Assessing digestibility of Hadza tubers using a dynamic in-vitro model

Effect of Food and a Proton-Pump Inhibitor on the Absorption of Encorafenib: An In Vivo-In Vitro-In Silico Approach

Encorafenib is a kinase inhibitor indicated for the treatment of patients with BRAF mutant melanoma and BRAF mutant metastatic colorectal cancer. To understand the effect of food and coadministration with a proton-pump inhibitor (PPI), in vitro, in vivo, and in silico data were generated to optimize the clinical dose, evaluate safety, and better understand the oral absorption process under these conditions. Study 1 evaluated the effect of food on the plasma pharmacokinetics, safety, and tolerability after a single oral dose of encorafenib 100 mg. Study 2 evaluated the same end points with coadministration of encorafenib and rabeprazole (PPI perpetrator). The in vitro gastrointestinal TIM-1 model was used to investigate the release of encorafenib and the amount available for absorption under different testing conditions (fasted, fed, and with the use of a PPI). The fasted, fed, and PPI states were predicted for the encorafenib commercial capsule in GastroPlus 9.8. In study 1, both AUC_inf and AUC_last decreased by 4% with the administration of a high-fat meal. The C_max was 36% lower than with fasted conditions. All 3 exposure parameters in study 2 (AUC_inf, AUC_last, and C_max) had mean changes of <10% when encorafenib was coadministered with a PPI. Using the in vitro gastrointestinal simulator TIM-1, the model demonstrated a similar release of drug, as the bioaccessible fraction, in the 3 conditions was equal (≥80%), predicting no PPI or food effect for this drug formulation. The modeling in GastroPlus 9.8 demonstrated complete absorption of encorafenib when formulated as an amorphous solid dispersion. To obtain these results, it was crucial to integrate the amorphous solubility of the drug that shows a 20-fold higher solubility at pH 6.8 compared with crystalline solubility. The increased amorphous solubility is likely the reason no PPI effect was observed compared with fasted state conditions. The prolongation in gastric emptying in the fed state resulted in delayed plasma T_max for encorafenib. No dose adjustment is necessary when encorafenib is administered in the fed state or when coadministered with a PPI. Both the TIM-1 and physiologically based pharmacokinetic model results were consistent with the observed clinical data, suggesting that these will be valuable tools for future work.

The energetics of uniquely human subsistence strategies

[Figure: see text].

The cost of cooking for foragers

Cooked food provides more calories to a consumer than raw food. When our human ancestors adopted cooking, the result was an increase in the caloric value of the diet. Generating the heat to cook, however, requires fuel, and accessing fuel was and remains a common problem for humanity. Cooking also frequently requires monitoring, special technology and other investments. These cooking costs should vary greatly across multiple contexts. Here I explain how to quantify this cooking trade-off as the ratio of the energetic benefits of cooking to the increased cost in handling time and examine the implications for foragers, including the first of our ancestors to cook. Ethnographic and experimental return rates and nutritional analysis about important prey items exploited by ethnohistoric Numic foragers in the North American Great Basin provide a demonstration of how the costs of cooking impact different types of prey. Foragers should make choices about which prey to capture based on expectations about the costs involved to cook them. The results indicate that the caloric benefit achieved by cooking meat is quickly lost as the cost of cooking increases, whereas many plant foods are beneficially cooked across a range of cooking costs. These findings affirm the importance of plant foods, especially geophytes, among foragers, and are highly suggestive of their importance at the onset of cooking in the human lineage.

