En blogg jag inte läst tidigare skriver mycket om vårt mikroliv och det här inlägget om skillnad mellan kvinnor och män är intressant.
A study on the effects of prebiotics on satiety and hunger came across my radar the other day. It had an interesting finding — that increased fiber had opposite satiety effects in men and women:
"Over the remainder of the day, the high dose of scFOS reduced food intake in women, but increased food intake in men, suggesting a gender difference in the longer-term response."
I filed it away as interesting. Do women somehow extract more energy from fiber than men? Maybe.
But then, today, I came across a piece of info that I’m familiar with, but never really connected to anything: gender differences in colonic transit time. In short, it’s been found that women generally have a markedly longer colonic transit time. Average transit time for men: 33 hours. Average transit time for women? 47 hours.
As you should know by now, a major area of interest for this blog is the role that the human microbiome might play in chronic disease. And there’s a pretty specific class of chronic disease that is particularly under the microscope. Given that we know what an important role microbiota play in our immune system — they are major regulators of immune activity, and about 70% of our immune system is considered to be in our gastrointestinal system — there’s no wonder that autoimmune diseases are at the top of the list when looking at the microbiome and human disease.
Now, let’s see. If women have a greater need for dietary, fermentable, prebiotic, gut bacteria-feeding fiber, would it perhaps stand to reason that they might suffer disproportionately from a modern Western diet devoid of that? Ummm:
"Taken together, autoimmune diseases strike women three times more than men. Some diseases have an even higher incidence in women.
[...]
The fact that women have enhanced immune systems compared to men increases women’s resistance to many types of infection, but also makes them more susceptible to ADs."
All very interesting.
2024.11.23 - 02:46:13
