Choline — is it the key to modern illnesses?
tldr; Choline is vital, and it’s probably the biggest difference between ancient and modern (less healthy) diets — but it turns out that we have to consume a lot of vegetable fiber/plant fibre in order to absorb it. Just having choline in our diet, or supplementing with it, isn’t enough.
It’s Tamara Rae who’s been at the forefront re telling us with EDS and similar “industrial diseases” to get more choline and digging up the research as to just why; but recently I stumbled on an article that really underlined her points. I always knew she was onto something (I was already supplementing with choline myself), but a 2015 study I just stumbled onto convinces me she’s onto something huge; for a wide range of modern illnesses. We may have to look hard at choline deficiency as a direct cause and not just see choline as a helpful supplement. Choline sufficiency or deficiency may be the key difference between modern and ancient diets.
For an odd reason — the choline in modern diets isn’t being absorbed in a useful form, because the bacteria in our gut that do that need lots of plant fiber to thrive, and we’re not getting that.
Experimenters switched people back and forth between traditional African with modern American diets, then measured what *wasn’t* being absorbed. In other words, they measured what was different about what was excreted.
Now, you’d think there’d be dozens or hundreds of differences in the excreted metabolites and nutrients that result from such a massive change, but nope… there’s just one difference that sticks WAY out — choline. Those eating the traditional diet absorbed large amounts of choline, helped along by biota that thrived on plant fibre, which is to say, vegetables (raw vegetables?) and fruits. Those eating the modern diet lacked those biota and absorbed very little: the choline in their diets just went straight through them. Which would explain why over 90% of us moderns are deficient in choline! [1]
So I’ve broken out my magic bullet and I’m grinding up a lot of carrots, celery, zucchini, lettuce, cucumbers, etc in it for a lot of liquidy salad these days. Tastes great with a oil and vinegar dressing. I’m gonna feed those good bugs and get my choline.
Here’s the money quote from the study:
“The only significantly more abundant fecal metabolite identified in the Americans at baseline, and in Africans after westernization of their diets, was choline. This is highly significant, as recent studies have shown that choline is extensively metabolized by the microbiota to trimethylamine20 that is absorbed and metabolized by the liver to trimethylamine-N-oxide, which is strongly atherogenic21, providing yet another link between westernized diets, the microbiota and westernized diseases. Evidence that this metabolic pathway was indeed stimulated in Africans given the western diet was the observed increase in urine trimethylamine-N-oxide (Table 2). Reciprocal changes in urinary metabolites derived from microbial metabolism of green vegetables, for example,, N-acetyl-S-methyl-L-cysteine sulfoxide, were also observed following diet switch, suggesting that some of the reduction in mucosal proliferation in Americans could also have been related to the effects of increased phytochemical consumption in the Africanized diets.”
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms7342#affil-auth
[1] The over 90% figure for choline deficiency, reference is here:
