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  • From: "Lawrence F. London, Jr." <lfl@intrex.net>
  • To: Sustainable Agriculture Network Discussion Group <SANET-MG@LISTS.IFAS.UFL.EDU>
  • Subject: [permaculture] OT: BBC NEWS | Health | 'Friendly bacteria' gum for teeth
  • Date: Mon, 21 Aug 2006 03:53:23 -0400

[My experience with probiotic supplements seems to indicate that this effect
can be duplicated and possibly enhanced by
consuming products like New Chapter's "All Flora" in powder rather than encapsulated form before each meal wherein you dilute about one teaspoon or more of the powder in the mouth, swishing it around with cold mineral water before swallowing. I noticed that after several months of doing this I rarely had any noticable plaque buildup on my teeth and when there was, it was easily and quickly removed. - LL]

<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/5259314.stm>

Last Updated: Sunday, 20 August 2006, 22:58 GMT 23:58 UK
'Friendly bacteria' gum for teeth
Image of teeth
Bacteria cause tooth decay
Scientists have developed a chewing gum containing friendly bacteria which
they say can help prevent tooth decay.

The good bugs in the gum prevent other harmful mouth bacteria from sticking
to and attacking the teeth.

Toothpastes and mouthwashes containing Lactobacillus anti-caries are also in the pipeline, German chemical company BASF told Chemistry and Industry.

Friendly bacteria, normally found in live yoghurt, are already purported to
be good for treating bowel conditions.

Probiotics

Another potential use of Lactobacillus include the prevention of body odour. BASF are looking to produce a deodorant which can stop the odour-producing bacteria in the armpit.

The bacterium responsible for dental cavities, Streptococcus mutans, persistently colonises the surface of the teeth, where it converts sugar into aggressive acids that breaks down the enamel.


These new products will not remove the need to brush your teeth
Dr Gordon Watkins of the British Dental Association

L. anti-caries reduces the concentration of this harmful bacterium in the mouth making S. mutans clump together, preventing them from adhering to the teeth.

The BASF scientists say the gum has been tested on large numbers of people and has the ability to significantly reduce bacterial levels.

Dr Andreas Reindl of BASF said: "The effectiveness has been demonstrated and the first oral hygiene products containing probiotic lactobacilli are scheduled to appear in 2007."

'Keep brushing'

Dentists advise that the best way to keep your teeth in good condition is to ensure that you clean them regularly to get rid of any plaque build up.

It is also important to have a regular check up at the dentist - most suggest
once every six months to a year.

Dr Gordon Watkins, a member of the British Dental Association's health and science committee, cautioned: "These new products will not remove the need to brush your teeth as their action is targeted against just one bacterium.

"It's not a substitute for brushing the teeth, because this removes the plaque that contains a whole range of bacteria that causes gum disease and bad breath.

"The best way to minimise tooth decay is to reduce consumption of sugars; strengthen the teeth through the use of fluoride; and brush teeth to remove dental plaque."

