lassesen 12:56 pm on November 16, 2019  

Report on Heritage Super Food!

I was fascinated by your recent posts about eating for your heritage. I have a 23andme done already, so I confirmed I’m roughly 40% British, 40% French/German, and 9% Nordic.

Then I looked at the 4 uBiomes I have on your site. Barley was the main suggestion for all of them. I started eating cooked barley for breakfast and adding in barley/rye only breads, with no wheat. The skinny flat ones that you’ve pictured on your site many times over the years. Shockingly, my brain fog has been improved and my mood is much better. These are two of my worst symptoms and nothing else has touched them for almost a decade.

The problem is that my diarrhea has returned. This was the reason I stopped eating all types of gluten. Going GF and taking lots of digestive enzymes cured me of an awful lifelong struggle with IBS-D. So now I’m worried. I hope it’s just a temporary reaction to a microbiome change. But would love your advice. 

From a reader

The reader did this as a result of my Eating for your heritage microbiome post. I am going to use those uBiomes (with permission from reader) to try to tackle the diarrhea issue using the new Hand picking bacteria to modify

The diarrhea effect may be a herxheimer like effect from the microbiome changing. If this is the case, then roughly it out for a while is suggested (after consulting with a medical professional of course).

The ideal situation would be getting a post-Barley microbiome, to both see the changes and possibly identify what shifted to cause diarrhea to return. For this analysis, I used the latest uBiome sample.

Using the IBS Medical Condition Profile
Using Citizen Science

The final bucket of bacteria we came up with is shown below

Suggestions

I left this bucket on my site so the reader can look at the full list.

  • Under suggestions, I would skip wheat for the moment 😉
  • Under avoid, only a few items are > 0.1, but three items are commonly used in self-treatment.
Good Probiotics
Poor probiotics

Bottom Line

We await the reader’s report on what impact these changes make. If it is negative, I will post it regardless. I seek answers which means a willingness to accept learning experiences.