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Japanese Guts Are Made For Sushi
cremeglace writes "Americans don't have the guts for sushi. At least that's the implication of a new study, which finds that Japanese people harbor enzymes in their intestinal bacteria that help them digest seaweed, enzymes that North Americans lack. What's more, Japanese may have first acquired these enzymes by eating bacteria that thrive on seaweed in the open ocean."
... from my cold, dead digestive tract!
I'm not surprised. Most Americans don't have the stomach for it.
I wonder if that bacteria is (part of) the reason stomach cancer is a major killer in Japan. Lost a friend to it.
This doesn't seem evolutionary so much as it appears that they grew up eating the bacteria. If I'm wrong, would somebody please tell me where my thought process is hitting a disconnect?
I thought that everyone started out with pretty much zero gut bacteria and acquire them based on what they eat. (And sometimes people lose all their gut bacteria from various medical treatments and have to work to restore them.)
So the japanese end up with the bacteria/enzymes do digest sushi because... they eat a lot of sushi. Presumably anyone else could develop a colony of such bacteria/enzymes by also eating a lot of sushi?
That would mean the division isn't whether you're Japanese or American or something else. It's just whether or not you eat a lot of sushi.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Here's one American who loves sushi and sashimi. Except ikura (salmon eggs). Never cared for those. Seems like bait to me. The only other Japanese food I would not choose to eat again is natto. Of course, I don't think they're singling out Americans, just non-seaweed eaters in general.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
if you like intestinal parasites!
yum!
Thank you!
What about North Americans of Japanese decent?
Nation eating fish has digestive system which adjusted to eating fish. What a surprise!
In our next show: People Jump Better After Training To Jump!
Well, I'll be; and here I thought my brief illness on an Okinawan beach resulted from my consuming budweiser and salty dogs all night and then passing out on the beach - and failing to wake up when the sun came up.
It wasn't alcohol, heat stroke, or the incandescent sunburn - it was the seaweed from that piece of sushi I had the day before!
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
Is it not obvious that if you regularly eat a certain type of food, you will eventually have bacteria that thrive in your gut because of the regularity of what you eat?
What would really surprise me is if they find that an American living in Japan and eating a 'local' diet would not acquire these bacteria.
I'm sure by now I've acquired bacteria that help with the digestion of french fries and poutine.
Czjzek's team compared the microbial genomes of 13 Japanese people with those of 18 North Americans.
If I used this many test subjects in my job I would get fired.
The Japanese have survived pretty well up to this point. What makes you think won't be the case in the future?
Have there been deadly pandemics in Japan because of the food?
This post is retarded. Literally, made by a person with limited mental faculties. Since when has any pandemic disease been caused or spread by eating sushi? The types of illness likely to be caused by bad sushi are Listeria or possibly a parasite of some kind, neither of which would classify as a pandemic. And both of these would be caused by mishandling the fish, not the fish itself. Sushi-grade fish undergoes a very specific, rigourous processing to be considered sushi-grade. It has to be immediately gutted after capture in a way that ensures the intestines and stomach do not transmit any bacteria into the flesh of the fish, and is then flash-frozen, either immediately or on the dock, depending on how far out the boat is.
You're more likely to get sick from eating a hot dog or a deli sandwich.
Different parts of the world evolved different strains of bacteria. Can I collect my research grant now.
Vietnamese people who immigrate to Australia often have trouble with Australian food until they get used to it (I.E. develop the bacteria to help digest it). Each part of the would would have developed different bacteria in the digestive system.
This is why, more often then not when one travels to SE Asia one's stool is more regular (about 1 hour after you eat) and rarely solid. YMMV of course, people are different (ohhh, I sense a Nobel prize coming on)
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Yeah, 20 years ago there was similar pseudo-science published in Japan claiming that Americans were specially built to eat hamburgers.
Just what we need, more "Japanese are unique" idiocy to justify racism and discrimination in Japan. So far we've heard that "Japanese intestines are longer, so Japanese can't eat foreign beef", "Japanese brains are unique, so only Japanese people can speak the Japanese language." and so on, all of which are supported by pseudo-scientific studies such as this one.