Influence of a High-Impact Multidimensional Rehabilitation Program on the Gut Microbiota of Patients with Multiple Sclerosis

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a neurodegenerative inflammatory condition mediated by autoreactive immune processes. Due to its potential to influence host immunity and gut-brain communication, the gut microbiota has been suggested to be involved in the onset and progression of MS. To date, there is no definitive cure for MS, and rehabilitation programs are of the utmost importance, especially in the later stages. However, only a few people generally participate due to poor support, knowledge, and motivation, and no information is available on gut microbiota changes. Herein we evaluated the potential of a brief high-impact multidimensional rehabilitation program (B-HIPE) in a leisure environment to affect the gut microbiota, mitigate MS symptoms and improve quality of life. B-HIPE resulted in modulation of the MS-typical dysbiosis, with reduced levels of pathobionts and the replenishment of beneficial short-chain fatty acid producers. This partial recovery of a eubiotic profile could help counteract the inflammatory tone typically observed in MS, as supported by reduced circulating lipopolysaccharide levels and decreased populations of pro-inflammatory lymphocytes. Improved physical performance and fatigue relief were also found. Our findings pave the way for integrating clinical practice with holistic approaches to mitigate MS symptoms and improve patients’ quality of life.

Effects of Evolution, Ecology, and Economy on Human Diet: Insights from Hunter-Gatherers and Other Small-Scale Societies

We review the evolutionary origins of the human diet and the effects of ecology economy on the dietary proportion of plants and animals. Humans eat more meat than other apes, a consequence of hunting and gathering, which arose ∼2.5 Mya with the genus Homo. Paleolithic diets likely included a balance of plant and animal foods and would have been remarkably variable across time and space. A plant/animal food balance of 40-60% prevails among contemporary warm-climate hunter-gatherers, but these proportions vary widely. Societies in cold climates, and those that depend more on fishing or pastoralism, tend to eat more meat. Warm-climate foragers, and groups that engage in some farming, tend to eat more plants. We present a case study of the wild food diet of the Hadza, a community of hunter-gatherers in northern Tanzania, whose diet is high in fiber, adequate in protein, and remarkably variable over monthly timescales. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Nutrition, Volume 41 is September 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

The evolution of the human trophic level during the Pleistocene

The human trophic level (HTL) during the Pleistocene and its degree of variability serve, explicitly or tacitly, as the basis of many explanations for human evolution, behavior, and culture. Previous attempts to reconstruct the HTL have relied heavily on an analogy with recent hunter-gatherer groups' diets. In addition to technological differences, recent findings of substantial ecological differences between the Pleistocene and the Anthropocene cast doubt regarding that analogy's validity. Surprisingly little systematic evolution-guided evidence served to reconstruct HTL. Here, we reconstruct the HTL during the Pleistocene by reviewing evidence for the impact of the HTL on the biological, ecological, and behavioral systems derived from various existing studies. We adapt a paleobiological and paleoecological approach, including evidence from human physiology and genetics, archaeology, paleontology, and zoology, and identified 25 sources of evidence in total. The evidence shows that the trophic level of the Homo lineage that most probably led to modern humans evolved from a low base to a high, carnivorous position during the Pleistocene, beginning with Homo habilis and peaking in Homo erectus. A reversal of that trend appears in the Upper Paleolithic, strengthening in the Mesolithic/Epipaleolithic and Neolithic, and culminating with the advent of agriculture. We conclude that it is possible to reach a credible reconstruction of the HTL without relying on a simple analogy with recent hunter-gatherers' diets. The memory of an adaptation to a trophic level that is embedded in modern humans' biology in the form of genetics, metabolism, and morphology is a fruitful line of investigation of past HTLs, whose potential we have only started to explore.

THE EXPOSOME IN HUMAN EVOLUTION: FROM DUST TO DIESEL

Global exposures to air pollution and cigarette smoke are novel in human evolutionary history and are associated with about 16 million premature deaths per year. We investigate the history of the human exposome for relationships between novel environmental toxins and genetic changes during human evolution in six phases. Phase I: With increased walking on savannas, early human ancestors inhaled crustal dust, fecal aerosols, and spores; carrion scavenging introduced new infectious pathogens. Phase II: Domestic fire exposed early Homo to novel toxins from smoke and cooking. Phases III and IV: Neolithic to preindustrial Homo sapiens incurred infectious pathogens from domestic animals and dense communities with limited sanitation. Phase V: Industrialization introduced novel toxins from fossil fuels, industrial chemicals, and tobacco at the same time infectious pathogens were diminishing. Thereby, pathogen-driven causes of mortality were replaced by chronic diseases driven by sterile inflammogens, exogenous and endogenous. Phase VI: Considers future health during global warming with increased air pollution and infections. We hypothesize that adaptation to some ancient toxins persists in genetic variations associated with inflammation and longevity.

