My daughters are often on my case to give up drinking Pepsi – but it is the one vice that I actually enjoy and do not want to give up!
I mean apart from this particular soda drink I am pretty good. My husband does not drink any form of fizzy drinks neither do my two teenage daughters!
I am also lucky in that the girls never enjoyed eating fast food, or processed food and always preferred home cooked meals made from scratch!
To be honest processed foods, other than the fact they are full of sugar, fat and salt and lack certain nutrients, like fibre don’t actually taste that good either!
And now, new research suggests that some of the additives that extend the shelf life and improve the texture of these foods may have unintended side effects not on our bodies directly, but on the human microbiome, the trillions of bacteria living in our guts!
These substances may selectively feed the more dangerous members of our microbial communities, causing illness and even death.
They say this explains the rise in the deadly cases of clostridium difficile, or C. diff, an infection of the gut, that at times can be fatal!
One reason the bug has become more virulent is that it has evolved antibiotic resistance and is not as easily treatable.
Microbiologist Dr Robert Britton wanted to know what gave these strains their edge, so combed through more than 200 sugars and amino acids present in the gut to see if these microbes better utilised some food source compared with others.
The results of the investigation suggest a deceptively banal adaptation: Two of the most problematic C. diff strains have a unique ability to utilise a sugar called trehalose.
Trehalose occurs naturally in mushrooms, yeasts and shellfish, among other things.
It has historically been expensive to use, but in the late 1990s a new manufacturing process made the sugar cheap. That was good news for companies that manufactured prepackaged foods, because trehalose works great for stabilising processed foods, keeping them moist on the shelf and improving texture.
Since about 2001, loads of it has been added on to practically everything from cookies to ground beef!
In doing so, Dr Britton says we have inadvertently cultivated the most toxic C. diff strains, driving what has become a scourge of hospitals.
“What this research shows is that people should be considering the ecological impacts of food stuffs. Our gut bacteria are being bombarded with things that we never ate or never ate in the concentrations we eat now,” he says.
Gut microbes are kept slightly removed from the intestinal lining by a thin layer of mucus, and the Western diet seems to erode that protective barrier, bringing microbes too close.
A diet rich in soluble fibre, on the other hand, keeps the mucus barrier thick and healthy.
Certain food additives also lead to a weakened mucus barrier.
Then there are the artificial sweeteners like sucralose and saccharin, which individuals consume in diet sodas and “sugar-free” snacks in hopes of cutting calories.
Our bodies can’t directly digest most of them as they are meant to pass right through but it turns out that the microbes inhabiting our colons can metabolise the sweeteners, potentially to our detriment.
Of course the best thing to do would be to eat as much soluble fibre as possible, preferably in real food like nuts, legumes and vegetables and limit our intake of processed food!
Limit is the key word here – so for instance instead of two cans of Pepsi a day perhaps we can make it one?!