% of adults consumed foods with high levels of live microorganisms in their diet. Both children and adults increased their consumption of these foods over the 18-year study period. The study, published in the Journal of Nutrition, is the first large-scale estimate of how many live microbes are consumed by Americans every day.
“This trend is going in the right direction. Exposure to friendly microorganisms in our foods can be good for promoting a healthy immune system.” said Marco.
Foods for gut health
Study authors examined the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey to create the estimate. The health and dietary database contains extensive information on the foods consumed by Americans daily. Food science and fermentation experts assigned each food an estimated range of live microbes per gram, creating categories of foods with low, medium and high levels of live microbes. Foods in the high category included fermented dairy foods such as yogurt, fermented pickles and kimchi. Fresh, uncooked fruits and vegetables were also good sources of live microorganisms, represented in the medium category.
The analysis was funded by a grant from the International Scientific Association for Probiotics and Prebiotics, or ISAPP. The microorganisms quantified in this study are not necessarily probiotics.
“By definition, a probiotic must be well-defined and have a demonstrated health benefit at a quantified dose. Live microbes associated with food as a category, however, do not generally meet the criteria of a probiotic,” said corresponding author Mary Ellen Sanders, executive science officer for the ISAPP.
The publication is part of a larger global effort to determine how live dietary microbes might contribute to health.
“There is no doubt that the microbes we eat affect our health. When we think of microbes in our food, we often think of either foodborne pathogens that cause disease or probiotics that provide a documented health benefit,” said co-author Colin Hill, a professor of microbial food safety with University College Cork, Ireland. “But it's important to also explore dietary microbes that we consume in fermented and uncooked foods. It is very timely to estimate the daily intake of microbes by individuals in modern society as a first step towards a scientific evaluation of the importance of dietary microbes in human health and well-being.”
Other scientists co-authoring the paper were ISAPP board members Robert Hutkins, Dan Merenstein, Daniel J. Tancredi, Christopher J. Cifelli, Jaime Gahche, Joanne L. Slavin and Victor L. Fulgoni III.
Editor's note: Maria Marco is affiliated with UC Agriculture and Natural Resources as an Agricultural Experiment Station faculty member.
- Author: Rob Waters, Kaiser Health News
Saira Diaz uses her fingers to count the establishments selling fast food and sweets near the South Los Angeles home she shares with her parents and 13-year-old son. “There's one, two, three, four, five fast-food restaurants,” she says. “And a little mom and pop store that sells snacks and sodas and candy.”
In that low-income, predominantly Latino neighborhood, it's pretty hard for a kid to avoid sugar. Last year, doctors at St. John's Well Child and Family Center, a nonprofit community clinic seven blocks away, became alarmed by the rising weight of Diaz's son, Adrian Mejia. They persuaded him to join an intervention study run by the University of Southern California and Children's Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA) that weans participants off sugar in an effort to reduce the rate of obesity and diabetes among children.
It also targets a third condition fewer people have heard of: fatty liver disease.
Linked both to genetics and diets high in sugar and fat, “fatty liver disease is ripping through the Latino community like a silent tsunami and especially affecting children,” said Dr. Rohit Kohli, chief of gastroenterology, hepatology and nutrition at CHLA.
Recent research shows about 1 in 4 people in the U.S. have fatty liver disease. But among Latinos, especially of Mexican and Central American descent, the rate is significantly higher. One large study in Dallas foThe USC-CHLA study is led by Michael Goran, director of the Diabetes and Obesity Program at CHLA, who last year made an alarming discovery: Sugar from sweetened beverages can be passed in breast milk from mothers to their babies, potentially predisposing infants to obesity and fatty livers.
Called HEROES, for Healthy Eating Through Reduction of Excess Sugar, his program is designed to help children like Adrian, who used to drink four or more sugary drinks a day, shed unhealthy habits that can lead to fatty liver and other diseases.
Fatty liver disease is gaining more attention in the medical community as lawmakers ratchet up pressure to discourage the consumption of sugar-laden drinks. Legislators in Sacramento are mulling proposals to impose a statewide soda tax, put warning labels on sugary drinks and bar beverage companies from offering discount coupons on sweetened drinks.
“I support sugar taxes and warning labels as a way to discourage consumption, but I don't think that alone will do the trick,” Goran said. “We also need public health strategies that limit marketing of sugary beverages, snacks and cereals to infants and children.”
William Dermody, a spokesman for the American Beverage Association said: “We understand that we have a role to play in helping Americans manage consumption of added sugars, which is why we are creating more drinks with less or no sugar.”
