Ethanol-Making Microbe Tied to Nonalcoholic Fatty Liver Disease

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I didn't know that. I have always associated liver ailments with the ingestion of something - alcohol, drugs (legal and otherwise,) strange dietary components... but this is something I learned today...

As its name suggests, nonalcoholic fatty liver disease describes a liver condition in which fat builds up in the livers of people who drink little or no alcohol. It can affect young, healthy people with no other comorbidities, leaving scientists and doctors stumped as to why some livers gradually fail.

I guess the assumption that alcohol is the culprit is kind of justified. But it doesn't come from consumption. It comes from gut-bacteria... a particularly nasty guy named Klebsiella pneumoniae - and if you infer pneumonia from this, you're not exactly wrong. If aspirated (breathed in) the lung infection that can follow can be severe.

But in this case:

Meijnikman says that one of the first people to tie the gut to ethanol production in the gut was Hans Krebs, the Nobel Prize–winning physician of Krebs cycle fame. Back in 1970, Krebs gave rats parasol, a drug that inhibits an enzyme that breaks down alcohol, and noticed afterward that the amount of alcohol leaving the portal vein, which drains the blood from the gastrointestinal tract to the liver, was higher than the amount in the peripheral circulation. Though Krebs established that the portal vein typically has a higher ethanol concentration than the peripheral veins, the association between ethanol-producing microbes and liver disease didn’t come until later.

I remember numerous instances where people had been repeatedly accused of being drunk - despite their assertions to the contrary...

In a subsequent experiment, the researchers infused 10 individuals with NAFLD and 10 overweight but otherwise healthy controls with selective alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH) inhibitors before a meal. ADH is the enzyme that the liver uses to break down alcohol, and, as the researchers expected, this intervention increased patients’ blood ethanol concentration 15-fold compared to patients that had not received ADH. “There was one patient who even appeared to be a little bit intoxicated,” says Meijnikman. This told the researchers that normally, the liver cleans ethanol-rich blood coming from the gut before it reaches the peripheral blood.

Things that make you go "Hmmm."

This is good work. I hope they can learn more.

a reply to: Maxmars

I've got NASH. Thanks for posting this.

a reply to: Creep Thumper

I hope you remain well. I am pleased that I could share this with you.

a reply to: Maxmars

I wonder if probiotics would create a gut flora that choked off the other non desirable ones.

sounds like auto brewers syndrome

The solution is to eliminate anything that can ferment from your diet

originally posted by: markovian
sounds like auto brewers syndrome

The solution is to eliminate anything that can ferment from your diet

It's more complicated than that.

I get the impression that this is not really a dietary issue.

There are many types of microbes within the gut that produce ethanol. The disconnect seems to occur between the host and it's symbiotic microbial environment where - as the author of the article puts it, "the relationship goes sour."

I am not learned enough to understand just how that can happen. I suspect that a dietary approach would seem logical approach to controlling or at least coping with this 'soured' relationship between the two. But from what I can tell, the thrust of everyone's approach to this is about "what new drug can we create" to micromanage the actual symptomatic aspect between liver metabolism and blood. Go figure.

Like I said, not a scientist, not a doctor... only interested because: reasons.

a reply to: Maxmars

Anything to do with an intake of Aspartame or a similar sweetener perhaps?

I seem to remember there was a link to chemicals that build up in major organs from that poisonous stuff. It cannot be digested, passed or absorbed by the body.

Could what you have reported here be a part of that process using normal sugar digestion processes but the body was tricked by fake sugar and the fat build up is the result of obsolete material normally used to transport the digested sugars around the body.

Just spitballin'... I'm no scientist or biologist.

a reply to: nerbot

I wouldn't be too surprised to learn that this may have a bearing on the condition. It might not be wrong at all. But I'm afraid that as a causal factor - I wouldn't think so. This ailment manifested itself among us long before our intake included refined petrochemicals.

The devastation that comes from altering our food cycle is not through expressing itself - manipulating food industrially is something that needs to be done without the overriding factor of profit.