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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."
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.
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What about North Americans of Japanese decent?
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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?
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.
organisms adapt to local diet.
film at 11.
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
Not having the enzymes won't make any difference to your enjoyment of the dish, it will just mean that the seaweed won't be broken down for digestion. It will simply pass through your system like fibre. You can enjoy it, you just won't get any nutrition from it. I'm not really surprised by this discovery; it explains why I feel hungry about an hour after eating sushi.
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Not if they're giving birth with a competent doctor/midwife/whoever. A catheter and proper procedure keeps all that off the baby. I have two kids, so I've seen it happen. Next time try going to a hospital instead of a biker bar.
such a big sample size, how could they possibly be wrong..
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
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This is one thing I always hate to hear. anyone who doesn't really like it simply hasn't been properly introduced. I've know a few Gay men that make the suggestion about certain sexual situations...
So let me be clear, you're wrong...some things just rub people the wrong way. It's not how you were introduced to it...we are honestly that different from each other. I hate Sushi and it makes me want to throw up just looking at it.
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
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Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.