Book(?) review: Microbial Burden: A Major Cause Of Aging And Age-Related Disease, by Michael Lustgarten.<\/p>\n
This minibook has highly variable quality.<\/p>\n
Lustgarten demonstrates clear associations between microbes and aging. That’s hardly newsworthy.<\/p>\n
He’s much less clear when he switches to talking about causality. He says microbes are the root cause of aging, and occasionally provides weak evidence to support that.<\/p>\n
I still have plenty of reason to suspect that much of those associations are due to frailty and declining immune systems, which let microbes take over more. Lustgarten doesn’t make the kind of argument that would convince me that the microbe –> senility causal path is more important than the senility –> microbe causal path.<\/p>\n
He has a decent amount of practical advice that is likely to be quite healthy even if he’s wrong about the root cause of aging, including: eat lots of leaves, green peppers, mushrooms, and use low pH soap.<\/p>\n
One confusing recommendation is to limit our protein intake to moderate levels.<\/p>\n
He provides a nice graph of mortality as a function of He also notes that methionine restriction<\/a> has significant evidence behind it, and methionine restriction requires restricting protein, especially animal proteins.<\/p>\n Yet I see some suggestions that protein (methionine) restriction is likely only helpful in people with kidney disease<\/a>.<\/p>\n My impression is that high BUN mostly indicates poor health when it’s caused by kidney problems, and doesn’t provide much reason for reducing protein consumption, and least in people with healthy kidneys.<\/p>\n Lustgarten has since blogged about evidence<\/a> (see the 7\/11\/2018 update) that higher protein intake helps reduce his homocysteine.<\/p>\n I have also noticed a (noisy) negative correlation between my protein consumption and my homocysteine levels. But that might be due to riboflavin<\/a> – when I reduce my protein intake, I also reduce my riboflavin intake, since crickets<\/a> are an important source of riboflavin for me. So I want to do more research into dietary protein before deciding to reduce it.<\/p>\n The book is too quick to dive into technical references, with limited descriptions of why they’re relevant. In many cases, I decided they provided only marginal support to his important points.<\/p>\n