1) You might not get them all, and the ones that survive might transfer the traits of antibiotic survival and pathogenic-ability (if present) to the new population.
2) You would need to ensure that your hyper-specific diet contains the right mixture of microbes, say, you would need to avoid irradiated food, and a bunch of other things. "Bad microbes" coming into an empty gut seems to me like a bad thing.
We don't really enough enough about what should be the optimal mix of bacteria to make someone healthy.
They do "fecal" transplants to help people get back bacteria that are missing.
There was a graduate student talk (an hour) about some of this stuff last spring. slide decked linked to the right.
http://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/seminars/2014/in-the-loop-with-p...
In it, the author tells a story of someone in a village in a less developed country who cannot afford pesticides. So he starts a war between two ant colonies in order to drive out the ants that are destroying a beloved fruit tree.
You can do the same thing for gut flora. You don't have to wipe things out first. Trying to wipe the gut clean is extremely hard on the body. It's much easier on the body to just feed the good flora and give them support so they start crowding out things you don't want. It's a gentler path. It just takes persistence.
The problem with this is that they are frequently wrong. Many people respond poorly to these type of probiotic diets, and holistic medicine has observed outcomes in a small portion of the population and thus encouraged us to generalize them. All we really know about the gut is that it is extremely complicated and that in terms of gut conditions' ("IBS") relationship with gut microbiota they run the gamut. Many of them are either not directly affected by microbiota population (ie: nerve damage, circadian rhythm ), or gut microbiota are part of a multi-causal problem.
We need more science like this, that reaffirms what we "know," not more holistic bullshit.
Source: IBS sufferer who has spent years talking to GI specialists and reading research papers about this stuff. It's hard, and as soon as you think you have it figured out it smacks you in the face with another factor you haven't considered.
"Turnbaugh’s team found that switching mice to a high-sugar, high-fat diet reshaped the abundance of the community of microbes in the gut to a new, stable makeup within three days, in a reproducible manner that was largely independent of genetic differences among individual mice."
When babies are born, their gut is sterile before it gets colonized from outside. The diet definitely can affect which strain will outgrow others, but all gut bacteria is exogenous.
[0] http://www.whitemountainfoods.com/YogurtProductPage.html
A NY Times article earlier this year gives a background on how the rise of antibiotics has been accompanied by a rise in weight among animals and humans alike:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/09/opinion/sunday/the-fat-dru...
Kids in particular seem to be at risk. A recent study of 64,000 kids has associated repeated antibiotic exposure before age 2 with early childhood obesity:
http://archpedi.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=19098...
It's good we're investigating diet-based therapy, so patients can someday hear their doctors say "after finishing this broad-spectrum antibiotic prescription, you [or your child] should eat like this for this amount of time to restore digestive health."
Also, they also found a connection between obesity and "Steroid use, male sex, urban practice, public insurance, Hispanic ethnicity, and diagnosed asthma or wheezing were also predictors of obesity; common infectious diagnoses and antireflux medications were not."
Six doctor visits, stool and blood tests later, the doctors found what moved in. New antibiotics and replenishment medicines, diet with lots of probiotics, and within a few months I was back to mostly normal.
My story is simple, if you end up on harsh antibiotics it can change your life. Plan for it.
Something other than C. Diff? Would you mind sharing what it was?
(http://www.nature.com/news/gut-brain-link-grabs-neuroscienti...)
Tradition? Capsicums are a new world crop. They didn't make much of a dent in cuisines outside of the Americas until the 18th century.
Spicing food has a preservative effect, which is probably a more important factor in the spread of the practice than masking food that has already gone off.
It's easy to find diets for losing weight in general, but I'm curious if we know enough to create a diet to make a microflora composition that can help the weight loss process along. I keep seeing mentions of the microflora factor influencing weight gain, so I'm assuming there's a way to cultivate it to help with loss as well.
The answer in humans does not quite match the answer in mice so far. Possible reasons to explain this discrepancy : might be the lack of a large enough group to study, or a local variation in the groups that does not generalize to mice.
1. The speed at which the microbiome can change (<3 days)
2. The permanence of such changes (some of them are more permanent than others)
There are a couple mouse papers out that don't directly address the issue in 2, but that permanence (or lack thereof) played prominent roles in their findings.
What I'm really interested in is which types of bacteria create a feedback loop by releasing chemicals/hormones to increase hunger or cravings for specific foods. Definitely not an easy thing to determine given all the variables, but it seems very likely based on the other studies showing bacteria can promote fat or thin mice: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-gut-bacteria-h...
It will be fascinating to see how our understanding of nutrition and diet changes as science finally catches up. Studies like this are just the beginning.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2012/05/0...
http://www.wired.com/2014/04/hadza-hunter-gatherer-gut-micro...
The second link is particularly interesting, as the Hadza hunter-gatherers have a lot of gut bacteria that cause disease in the west. So it seems that gut bacteria aren't the whole story. Something to complicate the story for people who want to cure mental illness or create skinny people via manipulating gut bacteria.
