Harvested by Hadza: fruit, seeds, honey, bark, etc
COOKING BROADENED HUMAN UTILIZATION AND FORAGING OF WILD AND TOXIC PLANTS
Let's neo-romanticize the Hadza hunter-gatherer studies for a moment. They eat a diet rich in starchy tubers, raw roots, chewing some of the tough, fibrous ones for several minutes, extracting as much starch, nutrients and energy as they can. The carbohydrate content varies from 27 to 70% of the tuber (see chart at end). Fiber varies from 3-35%. Cooking generally breaks tough fibers down. Stewing, boiling and roasting all make these more easily chewable and thus digestible.
Fermentation does as well. Paleophil has a short list of tubers that are fermented to process them into safe to eat starches (truly ancient 'safe starches' lol). Several varieties were put underground and allowed to pickle/ferment to remove toxins. The great majority of tubers on earth are toxic if raw. Nature provided underground protection for them. Potatoes contain trypsin and protease inhibitors (never fed raw to livestock or eaten by humans raw) and cassava, cyanide derivatives. In Africa, co-evolution of consumption of toxic cassava may have actually conferred an advantage by improving sickle cell anemia. On the other hand, trypsin inhibitors in yams and potatoes are heat labile and easily deactivated by cooking. Heat rapidly degrades these toxins, making them safe for eating for everyone: small toddlers, children, elderly and adults.
In Africa and the tropics, extracts from toxic potatoes and yams can even be isolated for use in making poison arrows for hunting wild game.
RS3 AND RS2 FEED DIFFERENT FLORA IN THE GUT
N=1, THREE HIGH-DOSE RS2 INTREPID SELF-EXPERIMENTERS
Here are 3 individuals (reports: a, b, c) who biohacked their guts and used high dose RS2 for a period of time before submitting stool samples to various testing groups: uBIOME, American Gut.
Bacteroidetes-Prevotella and Bacteroides overlap -- they both consume RS2 heartily and easily, as you can see below. On the other hand, the great majority of the core ancestral microbiota do not and with report c, one may observe that even consuming significant fiber as RS3, the Roseburia fails to 'bloom' in the gut. Normally RS3 (alone, sans RS2) feeds or cross-feeds Roseburia extensively based on Alan Walker et al research group. These 2 groups Prevotella and Bacteroides are big starch eaters of cooked digestible carbohydrates as well as resistant starch (cooked cooled, RS3). So they eat EVERYTHING. This is what I have an overgrowth of on/off the last few years of gut healing (and didn't realize). Prevotella is implicated in many cases of dysbiosis and uppergut overgrowths (SIBO/SIFO). Ck out pubmed: Prevotella/dysbiosis.
--IBD (Crohn's, UC)
When I saw the Prevotella on my stool reports I had previously (up until a few weeks) HEY THIS IS LIKE THE HEALTHY BURKINA FASO KIDS. I was totally wrong. My gut was like the dysbiotic HIV and other gut disrupted subjects actually.
I've had a lot of questions more than evolution lately:
What is the pattern that high dose RS2 exerts on the flora?
Does the resultant flora appear Bacteroides heavy and dominant? Why?
What is overgrown?
What is suppressed?
Does this have implications for the host?
Also if a gut is dysbiotic and we throw fire on the flame, will this cause dysbiotic-related metabolic changes? The research is inconsistent but I think the answer is, yes. It is entirely gut dependent. Many do great on raw potato starch and see gut healing. Others may run into obstacles like mine. Even testing for me didn't reveal the obstacles.
Dr Bill Lagakos reviews some studies where RPS or HAM-RS2 may worsen insulin by raising it and adversely effect blood sugars: here. It is not every study but appears to be seen in studies that are more recent IMHO and I suspect that the influence of livestock and human antibiotics adversely skewing our gut flora.
Journal club: new study in healthy pig gut flora, RS2 appears to raise insulin
PHD CARBS 100-150 g
HIGH DOSE RS2 APPEARS TO
HADZA GUTS (AND HEALTHY MEDITERRANEAN) HAVE NEARLY ALL THE ANCESTRAL CORE MICROBIOTA
See below - this is comparing apples and oranges but let's do it for fun anyway. Comparing healthy (no inflammation or disease) Italians on the Mediterranean diet and Hadza guts, nearly every species of the 7 ancestral core microbiota of healthy humans (per Julien Tap et al research) are accounted for. They are similar or in higher abundance than USA ubiome healthy averages.
It is questionable whether or not the Hadza are truly 'missing' bifido or that lab errors in collection and subsequent bifido determination happened. Personally I think bifido are there!
“The conclusions about relative proportions of bacteria are likely not valid,” says Rob Knight, a microbiome scientist with expertise in technical issues. “Unfortunately there is no published reference for this yet; we’re working on one.” It’s not clear if this problem affects the study’s other conclusions, like the lack of Bifidobacteria. Source: NATGEO
For those on high dose raw starches -- you may observe vast differences.
- the bifidobacteria are absent or nearly extinct (except for report c).
- F. prausnitizii which typically makes up 10-20% of healthy stool microbiota is only HALF OR LESS of 'normal' for either a hunter-gatherer Hadza or Western urbanite.
- Bacteroides appears overselected
- low eubacteria
- no Roseburia/cluster XIVa
To me the most striking losses are bifido, F prausnitzii and Roseburia. These are hugely immunomodulating to the point where when these are used as probiotics in animal models, it is observed that disease and inflammation reverse. Bifidobacteria longum has been widely studied and since it is so easy to culture and grow, offered as a commercial probiotic for years.
Roseburia has recently been shown to reverse peanut allergies in a rodent model. In the gut, this is the superstar butyrate producer. I think Roseburia/XIVa was key for me when I reversed gluten and dairy allergies after gut healing with eating soil probiotics, B longum probiotics (FloraMEND), steamed mountain white yams and purple potatoes (high RS3 diet) and consuming daily fermented root vegetables. Roseburia eats everything (except raw starches); its favorite foods are inulin, GOS (beans or supplements), chitin, beta glucan (grains, oats, mushrooms) and cooked starches (RS3). I talked about Roseburia HERE.
FIRE CHANGED OUR GUT FLORA
Below I compare their relative dominance in terms of the ancestral core human microbiota ( Nature).
RAW POTATO STARCH RS2
- F. prausnitzii
I've polled a few gut researchers because I don't know sh*t about the gut microbiota. They say that it is highly plausible for overselection and competition of substrate media by a single group of gut flora, to the suppression or detriment of other gut flora.
If I neo-romanticize the Hadza, I would say keeping all fiber in context is helpful. Each person's ancestry play into this. Those who emerged from near the Fertile Crescent are likely to tolerate grains better. I'm Asian and I think we favor legumes, tubers and white rice and more net carbohydrates than those of northern Europeans/Asians or aboriginal ancestry.
|Hadza wild African cooked tuber|
2 slices of one mak’alitako tuber (Emminia entennulifa)
Chewed for ~3min to extract carbs and nutrients
Spit out insoluble 'CUD'
Hadza hunter forager diet