This sort of incomplete research just feeds the view of racial uniqueness (and superiority) among Japanese and justifies their racism and discrimination against others.
What a surprise, samzenpus posting an idle article on the main page under a heading such as Science or Your Rights Online so his articles get more views.
Seriously, take a look at the articles you've posted today samzenpus and the sections you placed them in. All, but one of your stories are Idle and yet all of them appear on the main page.
Thanks for bypassing my filters and cluttering up people's pages with your nonsense.
Killer Whale guts are made for Japanese, story at 11.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
No way I would trade lactose tolerance for seaweed tolerance.
Milk and cheese >> seaweed.
The study maybe valid if they can find the enzymes in Japanese babies. Otherwise it can be said that the Japanese have the enzymes because they eat lots of sushi.
Forget the methodology in the study...the only conclusion I am drawing is that North Americans are luckier: they have no danger of acquiring additional calories from the seaweed which sushi rolls are wrapped in. "Indigestible" is a good thing for those of us living in the first world.
Indeed, we must stop this bacterium from crossing to our shores at any cost! Seaweed calories! Nooooooooooooooooooo!
So that's why nobody eats sushi outside of Japan!
I'll just try to get by on my > 4" weiner.
That seems like an odd diet, I hope it serves you well.
Speaking of cold, dead digestive tracts: A few years ago, I got terribly ill while on vacation. Loss of appetite, waves of tremendous abdominal cramps, and vomiting. My intestines had plugged up and it took some intervention to get them moving again.
I put some of the blame on a sushi lunch I ate that day. I'd eaten sushi often before, but this restaurant used a lot more seaweed in the dishes than I was accustomed to. Even as I was eating, I had second thoughts about whether what I was putting into my mouth was actually edible. But I figured it seemed strange to me only because that Japanese restaurant was more authentic than the Americanized sushi places where I usually dined.
Now I wonder whether that seaweed would be edible to Japanese guts, but truly was inedible to mine.
You should check out this guy's diet!!
A large proportion suffer lactose intolerance which means milk and yoghurts are out though I believe they can still eat some cheeses where the lactose has been converted into something else. If anyone has ever wondered why you never see dairy food in chinese or japanese restaurants - theres your answer.
Anyway , most veg if cooked long enough can be digested by the human gut so these enzymes only give them an advantage if they eat it partially cooked or raw.
TFA is not clear whether non-Japanese really cannot break down seaweed at all.
In Japan it is popular to buy yogurt with live culture, for example there is Meiji's LB51 (lacto bacillus 51) yogurt supposedly good for your gut.
Might be cool if a yogurt with this organism is made.
Of course if you could just eat non-sterile seaweed maybe it would make a culture for you in your gut.. anybody know about edible seaweeds that would have this?
I've had seaweed salad and maybe that would have it.
Also the American gut is supposedly longer does that balance not having the enzyme at all?
Us rednecks call it bait. I don't eat bait.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihonjinron
You were knocked out by a beer lover who saw you drinking budweiser. Good thing it happened in Japan, in Europe you would have been killed.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Let's recall that tribes that life off hunting have more lactose intolerant people that those that practice livestock breeding, that certain northern tribes of Chukchas and Eskimo doesn't have ensimes to get rid of alcohol so they become alcoholics easily and so on and so on.
Enjoy yourself.
YUK!
.... with my ass and spit it out my mouth. Your should smell my breath.. mmmmmmmmm
If you didn't drive over it, it ain't worth eating.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
organisms adapt to local diet.
film at 11.
Japanese guts...
But then it makes no sense to say they acquired it from bacteria.
Genes don't transfer from bacteria to mammals. Genes transfer between bacteria, via exchange of plasmids. (Which is one reason why antibiotic resistance spreads so fast.) But your cells don't have the mechansims to acquire such a plasmid, and wouldn't know what to do with it. You don't even have the regulating proteins or the ribosome to deal with a _circular_ DNA strand, and one outside the nucleus at that.