The World Health Organization estimates that 5 billion people world-wide
suffer from tooth decay.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4938020.stm
Last Updated: Monday, 24 April 2006, 23:03 GMT 00:03 UK
Probiotics may ease gut disorders
Image of a man shopping
Numerous probiotics are available
Probiotics may help ease gut disorders linked to long-term stress such as
Crohn's disease, research suggests.
A team at Canada's McMaster University analysed gut tissue taken from rats
put in stressful situations.
Animals fed drinking water containing probiotic bacteria showed less signs that harmful bugs were mobilising to cause damage.
The gut study suggests probiotic bacteria literally crowd out their harmful
peers.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3952407.stm
Last Updated: Monday, 1 November, 2004, 00:21 GMT
Should we top up our friendly bacteria?
By Michelle Roberts
BBC News health reporter
Eating live bacteria can benefit people with certain illnesses, clinical
trials have shown.
The use of foods containing bacteria - probiotics - dates back thousands of
years.
It is reported that people in Biblical times drank sour milk to combat
problems in the gut.
The idea is by constantly topping up the bacteria in your body you're
maintaining well-being.
Dr Simon Cutting from the Royal Holloway, University of London
The annual probiotic market is now worth an estimated £135 million in the UK
alone.
There are two ways a probiotic can be classified.
Dr Simon Cutting, a reader in molecular microbiology at the School of Biological Sciences, Royal Holloway, University of London, explained: "One is a novel food - that's when you buy things from the supermarket. The other type is what is classified as a drug.
"When you have a drug, that means you have specific claims which have to be supported by clinical trials. You can't just say it will make you better - you have got to say specifically what it is.
"With novel foods you don't. So novel food is how probiotics are being sold at the
moment in the UK."
He is working with a pharmaceutical company to develop a probiotic that can
be classified as a drug.
Good plants
Dr Cutting said: "The idea is by constantly topping up the bacteria in your body
you're maintaining well-being."
Having a balance of "friendly bacteria" is thought to stop harmful bacteria taking a hold and causing disease, much like having a garden filled with good plants rather than weeds.
To do this, probiotic bacterial strains must be alive and be deliverable to
the gut.
That is they must survive gastric and bile acid and digestive enzymes during the gastrointestinal transit until they reach the gut.
Dr Cutting said trying to prove the effects of probiotics in health
scientifically was extremely complex.
"If you were to perform a clinical trial how can you be sure that the same number reach the small intestine for every person?
"At every step it becomes more and more difficult. And of course with a novel food you don't have a clinical trial, so it's really done on hearsay."
He doubted whether the novel food probiotics sold in the UK could work.
"In England, all they are selling at the moment are lactobacillus products.
"When you take a dose of lactobacillus, it's not clear how many of those can
survive digestion.
"But in Japan, for example, they are all based on spore-forming bacteria.
"I have a lot of faith in the novel foods based on bacillus products simply because I understand that the spore can survive the stomach so when you take a dose it gets through the stomach into the small intestine."
Professor Jeremy Hamilton-Miller, from the Royal Free and University College Medical School, London, said: "Not all probiotics achieve the same results.
"Despite claims on the label, some contain too small a quantity of bacteria to be beneficial, some contain probiotic cultures that do not survive the gastrointestinal passage, whilst others contain strains of bacteria that are not shown to benefit health."
But the professor, who works with Seven Seas, which produces Multibionta, said many of the probiotic foods sold in the UK did promote good health.
Professor Collette Short, director of science at Yakult, said there were
studies showing that probiotics boost health.
"There are scientific papers looking at people who are healthy and looking at different parameters, like mild conditions. Constipation would be one example.
"The other area you have is in healthy children going to nursery school where they are in an environment that they are more exposed to bacteria and potentially picking up infections.
"There are several studies that show that children on probiotics were better able to cope and had less use of antibiotics than other children."
THE 'NORMAL' GUT BACTERIA
Lactobacilli
Streptococci
Clostridia
Coliform
Bacteriodes
She said it was difficult to prove probiotics' effects in healthy people because there were no obvious biomarkers to measure any improvements.
Professor George MacFarlane, professor of bacteriology at the University of Dundee, said: "To be honest, I'm not entirely sure there is any great benefit in young healthy people. On the other hand they may not do any harm."
Different things
"Most of the things that are available now are well proven to be safe,"
Professor MacFarlane said.
"One of the biggest problems with all the work on probiotics is that they are funded by companies that have their own products, which means they are asking the questions that companies want answered," he said.
"The other thing is that different probiotics do different things.
"For example, if you take a probiotic that is proinflammatory, so it stimulates your immune system, it could actually do damage if you had something like ulcerative colitis.
"Ideally you would want to take something that reduces inflammatory processes. Many lactobacilli tend to be proinflammatory," he said.
Wendy Johnson, food scientist and member of the Institute of Food Science and Technology said: "I think probiotic organisms have a place to play in promoting health but providing the evidence is difficult."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/2253408.stm
