The benefits of fermented food

 Some new research out of Stanford has shown that eating fermented food, such as yogurt, sauerkraut, kombucha, and kefir may alter our gut biome (bacteria, viruses and fungi) in a beneficial way. Fermented foods are often teeming with live microorganisms as well as byproducts of the fermentation process that include various vitamins and lactic and citric acids. In the study, the group of subjects that ate such foods were found to have far more microbial species in their guts than the control group. What’s more, those who ate the fermented foods showed marked reductions in 19 inflammatory compounds, such as interleukin-6, an inflammatory protein that tends to be elevated in diseases such as Type 2 diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis.

Interestingly, just five percent of the new microbes came directly from the fermented foods. As one researcher said, “The vast majority came from somewhere else, and we don’t know where.” The researchers guessed that the species were either low-level microbes below the level of detection that bloomed, or the fermented foods did something that allowed for the rapid recruitment of other microbes into the gut environment.

The more fermented foods the test subjects ate, the greater the number of microbial species they acquired—a good thing. Studies have linked high levels of microbial diversity to lower rates of obesity, Type 2 diabetes, and other ills. Researchers also discovered that those with a higher levels of diversity had reductions in inflammation when eating a high fiber diet, while those with less diversity had slight increases in inflammation when they ate more fiber. The researchers suspect that people with low microbiome diversity lack the right microbes to digest all the fiber they consume. Perhaps that’s why some people experience uncomfortable gastrointestinal issues when they eat a lot of fiber.

I like fermented foods, such as sauerkraut and yogurt. I eat yogurt several times a week. I’ve been eyeing bottles of kimchi at my market for months. Now I’m motivated to buy it.  

For an introduction to this blog, see I Just Say No; for a list of blog topics, click the Topics tab.

Hospital billing secrets revealed (sort of)

 This year the federal government ordered hospitals to publish a complete list of the prices they have negotiated with insurers. Some hospitals have complied; many have not (they just ignore it and pay a fine). Even when the prices are published, the data is nearly impenetrable. In one case, a hospital posted information about one treatment that spread its prices across 269 web pages.

At any rate, what the data has shown so far is that, depending on the insurers, hospitals are charging patients wildly different amounts for the same services and a single insurer can have half-dozen different prices within the same facility. What’s more, major health insurers are often negotiating unfavorable rates for their customers. In many cases, insured patients are getting prices that are higher than if they pretended to have no coverage at all. As to Medicare, it generally covers 87 percent of the cost of care. Often major health plans pay more than four times the Medicare rate for a routine colonoscopy and more than ten times for an MRI scan.

Examples of ranges for insurance prices:

• Basic knee MRI at Massachusetts General: From $877 to $4,140.
• Emergency room foot X-ray at Baylor Medical Center: $832 (no insurance) to $1,727.
• Colonoscopy at Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Michigan: $732 to $1,801.
• Pregnancy test at University of Pennsylvania hospital: $10 (no insurance) to $93.
• Rabies shot at Layton hospital in Utah: $16,953 to $37,214

It matters. If your insurer negotiates a bad deal and you have a high-deductible plan, you’re responsible for thousands of dollars in costs before coverage kicks in. Sixteen percent of insured families currently have a medical debt with a median amount of $2000. When choosing a plan, you have no way of knowing how this is going to turn out—what you’ll end up paying when the time comes. Neither do employers or the government. What a mess.

For an introduction to this blog, see I Just Say No; for a list of blog topics, click the Topics tab.

Problems with eye drops

 Here’s something that users of eye drops might find helpful—or at least interesting. I read about a woman who had lots of problems with her eyes—an abnormal membrane on her retina; glaucoma; cataracts. She used pressure-reducing eye drops for her glaucoma, and ocular antibiotic and steroid drops as well as artificial tears for her other ailments. After her cataract surgery, she found she was intensely sensitive to light. Also, when she used her glaucoma drops her eyes began to burn, and her eyes were dry and gritty feeling. She stopped all the drops and the problems went away.

It turns out that eye drops contain a preservative called benzoalkonium chloride (BAK). BAK, a soap-like compound, prevents the growth of bacteria in bottles of medications that contain more than a single dose. It is the most commonly used preservative in both over-the-counter and prescription eye drops. BAK kills bacteria by dissolving their protective outer coat. The problem is that our tears are covered by a similar protective coat. The BAK in eye drops breaks down the protective coat in our tears, exposing the salty fluid to the air. The unprotected fluid evaporates and our eyes become even dryer. If you make enough tears, the drops won’t bother you. But aging reduces this protective layer, which puts older users of medications containing BAK at higher risk of drying eyes. The dryness can eventually lead to permanent damage to the cornea, the clear outermost layer of the eye. (As to the woman I described above, she switched to single-dose bottles of drops, which don’t need preservatives.)

When the optometrist puts drops in my eyes to dilate them, the drops really burn. She says it’s because I have dry eyes and that I should use lubricant drops. So I bought some Systane. It contains a preservative called Polyquad, which is similar to BAK, but it’s a larger molecule and is “not internalized by the epithelial cells on the eye, so it doesn’t cause the kind of toxicity that BAK causes,” according to the Review of Opthalmology. But I hate putting drops in my eyes so I never use it anyway.

For an introduction to this blog, see I Just Say No; for a list of blog topics, click the Topics tab.

Mouth breathers: Listen up!

 I was alerted by my sister and daughter to a new book called Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art by James Nestor. One key point is the importance of breathing through your nose and not your mouth. I had no idea that mouth-breathing was so commonplace and so bad for you. I’ve always breathed through my nose, I so never thought much about it.

Your nose is designed for breathing and for maintaining your health. Trillions of air molecules pass through your nose in a single breath. Specialized bones and cilia filter out pollutants and keep the air moving. By heating, cleaning, and pressurizing air, the structures in your nose can extract more oxygen with each breath. Mouth breathing does not do these things,

“Mouthbreathing transforms airways for the worse. Inhaling air through the mouth decreases pressure, which causes the soft tissues in the back of the mouth to become loose and flex inward, creating less space and making breathing more difficult. Mouthbreathing begets more mouthbreathing. Inhaling from the nose has the opposite effect. It forces air against all those flabby tissues at the back of the throat, making the airways wider and breathing easier. After a while, these tissues and muscles get ‘toned’ to stay in this opened and wide position. Nasal breathing begets more nasal breathing.”

Mouth-breathing causes snoring and sleep apnea. It also causes your body to lose 40 percent more water than nose breathing. Rats who had their nostrils obstructed developed fewer brain cells and took twice as long to make their way through a maze than the nasal-breathing control group. And so on. The author learned that after 240 hours of having his nostrils plugged by a researcher, his stress-related hormones spiked, he developed a bacterial infection in his nose, and his blood pressure increased.

The author and other experts recommend taping your lips together at night to train yourself to breathe through your nose (just a little square will do it). My sister, who is 86, has been working on eliminating mouth breathing. Here’s what she wrote to me: “I taped my mouth for two or three naps, and then it seemed to catch on. Now I just try to remember all day. At night I try to sleep with nose breathing and it’s only partially successful, but I wake up without the awful congestion with lots of phlegm. I’m more comfortable both night and day. When I must do something that takes concentration, I forget to nose-breathe. An interesting experiment.” At another point she writes, “It’s so nice to be able to go on an errand, eat out, and visit friends without having to rest constantly.” My daughter reports that she’s sleeping better and her blood pressure has gone down. Wow! I urge all you mouth breathers to buy the book and get going!

For an introduction to this blog, see I Just Say No; for a list of blog topics, click the Topics tab.