At this point someone will probably have the knee-jerk reaction to explain how viruses can account for horizontal gene transfer, 'cause they read that notion at some point and it sounded so smart. Not so fast. Viruses are quite specialized in what they attach to. They depend on very specific nucleotid sequences, which is why you can have a virus that attacks your upper respiratory tract, but can't affect your lungs, or viceversa. Viruses that prey on bacteria, the so called "phages", have very specialized capsids and mechanisms to inject themselves into a bacterium, and are even more specialized in what they can attach to. Which is why for example you can spray meat with a phage which destroys Lysteria, but won't destroy your intestinal flora. A virus that's suited to infect both a bacterium _and_ your gut lining and transfer genes from one to the other, is almost an impossibility, and at any rate to the best of my knowledge none was ever identified.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I didn't realise that the appetite for sushi amongst the Sioux, Cherokee and other North Americans was quite such a concern.
Or did they mean Europeans?
If you're going to discuss genetic differences, you do need to be accurate.
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
the mother shits and pisses all over the child as she births it (you try squeezing out something the size of a basketball without losing your bowel control)
soon after the baby is screaming, mouth agape, inhaling and swallowing its mom's shit and piss
seems to me to be the most likely scenario for gut flora transfer
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The article states clearly that:
Gene transfer from the living bacteria transferred into the Japanese people's genome that produces enzymes in the gut that make breaking down seaweed easier (i.e. they get more from it).
They didn't say you couldn't eat seaweed and that it was bad for you if you don't have these enzymes, just that it's better for you if you do.
The only food the Japanese and I agree on is PIZZA via the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. You can put all the sushi you want on your pizza, just don't add that to my pie. Pizza is one dish where everyone can agree and disagree on, in the same delivery. Cowabunga
So Japanese people have a seaweed digesting bacterium in their guts. So sushi restaurants could offer visiting westerners a small culture of this bacterium, and they would be set up to digest the seaweed. Before you go "Ewww, bacteria!", this is just what is being offered commercially as "pro-biotic yogurt". You would probably need a top-up on every visit to Japan, because the bacterium would probably die out without a regular supply of seaweed.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
You know, I have when ethnic and political identities share a word. Does this article mean that people who live in japan get these enzymes? That would make sense. Or is it saying that ethnically Japanese people are born with these enzymes. That doesn't make sense.
I used to have a girlfriend who worked at a Sushi Bar & Japanese steak house back when I was in college, so she'd bring some home every once in a while. I've had all sorts, and can't remember a single issue. I think my favorites were barbecued eel, salmon (raw), tuna and also plum mint, but I can't seem to find that one anywhere.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
such a big sample size, how could they possibly be wrong..
You're more likely to get sick from eating a hot dog or a deli sandwich.
Are you trying to make his point for him? You'll get sick from a hot dog or deli sandwich precisely when the hot dog or deli sandwich is not properly prepared, and it's more likely in "your" case because anyone reading your drivel is likely to be eating more hot dogs or sandwiches than sushi, by weight at least.
if you artificially make the birthing process clean, you are not adequately inoculating your baby's digestive tract with the mother's gut flora
perhaps setting the kid up for opportunistic infection in the first days of life, inadequate digestion, malformed immune system (allergies), etc.
so you reacted to the ugliness of getting shat upon by your mother at birth, but your delicate sensibilities are not the issue: for millions of years, getting shit on at birth has meant we evolved with the timing of the introduction of the full spectrum of the mother's gut bacteria at time of birth. meaning a delay in that timing could be unhealthy for normal immune function, normal digestion function, etc.
we talk about how antiseptic living has increased allergies and other diseases. a clean birthing room might be a part of that constellation of problems. perhaps in the future, healthy child birth will consist of the doctor shoving his finger up the mother's ass and sticking it in the newborn's mouth to ensure full spectrum inoculation. this may sound disgusting to you, but it may be the healthiest thing you can do for a newborn's normal development
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
For getting sick, try some good old fashion New York street meat. Not only is there a good chance of getting sick you won't even know if it's beef or rat that you're eating. :)
Mmmmm. Now I'm really hungry.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Actually, getting sick from a hot dog or deli sandwich is more likely because of issues during packaging of the hot dogs or deli meat.
it seems a lot more people these days eat sushi, or mention eating it, and that makes me wonder if it have become fashionable for some reason.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Primarily the Mother - in cases of vaginal birth. Breastfeeding, touching, etc add more. The infant is pretty well colonized within 1-6 months.