Sunday, 15 September, 2002, 23:18 GMT 00:18 UK
Dental bacteria swap resistance
Teeth
Plaque contains good and harmful bacteria
Bacteria that cause gum disease and tooth decay swap genetic material that helps them build up drug resistance while they breed in the mouth, scientists have discovered.
A team led by Dr Peter Mullany, of the Eastman Dental Institute, London, has found that bacteria in the mouth and gut have identical antibiotic resistance genes.
This may prolong the useful lifetime of antibiotics
Dr Peter Mullany
They also found that many of these genes are found on short, mobile pieces of DNA called transposons which theoretically can be transferred between different types of bacteria.
In order to test the theory, Dr Mullany's group produced artificial dental plaque in the laboratory, using bacteria from a sample of human saliva.
They added a donor bacterium, Streptococcus salivarius, to the plaque, which contained a transposon with a gene for resistance to the antibiotic tetracylcine.
After a while other Streptococcal species in the plaque became resistant to
tetracycline.
Dr Mullany said: "We also found that when a soil bacterium was used as a donor it could pass on its transposon, even though it couldn't grow in plaque.
"In the long term, by understanding how antibiotic resistance genes are transferred, we can work out how to stop or slow down gene transfer.
"This may prolong the useful lifetime of antibiotics."
The research was presented at a meeting of the Society for General
Microbiology at Loughborough University.
Natural defences
The conference also heard that good bacteria growing in dental plaque could help fight off bugs that cause gum disease and tooth decay if they are given a competitive edge.
Under normal circumstances, the plaque that grows on teeth contains a mix of
good and harmful bacteria.
However, harmful bacteria tend to thrive in the acidic environment that is created when we eat sugary foods to the detriment of beneficial bacteria, which increases the risk of tooth decay.
Similar disruptions in the delicate bacterial balance can lead to gum disease.
Antibiotics are available to treat gum disease, but they work by wiping out
all bacteria, good and bad.
This gives good bacteria no opportunity to fight back, which they can do if the environment in the mouth is less made less acidic.
Professor Philip Marsh, of the Centre for Applied Microbiology and Research, Salisbury, said it should be possible to control the environment in the mouth more effectively to stop the good bacteria being killed off, and to modify the conditions that favour the growth of the harmful organisms.
"Bacteria involved in gum disease feed on host proteins and cannot grow in
air.
"They could be controlled using anti-inflammatory drugs (to reduce their food supply) or redox agents (to make the gum environment more oxygen-rich).
"And by using alternative sweeteners, or stimulating saliva production we can reduce the growth of bacteria that cause tooth decay."
"We think that these and other novel approaches may be developed to control or
prevent dental diseases."
A British Dental Health Foundation spokesperson said, "The research sounds very promising, although it is likely to be a considerable time before the public can gain the benefits.
"But gum disease is the most common disease in the world, and poor oral health is generally recognised as an indicator of social deprivation.
"So potentially it could have a significant impact."
Growing issue
The problem of antibiotic resistance is growing.
In recent years there have been outbreaks of bacteria resistant to all but a
handful of modern antibiotics.
These have mostly been confined to hospitals, where drug-resistant bugs are
more likely to arise.
Researchers have found that genes conferring antibiotic resistant are far more likely to be swapped between strains if they are carried on a particular part of the bacterium's DNA.
These parts, called a plasmid or "tranposon", can be easily exchanged by different bacteria in close contact with each other.
The Rowett team believes its findings on gene transfers could help scientists come up with ways to prevent this happening so often.
Dr Scott said: "Once we know more about the way these genes are passed on, we will be able to help doctors minimise the risk from spreading antibiotic resistance, and improve the way our current antibiotics are used."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/2918423.stm
Last Updated: Sunday, 6 April, 2003, 23:12 GMT 00:12 UK
Gut bugs swap drug-beating hints
Salmonella
Bacteria such as Salmonella can become tougher
Genes that allow bacteria to beat antibiotic treatments can be passed between
species with ease, say scientists.
Our natural gut bacteria may have acquired antibiotic resistance, but they
can hand that advantage to less friendly strains.
Researchers at the Rowett Research Institute in Aberdeen found that genes which conferred resistance against the antibiotic tetracycline transferred easily between gut bacteria and disease-causing bugs.
Any of these bacteria can readily transfer genes to each other which give resistance to some of our most important antibiotics.
Dr Karen Scott, Rowett Research Institute
Dr Karen Scott, who will present this evidence on Monday at the Society for General Microbiology Spring Meeting in Edinburgh, said: "We all have a huge number of different bacteria in our guts.
"Between them they make up a reservoir of millions of genes which they can
exchange with each other.
"Some of the bacteria are harmless - such as the bacteria in live yoghurt,
and can live safely with us all the time.
"But others, such as Salmonella, may make us very ill. Any of these bacteria can readily transfer genes to each other which give resistance to some of our most important antibiotics."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/5253182.stm
Last Updated: Monday, 7 August 2006, 14:20 GMT 15:20 UK
Elderly 'should take probiotics'
Bifidobacteria (Scimat/Science Photo Library)
Bifidobateria is a friendly bacteria found in the gut
Elderly people should take probiotic supplements, according to scientists

