Kickas.org Forums Treatments, Drugs and Alternatives NSD and diet-related; Flatulence as a sign bacterial activity

Hello, this is Nacho, from Spain.

As a sufferer both from AS and Ulcerative Colitis, I am very interested in diets aimed at controlling the bacteria in the colon, and I have the impression that these diets do help. However I have doubts about some aspects, which stem mainly from what I have read about gas in the digestive system. I would like to share these doubts with you all.
It seems that the gas we expel though the anus has two sources.
The first one is swallowed air. This air is odourless.
The second one is the production of gas by the bacteria in our intestines, mainly the colon, when breaking down undigested food. Among these gases is Hydrogen sulfide, which is the source of the odour associated with flatulence.
Excessive flatulence is not usually due to swallowed air. It indicates an increase in the activity of bacteria in the colon.
Complex carbohydrates (starch) are a common source of flatulence BUT:
-Rice is not usually considered a culprit. In fact, in some pages about flatulence you can read: “Rice is the only starch that does not cause flatulence”. “Rice is the most easily digested starch and little undigested rice starch reaches the colon and the colonic bacteria. Accordingly, the consumption of rice produces little gas.”
-On the other hand, fructose is considered a source of flatulence. It seems that many people have problems to digest fructose, particularly in the large amounts we consume it nowadays. Common sugar is a disaccharide made up from glucose and fructose, and fructose is used as a sweetener in many soft drinks and other processed foods. Honey too has a lot of fructose, and, of course, it is present in fruit. Our bodies may not be prepared to cope with so much of it.
-Not everyone reacts to the same foods in the same ways. So it may be a good idea to listen to our bodies and see which particular foods increase our levels of flatulence.
I should be grateful for your opinions.

Hi Nacho and welcome to Kick As,
Interesting post and I too think it is important to watch what foodsources promote flatulence cause this is surely a sign of bacterial activity. I also agree on your observation on starches like bread and potatoes, and the different reaction on rice. There is however a lot of misunderstanding about fructose especially on some websites where fructose is misinterpreted with fructose oligosaccharide or fructo oligosaccharide, here better known as FOS which is an entirely different starch-like molecule. FOS is used as an artificial sweetener and therefore comsumption of it is higher nowadays. No soft drink maker would however even think of using fructose in their soft drinks as it has around the same caloric value and sweeteness as plain sugar and it is many times more expensive. Fructose can be taken up quite easily by the body (better then plain sugar) as it is a monosaccharide and will in a normal situation never reach the lower intestines. To be digested it needs the presence of glucose and therefore in the digestion is slower then that of glucose which is good for preventing peaks in blood sugar levels. For good digestion a mix with glucose is best like in honey or like in fruits. I have never heard of anyone getting flatulence from fruit by the way. On the other hand I have found cases in official literature where fructose digestion is indeed impaired which then lead to colitiis. This is a rare condition however many times more rare than lactose maldigestion. But if someone should have this condition it is bad enough surely. I too am interested to find out what food causes flatulence, to start with myself: the combination of spinach and red meat causes excess gas production I think because of the overdose of iron. Anyone else?
Greetings Gerard

Nacho,
So, do you consider any gas a bad sign? I know that there will always be gas from swallowed air, but do you consider any gas that results from bacterial fermentation a bad sign?

I have spent some time and research on this, because where I am coming from (the Specific Carbohydrate Diet, SCD), any gas is considered bad. I have studied the gas production of both beneficial and pathogenic gut bacteria. The potentially pathogenic Pm bacteria, which I have in over growth, produces a lot of gases. Pm does mixed-acid fermentation of glucose, producing carbon dioxide and dihydrogen gases. These are benign gases in the gut, but Pm also produces ammonia from catabolism of amino acids, resulting from the breakdown of proteins (its specialty). Worse, it produces dihydrogen sulfide (which you mentioned in your post), from using sulfates and sulfites as electron acceptors, instead of oxygen as an electron acceptor, in the anaerobic lower gut. H2S gas is a toxic substance in the human body, and ammonia gas can enter the blood stream and cause toxicity in the rest of the body as well. So neither of these gases are a good thing to have in your body (even when they ultimately exit it at high speed).