Wikipedia article on Gut Flora
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gut_flora#Acquisition_of_gut_flora_in_human_infants
Evolution in the general sense is just a method by which a population changes in response to the environment. DNA mutations are the most preached about accelerant form of evolution and an important one. However, acquiring chloroplasts, mitochondria, and indeed gut bacteria can all be seen as evolutionary changes as well.
I can see among a seaweed eating population that individuals that acquired this bacteria would do better than those that hadn't, thus would have the evolutionary edge. In the west, where seaweed is less popular, this wouldn't aid the individuals so much, thus there is no advantage to feeding the bacteria. Since an individuals (at least a mothers) bacteria strains are transferred to the child this would be at least partially hereditary. Seems like straight-forward evolution to me, if not genetic evolution.
MOD UP.
A good reply, and me with no mod points. :-(
This phenomenon isn't specific to Japanese. For example, I can eat at Taco Bell 5 out of 7 days of the week, while most people are making a run for the bathroom after just one burrito. I probably have special enzymes to handle it. Also, I read that most Americans can eat 57% more McDonald's cheeseburgers than the average European, and we all know that those are mostly made of seaweed (the cheeseburgers, not the Europeans).
Just what we need, more "Japanese are unique" idiocy to justify racism and discrimination in Japan.
TFA was about bacteria in the gut. If I read it right, then I don't see any reason a non-Japanese living on the same diet as Japanese wouldn't acquire the same bacteria and be able to digest the seaweed, too. Nor do I see any reason to see why a person of Japanese parentage living somewhere that doesn't eat raw seaweed would be able to digest it. In other words, this is about the environment where a person lives, not his genetic makeup.
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
. But there's more (and this is where one of the article's assertions surprises me). TFA states:
. IANAMB, but I thought that it had been pretty clearly shown that ordinary gut bacteria could become antibiotic resistant, and that that resistance could be transferred to other, more nefarious bacteria via gene transfer. Somebody who knows something about this is hereby encouraged to chime in ...
Since when is sushi defined by seaweed? It may be used, but sushi is primarily based upon a sweet-vinegary rice with fish. Sushi is not defined as a seaweed product. So, why does the article, and many of the comments tie these together so directly? It would have been a much better article only discussing the seaweed aspect.
Yeah, you didn't read the article.... So to spell it out. Bacteria lives on seaweed (and is able to eat it directly, and get energy from it). Japanese eats the seaweed, and thus the bacteria. The bacteria in the intestines swap notes with their cousins. Now part of the population in the intestine can do the digesting the seaweed trick. We have bacteria in and on our bodies. This bacteria outnumbers the cells we call "us". Most of this bacteria actually does a job, such as reducing inflammation around broken skin, or helping you digest your food. In the article, they were talking about gene transfer between bacteria living on the seaweed, and bacteria now found to be living in the intestines of some Japanese. Furthermore, current research suggests that humans "inherit" their population of intestinal flora from their mothers. So nowhere did anyone talk about phages, or any other virus. Accept you. I am saddened that a sufficient volume of accurate information, completely off topic, is "insightful".