In 2016, 45 deaths in Los Angeles County were attributed to fatty liver disease. But that's a “gross underestimate,” because by the time people with the illness die, they often have cirrhosis, and that's what appears on the death certificate, said Dr. Paul Simon, chief science officer at the L.A. County Department of Public Health.
Still, Simon said, it was striking that 53% of the 2016 deaths attributed to fatty liver disease were among Latinos — nearly double their proportion of total deaths in the county.
Medical researchers consider fatty liver disease a manifestation of something called metabolic syndrome — a cluster of conditions that include excess belly fat and elevated blood pressure, blood sugar and cholesterol that can increase the risk of heart disease, stroke and diabetes.
Until 2006, few doctors knew that children could get fatty liver disease. That year Dr. Jeffrey Schwimmer, a professor of pediatrics at the University of California-San Diego, reviewed the autopsies of 742 children and teenagers, ages 2 to 19, who had died in car crashes or from other causes, and he found that 13% of them had fatty liver disease. Among obese kids, 38% had fatty livers.
After Schwimmer's study was released, Goran began using MRIs to diagnose fatty liver in living children.
A 2008 study by another group of researchers nudged Goran further. It showed that a variant of a gene called PNPLA3 significantly increased the risk of the disease. About half of Latinos have one copy of that high-risk gene, and a quarter have two copies, according to Goran.
He began a new study, which showed that among children as young as 8, those who had two copies of the risky gene and consumed high amounts of sugar had three times as much fat in their livers as kids with no copy of the gene. Now, in the USC-CHLA study, he is testing whether reduced consumption of sugar decreases the fatty liver risk in children who have the PNPLA3 gene variant.
At the start of the study, he tests kids to see if they have the PNPLA3 gene, uses an MRI to measure their liver fat and catalogs their sugar intake. A dietitian on his team educates the family about the impact of sugar. Then, after four months, they measure liver fat again to assess the impact of the intervention. Goran expects to have results from the study in about a year.
More recently, Goran has been investigating the transmission of sugar from mothers to their babies. He showed last year that in nursing mothers who drank beverages sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup — the primary sweetener in standard formulations of Coca-Cola, Pepsi and other sodas — the fructose level in their breast milk rose and stayed elevated for several hours, ensuring that the baby ingested it.
This early exposure to sugar could be contributing to obesity, diabetes and fatty livers, based on previous research that showed fructose can enhance the fat storage capacity of cells, Goran said.
In neighborhoods like South Los Angeles, where Saira Diaz and Adrian Mejia live, a lack of full-service markets and fresh produce makes it harder to eat healthily. “Access to unhealthy food options — which are usually cheaper — is very high in this city,” Derek Steele, director of health equity programs at the Social Justice Learning Institute in Inglewood, Calif., told Kaiser Health News.
The institute has started farmers markets, helped convert two corner stores into markets with healthier food options and created 109 community gardens on public and private lands in South L.A. and neighboring Inglewood, which has 125 liquor and convenience stores and 150 fast-food outlets.
At Torrance Memorial Medical Center, 10 miles down the road, Dr. Karl Fukunaga, a gastroenterologist with Digestive Care Consultants, said he and his colleagues are seeing so many patients with fatty liver disease that they plan to start a clinic to address it. He urges his patients to avoid sugar and cut down on carbohydrates.
Adrian Mejia and his mother received similar advice from a dietitian in the HEROES program. Adrian gave up sugary beverages, and his liver fat dropped 43%. Two months ago, he joined a soccer league.
“Before, I weighed a lot and it was hard to run,” he said. “If I kept going at the pace I was going, probably later in my life I would be like my [diabetic] grandma. I don't want that to happen.”
This KHN story first published on California Healthline, a service of the California Health Care Foundation.
Source: Published originally on USAToday.com, Fatty liver disease strikes Latino children like a ‘silent tsunami', by Rob Waters, Kaiser Health News, April 19th , 2019.
- Author: Jeannette Warnert
Reposted from the UCANR News
Shoes with rubber soles, western cottontail rabbits, birds, avocados, oranges, peaches, candy wrappers and fast-food cartons were among the contents that UC Cooperative Extension human-wildlife interactions advisor Niamh Quinn has found inside the stomachs of urban coyotes, reported Louis Sahagun in the Los Angeles Times.
Quinn is working with Cal State Fullerton graduate student Danielle Martinez to get a clear picture of what is sustaining coyotes that died across Los Angeles and Orange counties.