The beneficial bacteria don't produce these toxic gases. By beneficial, I mean the kind of bacteria that you would take in probiotic supplements. Lactobacillus acidophilus, bulgaricus, casei, and plantarum species of bacteria do homofermentation of glucose, which does not result, directly, in producing any gases. They do, however, produce a byproduct of the fermentation, lactic acid, which can be used by other fermenters in the lower gut, and that may result in gas production. Bifidobacterium bacteria are (I think mostly) heterofermenters of glucose, and that produces carbon dioxide, which is benign. Bifidobacterium bacteria also produce acetic acid, which can be used by an ancient kind of bacteria, called methanogens, to produce methane, which is also harmless.

If you are doing a very strict diet, that removes all food for bacterial growth in the lower gut, then you may have a very reduced bacterial ecology in the lower gut. This situation may result in very little gas, because the only active bacteria left (if you are taking Lactobacillus supplements), may be Lactobacillus species in your upper gut. That's the SCD theory, anyway.

I, personally, have found that this theory did not work out for me. Having an overgrowth of a bacteria, Pm, that thrives on a high meat diet, the SCD did nothing to starve out Pm. I need to reduce my meat consumption and repopulate my lower gut with Bifidobacterium species, instead. And indeed, my initial attempts at feeding bifidus and not Pm are working. But, if you are dealing with a Kp over growth, then you are dealing with an opposite situation, where the starches and sugars need to be restricted, instead.

Kp does a butanediol fermentation of glucose, which produces carbon dioxide and dihydrogen gases, both harmless. So, it's possible that, if you were to starve out your lower gut with a restrictive diet (reduced starches and sugars), and only supplemented with Lactobacillus species, then a goal of greatly reduced volume of gas might be reasonable, allowing for swallowed air.

Bottom line, in my opinion, is that you need to ask, what kind of gases are being produced? It's not a simple question, either. Is this TMI (too much information)? Sorry if it is, I like this stuff, and I do tend to run on about it.
Jan

Edited by JanandPmirabilis on 11/22/04 03:06 PM (server time).

Hey nachos.Very interesting post never gave gas that much thought...But I guess it makes sence..But then there are some people I know who have a big problem with the gas catagory with a good diet .and with dietairy changes the gas remains...I guess the only thing to do is what my father does...blame it on the cat....Later Steve

You havent lived until you ride a wave .The best medication of all SURFING.

I want to thank you all for your answers. They have been very illustrative. Or should I say the opposite? Because the only clear thing is that the more you look into it, the more complex it becomes.
I must admit I did not feel very comfortable pointing at fruit as a possible bad guy because my experience with it, particularly with white grapes, is quite good. So I am happy to learn that the anonymous sugars in processed foods are quite a different thing from the fructose in fruits.
As for the question JanandPmirabilis asks me: No, I do not think that any gas is a bad thing. It seems that having a certain amount of bacteria is not only inevitable but necessary; so producing some gas must be considered a good thing. And I agree that combining diet and probiotics to control which bacteria we have seems a good strategy. But the point I wanted to make is that an increase in flatulence could indicate that you have problems with a particular food.
I am glad you mentioned the SCD. I have used it to fight my ulcerative colitis, and I think it did me good, but I must also admit that I do not dare to eat some of the things considered legal; chestnuts for example. If I am to judge from what happens in my body, I should say that bacteria enjoy them as much as I do.
As for the London AS Diet, I have doubts about the fact that it lets you take a normal amount of sugars. To begin with, in my experience, the moment you cut out starch, it is difficult to keep at a normal level of anything allowed. And it seems that "sugars", particulary in the food industry, can refer to quite a lot of different things.
Thank you all.

Heya Postal,
You're not referring to the beautiful Ms Marshmellow raising her elegant tail there are you?
(sorry JanandPM I do love that pic)
Gerard

Hi Janet,
Interesting observation you make over the growth of P. Mirabilis on a high meat diet. Maybe an intermittent apple fast can give the P. Mirabilis a hard time too. I alway feel a change in the intestines after doing that fast. Further I am always afraid that these opportunistic bacteria find a way to survive anyway and change their food habits. For instance it is known that Klebsiella can be present in open wounds where no starch is present or on skin etc. But giving them a hard time is always good for us of course.
Gerard

Hi all,
Nacho, yes it is a complicated situation. By the way, I found some info on Kp that stated that Kp rarely if ever produces the smelly dihydrogen sulfide gas, H2S (I have to correct my previous post where I called it HS). Also, I don't think that it produces much if any ammonia, not like Pm, which is a prodigious producer of both H2S and NH3. So, the smelly gas is coming from some other bacteria, maybe even PM.