Variations in the Post-weaning Human Gut Metagenome Profile As Result of Bifidobacterium Acquisition in the Western Microbiome

Studies of the gut microbiome variation among human populations revealed the existence of robust compositional and functional layouts matching the three subsistence strategies that describe a trajectory of changes across our recent evolutionary history: hunting and gathering, rural agriculture, and urban post-industrialized agriculture. In particular, beside the overall reduction of ecosystem diversity, the gut microbiome of Western industrial populations is typically characterized by the loss of Treponema and the acquisition of Bifidobacterium as an abundant inhabitant of the post-weaning gut microbial ecosystem. In order to advance the hypothesis about the possible adaptive nature of this exchange, here we explore specific functional attributes that correspond to the mutually exclusive presence of Treponema and Bifidobacterium using publically available gut metagenomic data from Hadza hunter-gatherers and urban industrial Italians. According to our findings, Bifidobacterium provides the enteric ecosystem with a diverse panel of saccharolytic functions, well suited to the array of gluco- and galacto-based saccharides that abound in the Western diet. On the other hand, the metagenomic functions assigned to Treponema are more predictive of a capacity to incorporate complex polysaccharides, such as those found in unrefined plant foods, which are consistently incorporated in the Hadza diet. Finally, unlike Treponema, the Bifidobacterium metagenome functions include genes that permit the establishment of microbe-host immunological cross-talk, suggesting recent co-evolutionary events between the human immune system and Bifidobacterium that are adaptive in the context of agricultural subsistence and sedentary societies.

Seasonal availability of edible underground and aboveground carbohydrate resources to human foragers on the Cape south coast, South Africa

The coastal environments of South Africa’s Cape Floristic Region (CFR) provide some of the earliest and most abundant evidence for the emergence of cognitively modern humans. In particular, the south coast of the CFR provided a uniquely diverse resource base for hunter-gatherers, which included marine shellfish, game, and carbohydrate-bearing plants, especially those with Underground Storage Organs (USOs). It has been hypothesized that these resources underpinned the continuity of human occupation in the region since the Middle Pleistocene. Very little research has been conducted on the foraging potential of carbohydrate resources in the CFR. This study focuses on the seasonal availability of plants with edible carbohydrates at six-weekly intervals over a two-year period in four vegetation types on South Africa’s Cape south coast. Different plant species were considered available to foragers if the edible carbohydrate was directly (i.e. above-ground edible portions) or indirectly (above-ground indications to below-ground edible portions) visible to an expert botanist familiar with this landscape. A total of 52 edible plant species were recorded across all vegetation types. Of these, 33 species were geophytes with edible USOs and 21 species had aboveground edible carbohydrates. Limestone Fynbos had the richest flora, followed by Strandveld, Renosterveld and lastly, Sand Fynbos. The availability of plant species differed across vegetation types and between survey years. The number of available USO species was highest for a six-month period from winter to early summer (Jul–Dec) across all vegetation types. Months of lowest species’ availability were in mid-summer to early autumn (Jan–Apr); the early winter (May–Jun) values were variable, being highest in Limestone Fynbos. However, even during the late summer carbohydrate “crunch,” 25 carbohydrate bearing species were visible across the four vegetation types. To establish a robust resource landscape will require additional spatial mapping of plant species abundances. Nonetheless, our results demonstrate that plant-based carbohydrate resources available to Stone Age foragers of the Cape south coast, especially USOs belonging to the Iridaceae family, are likely to have comprised a reliable and nutritious source of calories over most of the year.