Mind-Blowing Gut News

I’m not exaggerating when I tell you I’ve seen the movie An Officer and a Gentleman no less than 100 times. This 1982 release had cult status in the house I grew up in. If you’ve never seen it, we’re no longer friends until you do. If you have seen it, here’s a 2-minute clip from one of my favorite parts, the disastrous altitude chamber run for Sid Worley:

The movie clip happens to be both semi-autobiographical and very applicable to some recent gut microbiome news I read about this week.

I’ll be brief while I hopefully blow your mind.

Before I tell you how the movie clip haunted me some years later, let’s cover this crazy gut news first.

Dr. Chris Damman shared a story on X about a study that uncovered a particular gut bacteria strain prevalent in some high-altitude residents' guts.

The study participants agreed to move from a lower altitude to a much higher altitude and periodic testing confirmed the eventual presence of the beneficial bacteria strain, Blautia.

The article references that “research has suggested Blautia can benefit cognitive development in infants and lower adults’ risk of obesity and diabetes. Now, researchers are glimpsing another potential benefit of these microbes: helping people adapt to high altitudes”.

They followed up the human results with some mouse studies where they used low-oxygen conditions to induce Hypoxia in a portion of the mice.

“Hypoxia can trigger immune cells to release inflammatory factors that can cause fluid to build up in the lungs, brain, and intestine. The buildup can lead to altitude sickness.”

The mice treated with Blautia showed much less tissue and organ damage from the Hypoxia than their unfortunate counterparts.

The article discusses the future possibility of assisting mountainers with a “mile-high” probiotic to protect against the harmful effects of altitude sickness. Deeper research is also seeing links to Blautia and reduced rates of Type 2 Diabetes.

Unbelievable, right?

Equally as unbelievable was how the movie clip from above would become real life to me just a handful of years later.

Part of military flight training took me to an identical altitude chamber seen in the movie. The purpose was to expose us to hypoxia in a controlled setting so we could readily identify its onset, and see how physical and cognitive impairment follows.

The only difference was instead of playing a card game or “patty-cake”, I had to solve a kid’s “shape” game…do you remember this one?

Once I took my oxygen mask off, I successfully inserted about 4 pieces correctly before I lost the dexterity in my fingers and started to put circles into square holes.

Worse yet? I had a bit of a head cold and upon descent and increasing atmospheric pressure, I ruptured my ear drum.

The “mile-high probiotic” might have helped with the shape ball calamity, but my ear drum rupture was no match for the de-pressurization.

A new week can only mean tripping over another article about how GLP-1 medications like Ozempic are benefitting more and more parts of our bodies. The litany of benefits is led by blood sugar management and now weight loss but they’re seeing protective benefits throughout the body.

Now you may not lie awake at night wondering how this is happening, but sometimes I do. Afterall, the seismic results from GLP-1 agonists of late occur largely in the gut microbiome but these new developments are taking us to other places in the body.

Which is why this article caught my attention: Why do obesity drugs seem to treat so many other ailments?

Mariana Lenharo writes about how everything from alcoholism to Parkinson’s, scientists are studying the mechanisms behind the broad clinical potential of weight-loss drugs.

She mentions that the weight loss result has some obvious correlations to cardiovascular disease but these other connections like alcoholism and Parkinson’s Disease require a bit more brain power to solve.

Much is still unknown but brain activity, gut-brain axis workings, and the overall tamping down of inflammation seem to be the most likely culprits for conferring benefits to these additional areas of focus.

This new frontier in research is yet another reason to kick-start the journey to rebuilding, re-tuning, or maintaining your gut microbiome.

And if you’re searching for some trivia questions to quiz your buddies on this weekend, ask them which strain of beneficial bacteria was more than likely part of Sir Edmund Hillary’s gut microbiome as he scaled and descended from Mt. Everest- Blautia!

Thanks for reading,

Jeff