In March a study has been published by Playford at al.* about the the leaky gut syndrome in endurance athletes, and the efficiency of biestmilch/colostrum protecting stomach and gut exposed to strenuous workouts. In medicine the leaky gut is a problem physicians are quite familiar with. In sports in my opinion the problem has been neglected, even though stomach and gut are organs of minor resistance in many athletes. The survey is closed.

Stomach and gut issues are common among high-end performance athletes and endurance athletes in general. A few weeks ago a very interesting study has been published* that underscores the properties of biestmilch as a substance stabilizing the mucosal lining of the stomach and the gut. This makes me very happy, as I have been stressing the respective effects to athletes many times.
The gastro-intestinal tract's role is not only digestion, its mucosal lining also acts as a selective communicator between the external and internal micro-environments. In endurance performance you are walking the line between absorbing nutrients and keeping compounds on the outside that may jeopardizing your body's balance.

To work on authentic content is an awkwardly shaped creature for our brain. It takes energy, and the brain consumes already 25% anyway, without performing a special job. Our journey to Hawaii took its toll, brain activity is still low ;-). Since I am involved with Biestmilch I did quite some searches on the gut-brain axis. I learned a lot about the interactions between gut and brain, I learned that there is a hard-wired connection between the brain and the gut, and that there are myriads of soluble factors synthesized by the nervous and by the immune system that influences our well-being in every moment of time. The presentation by Heribert Watzke gives an inspiring view on the importance of cooking (= transformation of food) for energy production and expenditure and the avenues the skills of cooking have opened to us humans.

Since one century scientists try to find out about the cause of inflammatory bowel diseases. New techniques make it possible to examine whether there exist specific genetic profiles that cause chronic diseases. For Crohn's disease we know today that genes only make a minor contribution to its development. The trend in nature science, and that really makes me happy to observe, is to recognize that most of the chronic diseases cannot be explained by one cause only. The same applies to Crohn's disease (CD). Genetic studies proved this clearly. I want to raise the topic of CD because biestmilch proved to be a very good therapeutic agent in Crohn's disease. Of course, I ask myself why this is the case, where is the scientific evidence that gives us a reasonable explanation? Now, a group of scientists from the University of the City London, medicine department presents an interesting concept about the multi-causal roots of CD. In all CD patients examined scientists found abnormalities that indicate minor defects in a bunch of genes and not a single one. Probably they will discover many more of this kind. We must know that various genes contribute to the creation for example of signal transduction molecules etc. Defects on the level of molecules are called phenotypic, on the level of genes science speaks about ontogenetic defects. Okay then, various phenotypic failures in CD have been detected recently: a mucosal barrier dysfunction, innate immunodefiency states, and the propagation of a chronic inflammatory state. This vicious circle is perpetuating.

The mammalian lower intestine contains up to 10¹² bacteria per gram of intestine. The normal microbiota* are essential to maintain appropriate homeostatic (balanced) conditions, providing energy in form of short-chain fatty acids and nutrients like vitamins K and B12., and protection against colonization by pathogenic bacteria. The bacterial flora accounts in great parts for the maturation of our immune system. They are tightly intertwined with the mucosal lining of the gut. And we should not forget about the fact that the first sip we take in life consists of billions of bacteria. And we survive. So, they accompany us from the very beginning of our life without doing us any harm.