shortly after birth
an uncolonized digestive tract is pretty much an open space for all sorts of opportunistic bugs to move in. given random chance, many of them are probably not very healthy for you, and for a newborn, perhaps deadly. eating mom's shit takes out the random chance: you automatically receive, first and foremost, before anything more harmful can get in and colonize, the most ideal bacteria flora for you
only a precolonized digestive tract, colonized with gut bacteria from mom, evolved to live in stasis with its host (and even provide it with essential nutrients, as in homo sapiens, b vitamins and vitamin k i believe) can protect a newborn from harmful bacteria by exerting an "outward pressure": no open spaces to colonize. microbes evolved to grow in each species' gut probably grow with maximal efficiency in only that species' gut. such that it simply outcompetes microbes less specific to that host (and most probably more harmful, whether by simply increasing diarrhea, or worse, such as with certain cow e coli strains that damage human kidneys)
i bet there are thousands of deaths worldwide every year from people who take antibiotics, and don't need them, killing everything in their gut, and then exposing themselves to being recolonized with less specific bacteria flora. perhaps e coli from a hamburger, or something from an insect's gut. the effect could be harmless, it could be temporary, or it could be deadly
maintenance of gut bacteria, especially after diarrhea or changes in diet, should be on everyone's personal healthcare regimen. in fact, i see a business opportunity: sell people yogurt precolonized with their own gut bacteria when they feel at maximum health, for use after feelings of unhealth, periods of diarrhea, poor diet, antibiotic use, etc. seriously, someone could probably make millions off that idea. and unlike lots of health quackery, its a personal healthcare idea with solid science "behind" it (pun intended). the... details of the business might prove repellant to potential customers, however
feel free to capitalize on this idea, just give me a shout out after your first million of selling people yogurt colonized with their own shit
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
So, if you eat enough Japanese people would you also acquire the same enzymes?
(Interesting note: the first captcha word for this message was "sadist" -- thought I'd edit the message again to let you know)
Cue Nancy Sinatra in 5...4...3...2...1
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
the young of mammals instinctively go out of their way to eat their mother's dung in the first hours or weeks after birth. the survival advantage is that the bacteria that therefore colonizes them is maximally attuned to the guts of others of its own kind
what you refer to is an infection after an invasive surgical procedure. hardly a valid lesson on what is natural
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Depends, do they inherit their parents' gut bacteria as the mother regurgitates food for her cheeping young?
Guessing not.
This is about the symbiotic bacterial colonies people have in their intestines, and AFAIK there's no mechanism for that to be inherited. It's geographic/dietary, not hereditary.
Before eating sushi, non-Japanese people should stock up and eat some Japanese people, so as to not waste the seaweed's nutrition, not squander it? It's a plan!
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Aside from the other problems that have been mentioned, the article is poorly titled. It should read Japanese guts are made for *seaweed*. To say sushi is very misleading. My fiance and I eat sushi minimum once per week, and of the fifteen different pieces that we regularly order, only 2 or 3 of them have seaweed. Sushi is primarily seafood (fish, shrimp,eel) and rice. In the pieces that have it, the seaweed acts as a garnish.
I happen to enjoy giving and receiving anilingus. When I was in long term relationships, I made it a point to lick my girlfriend down there whenever I finished a course of antibiotics. I figured we shared most of our flora and that was a good way to recolonize each other with our shared healthy microbes. I did notice that the smell of my own excrement changed to match my mate's when we were properly cross-colonized.
in the literal sense in regards to your fictional girlfriend, and in the figurative sense of hijacking my queasy narrative
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
LOL!!!! Just reading the title made my BS-O-Meter shatter to shards! The title of this story implies there's a human genetic basis for Japanese people easily digesting Sushi. Pure BS. I'm of 100% "Western"/Non-Asian origin and had never been outside the U.S. or even eaten sushi. Yet I moved to Japan, spent the better part of a decade there, and never once had trouble digesting (or enjoying) sushi. LOL!!! Maybe I'm evolved like the Japanese (supposedly) are. The summary implies the same thing then contradicts itself by stating that Japanese people acquire bacteria from eating seaweed that allows them to properly digest it. This is just plain dumb journalism.
I am American and have no problem eating sushi or seaweed. I have eaten sushi in both the states and in Japan. I am wondering tho, could it be the amount of wasabi used? According to my Japanese father-in-law who is a Sushi chef, wasabi helps kill bacteria that sushi contains.
Well, yeah, the title is somewhat bogus. That's far too common. The actual story is about the raw seaweed on some sushi, not sushi itself. And it didn't say you couldn't eat/enjoy/digest the seaweed, just that you wouldn't digest it quite as efficiently. The Japanese, according to this study, had gut bacteria that got the ability to better break down the seaweed off of bacteria that was on the seaweed; the theory (apparently untested) is that this enables them to get more benefit out of the seaweed. Which, by the way, means they didn't evolve, their gut bacteria did.