Gerard, your comment about spinach and red meat reminded me about my problems with chicken liver. On the SCD, the only source of concentrated iron (no supplements) is supposed to be liver (beef or chicken), taken in moderate amounts twice a week. As I have been moving more to vegetarianism, I have found that the chicken liver I was eating was the last source of major, smelly gas. I strongly suspect PM is getting it--a combination of high iron and a difficult-to-digest form of animal protein. So, your idea about iron with protein is probably right on the mark. But, I have this problem now, of finding another source of iron that will not feed Pm. I am considering Lactoferrin with iron, if I can find it--although worried about an allergic reaction. Lactoferrin comes from cow colostrum, and I seem to be allergic to everything from beef, except leather.

I can't eat raw apples. The last time I tried, I got a very bad gut ach. If I even lightly saute apples (peeled), then there is no problem, so I think it may be an organic acid that is denatured with a little heat. Anyway, I have unstable blood sugar (hypoglycemia), so fasting is dicey for me. Another thing, is that Pm will go from 0 to 60 zillion colonies in nothing flat, and can go into a swarming phase that literally crawls across surfaces, when it's hungry or ticked off. So, apple fasting would make it both hungry and ticked off (from the acid), and it would tell me about it, then come right back after the fast, in no time at all. I think the answer, for me, is a long term, mostly continuous GFCF vegetarian diet.

As far as bacteria changing their lifestyles, well, I think that is a question of genetic baggage. Bacteria can pick up the DNA for an enzyme, or a suite of enzymes from plasmids passed between them, like card players sitting at a table and drawing cards from the stack. The plasmids (rings of DNA) are the cards, floating in the liquid around the bacterial cells. This is the way Pm picked up some of its virulence genes for urinary tract infections, from E. coli (not even the same species). But, there is a limit on how far this goes. Not every bacterial function can be coded on just one plasmid. I suspect (I am no expert), that for Pm to pick up the ability to use starch, or even most of the two-ring sugars, like lactose, is not possible. Similarly, for Kp to pick up all those proteases that Pm has, would be very unlikely. I think that there are whole metabolic pathways that would have to be constructed or rearranged here, for Pm and Kp to start to behave like each other. That is much more genetic coding than a few enzymes, passed under the table.

A lot of gut bacteria behave differently outside the gut. Even E. coli and the beneficial bacteria (L. acidophilus) have been found in wounds. Pm goes into a whole different set of behaviors in the urinary tract, and doesn't even look like itself in the gut. So the environment is a major trigger of changed behavior. I guess it takes major changes in the gut, like IBDs, to change the gut environment enough to turn Pm or Kp into pathogens.

Gerard, thank you very much for your adoration of my beloved pussy cat. She is on probiotics, too, you know. She had a root canal last October to save one of her little fangs, and went on antibiotics. She developed gut problems (yes, the cat passed gas and took the paint off the walls), so I put her on Natren's FelineDophilus (L. acidophilus and Enterococcus faecium). She is doing much better now, and we have repainted the walls.

Jan

To JanandPmirabilis.
I'm not sure if you will be interested in this, but just in case.
A British study shows that diets high in meat and alcohol are associated with an increased relapse risk for ulcerative colitis.
They attribute it to the fact that: "Some high-protein foods, including red meat and processed meat, are rich in sulphur. Many alcoholic drinks contain sulphates as additives."
"A sulphur-rich diet produces hydrogen sulphide, which damages the lining of the intestine, say the researchers."

(Oh, my God, not wine, please)

Nacho,
I find that very interesting. The SCD, as originally promoted by Gottschall, allows lots of red meat and some liquor, including the hard stuff. And ulcerative colitis is usually one of the slowest IBDs to respond to the diet, with many people with UC having to stay on the SCD to a large degree, for life. I did the SCD differently, with out red meat and almost no alcohol, just a little wine on rare occasions. But then, I think Gottschall was aiming for the great bulk of middle America, who would rather suffer from untreated IBD than give up their beef and whiskey. I am from the west coast of America, where a healthy lifestyle is more emphasized in the culture. And I am just plain allergic to cattle and alcohol gives me asthma (the sulfites). I suppose this means eggs, which are rich in sulfur-containing compounds, are also a problem.

You know, I wonder if Pm could be a cause, or at least an aggravation, of ulcerative colitis?
Jan