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3582902.stm
Last Updated: Sunday, 22 August, 2004, 00:55 GMT 01:55 UK
Friendly bacteria 'target ulcers'
Bowel scans
The scientists say further research is needed
People with bowel ulcers could soon be topping up their "friendly" bacteria
to beat their illness.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4784873.stm
Last Updated: Saturday, 19 August 2006, 00:05 GMT 01:05 UK
'Toxic diets' fuel child obesity
Chocolate
A small quantity - but a lot of calories
The increase in childhood obesity is being caused by addiction to "toxic", sugar-filled manufactured foods, a US researcher has claimed.
Robert Lustig, a University of California San Francisco child health expert said high-sugar, low-fibre diets cause hormone imbalances.
These then mean children overeat, he said in Nature Clinical Practice
Endocrinology & Metabolism.
The number of overweight and obese children is rising in the US and UK.
One in four children in England are obese, official statistics published
earlier this year showed.
It's relatively easy to eat a high calorie diet with what looks a very modest
quantity of food on your plate
Catherine Collins, British Dietetic Association
And 'adult' diseases, such as type 2 diabetes, are being seen in children.
Professor Lustig said food manufacturing practices have created a "toxic environment" that "doomed" children to being overweight.
He added too much fructose [fruit sugar] and too little fibre in foods both
act to boost insulin levels.
Insulin acts on the brain to encourage eating by blocking signals that travel from the body's fat stores to the brain and by stimulating a pleasurable dopamine "rush" after eating.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3208290.stm
Last Updated: Monday, 20 October, 2003, 23:34 GMT 00:34 UK
Gut teems with different viruses
Virus
Little is known about most viruses
A detailed genetic analysis of human faeces has revealed that we harbour
1,200 different viruses in our gut.
The researchers, from San Diego State University found that more than half
were previously unknown to science.
Most are phages - viruses that infect and kill bacteria - which are perfectly
harmless to humans.
Writing in the Journal of Bacteriology, the researchers say their findings
could lead to new treatments for gut disorders.
The gut contains up to 500 types of bacteria which play a crucial role in helping to digest food, and regulating our bowels' health.
The researchers say that phages could be used to tweak the balance of these
bacteria.
They say: "Understanding the population structure and dynamics of the normal human intestinal microbiota [micro organisms] has important implications for human health, nutrition, and the development of probiotics for the treatment and prevention of gastrointestinal disorders."
Only the viruses and bacteria that cause disease have been studied in detail.
Most of the world's bugs cannot be grown in the laboratory - and therefore
cannot be identified.
But the San Diego team was able to garner information about them by
extracting their genes from samples of human faeces.
The researchers compared the genetic material they discovered with DNA
sequences from known bacteria and viruses.
They found matches to families of phages, to previously described bacteria, to tiny organisms called protozoa and to DNA fragments called mobile elements that are shared by bacteria and viruses.
Significant study
Dr Bob Rastall, an expert in food technology at the University of Reading, told BBC News Online the study was significant as we currently knew little about the viruses present in the gut, despite the fact that they probably played an important role.
Firstly, they prey on bacteria, and so control the numbers of bacteria in the
gut.
And secondly, they can change the genetic structure of bacteria, potentially
altering the effect they have in the gut.
Dr Rastall said much work was taking place to develop foods that could either introduce new organisms into the gut, or promote the growth of certain types that were already there.
He said: "The significance of the phage work is that at the moment we are working partially sighted in that we do not take into account the impact of phages.
"They could be a reason, for example, why some probiotic bacteria do not persist
in the gut after introduction."
Professor Glenn Gibson, a colleague of Dr Rastall's at the University of
Reading, also welcomed the study.
He said: "Certainly the authors have used up to date technologies to address
a difficult issue.
"As is the case with gut bacteria there is a lot of diversity to unravel with
the viruses.
"I don't doubt that some of the phages may result in novel therapies against recognised pathogens. Often the best way to kill a microbe is to use another one."




  • [permaculture] OT: BBC NEWS | Health | 'Friendly bacteria' gum for teeth, Lawrence F. London, Jr., 08/21/2006

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