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Another post on gut biome!

If you get the flu, eat blueberries, and drink black tea and red wine to stop lung infection.

In a nutshell, certain gut microbes (Clostridium orbiscindens) love to eat the flavonoids in foods like black tea, blueberries and red wine. When mice were given a by product of the digestion of these foods, and then given the flu,  they didn't get the severe lung problems that the other mice got.

To be specific, the digestion of black tea, blueberries & red wine results in in the production of DAT (desaminotyrosine) which alters the immune system. To be specific it triggers type 1 interferon.

Here's the abstract: sciencemag.org

And here's a friendlier description of what happens: medicine.wustl.edu

Psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk is an innovator in treating the effects of trauma on people.
In this interview, he talks at length about how bodywork, like yoga and eye movement therapy can restore a sense of well being.
Surprisingly, much is centered around training the body to have a greater heart rate variability...yes...training the heart to be less even in its action! It turns out that the calmer people are, and the more mindful they are, the higher their heart rate variability.

Read a transcript of the detailed interview with Dr Bessel van der Kolk.
BESSEL VAN DER KOLK 
is Medical Director of the Trauma Center at the Justice Resource Institute in Brookline, Massachusetts. He’s also a professor of psychiatry at Boston University Medical School. His books include Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on the Mind, Body and Society and The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma.

A few weeks ago I heard a fascinating interview with Ted Kaptchuk, a  faculty member at Harvard Medical School, who has a degree in Chinese Medicine, and who, for the last 15 years, has been studying the biological changes associated with placebos.

In a nutshell, from a 2010 study he did with people suffering from Irritable Bowel Syndrome, it was found that even when patients were told that they were getting a placebo, the placebo affect  [healing] still happened. Here's a quote from an article in Harvard Magazine in 2013

Kaptchul asked himself, "What if he [I] simply told people they were taking placebos? The question ultimately inspired a pilot study, published by the peer-reviewed science and medicine journal PLOS ONE in 2010, that yielded his most famous findings to date. His team again compared two groups of IBS sufferers. One group received no treatment. The other patients were told they’d be taking fake, inert drugs (delivered in bottles labeled “placebo pills”) and told also that placebos often have healing effects.
The study’s results shocked the investigators themselves: even patients who knew they were taking placebos described real improvement, reporting twice as much symptom relief as the no-treatment group. That’s a difference so significant, says Kaptchuk, it’s comparable to the improvement seen in trials for the best real IBS drugs."

This is startling! Read the article for more in depth info on this and other studies Kaptchuck has been involved with. To summarize: "researchers have found that placebo treatments—interventions with no active drug ingredients—can stimulate real physiological responses, from changes in heart rate and blood pressure to chemical activity in the brain, in cases involving pain, depression, anxiety, fatigue."
To quote Ted Kaptchuck,
“We have to transform the art of medicine into the science of care.”

I love this quote. It resonates with my belief that health and good science go together. If the placebo affect is so powerful we should look at it...work out ways of working with it to harness the body's powerful healing mechanisms, rather than to dismiss it and eliminate it.