"This much is clear: coyotes aren't struggling in our urban environments," Quinn said. "They are almost everywhere, continually learning to adapt alongside us."
Quinn also developed the Coyote Cacher web application to catalog reports of coyote sightings throughout California. Users can see when and where coyote interactions occurred.
"Was howling at an ambulance going down PCH toward Hoag Hospital in Newport Beach," a report posted this month said.
"Killed and ate my cat," said another from the same area.
The stomach contents study indicates that cats make up only about 8 percent of the urban coyotes' diets. Dogs aren't part of the study because it would be difficult to differentiate the DNA of a coyotes from other members of the canid family.
- Author: Brad Hooker
On a Friday evening in a San Francisco conference room, food and technology leaders – including nutrition expert Carl Keen, a UC Davis professor affiliated with the UC Agriculture and Natural Resources Ag Experiment Station – spoke to a mixed audience on the need for innovation in adapting populations across the world to changing food systems.
In the crowd, one inspired undergraduate student from UC Davis thumbed together some notes on his phone. The next day he stood in front of everyone at the event – more than 250 in all – and pitched his newly formed idea for a nutrition app.
It drew a small team: a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, a UC Davis nutritionist and a UC Berkeley student. Over the next 40 hours they developed a software application that matches safe foods to patient medications. With the final presentations Sunday evening, the judges announced the winners.
Their project, called Took that? Eat this., won first place at the 2015 Food Hackathon. They now have sponsors and are developing their idea into a real consumer product. They are also flying out to the World Expo in Milan, Italy, in September – the first devoted to food and where an even larger food-themed hackathon will take place.
(Food Hackathon from FounderLY on Vimeo)
Breaking down the silos
“It's powerful how much happens in such a short period of time,” says Bob Adams, innovation adviser for the UC Davis World Food Center and a mentor for the hackathon teams. “It was a great experience for all the UC Davis students who participated, because they don't normally interact in projects with students from other programs.”
With nearly 9,000 total hours spent in developing the 18 different projects, the hackathon was declared by the organizers a success and a testament to the power of crowd sourcing.
A group of passionate techies, foodies, scholars, investors and entrepreneurs shut in a room for two days pushed them like never before to apply their diverse expertise toward tackling some of the biggest problems facing food and ag.
A university connecting ag and nutrition
Research and industry leaders are looking to this model as one way to seed California's innovation ecosystem across the state's agricultural horizons. As another example, Mars, Inc., which co-sponsored the hackathon, is investing in a new type of university-industry partnership with UC Davis and the World Food Center by establishing the Innovation Institute for Food and Health.
“All of us win from these new and needed collective investments in innovation in food, agriculture and health,” writes Mars chief scientist Harold Schmitz in a recent Sacramento Bee op-ed.
Howard-Yana Shapiro, also a Mars chief scientist and a UC Davis fellow, sees innovative food technology projects like those crafted at the hackathon as this decade's biggest investment arena.
“The next, larger human generation will face food challenges ranging from climate change and water stress to growing demands for upmarket foods,” he wrote in a LinkedIn article. “But from what I saw at the hackathon, the next generation is on it.”
See the original story by the UC Davis World Food Center.
- Author: American Heart Association
Compared to other racial and ethnic groups in the United States, Hispanics had higher rates of ideal blood pressure, cholesterol and glucose levels, were less likely to smoke, and were more likely to get recommended amounts of exercise. Like most Americans, however, too few Hispanics ate a heart-healthy diet and too many were overweight, the investigators found.
Researchers analyzed data from nearly 16,000 Hispanic-American adults of Cuban, Dominican, Puerto Rican, Mexican, and Central and South American origins to determine if they met the American Heart Association's seven cardiovascular health goals for 2020.
They found:
- 5 percent met six of the seven goals, which is higher than the national average of 3.8 percent.
- 76.6 percent never smoked or quit; nonsmoking was the most commonly achieved goal.
- 53.4 percent had ideal blood pressure, which is 21.9 percent higher than the national rate.
- Only 2 percent ate an ideal heart-healthy diet, which was the least achieved goal.
- More than half (51.2 percent) had ideal levels of moderate to vigorous physical activity, which is 23 percent higher than the national rate (39.5 percent). Still, less than one-fourth had an ideal body mass index compared to the national rate of 32 percent.
Source: American Heart Association, news release, Hispanics More Heart-Healthy Than Other Americans: Study, November. 6, 2012.
