7 thoughts on “The Microbial Garden”

  1. This should be common knowledge. Considering how often antibiotics are given, it’s not even understood by those in medicine. The article doesn’t mention it, but over half our mass is made up of required bacteria which outnumbers our own cells. I still find that hard to fathom.

    Of course, I’ll be dead before the medical profession figures this stuff out. The best part being the pain and misery until the end. The funny part is the next time somebody says eat shit, it’s just another way of saying, “fare thee well.”

    We live in bizarro world.

    I hear they’re bringing back blood letting and leaches as well. …and don’t forget maggots. Ya gotta have maggots.

  2. Half our mass? IIRC it’s more like 1.5 lbs, which nonetheless means that the vast majority of cells in our bodies are bacteria, rather than our own, since the bacteria are so much smaller. But yeah, this is huge. I’ve got to wonder what the effect would be of isolating a human population for several generations in a space colony. I’m guessing the results, when they visited Earth, would be a lot like my experience on one of my Haiti trips, which entailed a goodly amount of time in the bathroom.

  3. Some studies by the CDC or NIH have shown that American obesity has spread almost exactly like a communicable disease (in terms of mathematical modeling, who connects to who, etc). Thin people who hang around obese people are more likely to become obese, as if being fat is something you can catch. Some attribute this to simple behavior (my friends eat a lot, so I will too), but some suggest it goes deeper.

    Other studies have shown that many obese people have a population of gut bugs that are much more efficient at converting food into sugars than the gut bugs found in thin people. Basically, many obese people are getting far more calories out of the same amount of food.

    So if it’s true that the obesity rate started growing and growing shortly after WW-II, right when we started giving people lots of antibiotics, and since the rate has been getting worse ever since, then perhaps gut-bugs and broad-spectrum antibiotics combine to provide an explanation.

    My conjecture is that when people keep wiping out their normal gut bug populations with antibiotics, the populations are re-established from the gut bug populations of those we are close contact with. If those people are thin, nothing changes in the obesity rate, but if the people are fat, we might get a different spread of gut bugs and become fat, too. Then the number of obese people carrying the altered gut bug population expands, creating more hosts.

    The frequent doses of antibiotics leave people’s intestinal tracts open to recolonization from those around us, some of whom may carry the altered populations, so antibiotics and close contact are like heroin addicts sharing needles.

    One way to test this hypothesis would be to add a molecular tag (such as a pGlo plasmid) to a population of gut bugs and use them to re-innoculate patients who’ve been on high-dose antibiotics. After checking that the gut-bug population has been established and is stable, periodically check the patient’s acquaintances for the tagged bacteria. If the acquaintances pick up the tagged bacteria far more often after they’ve also been on a course of antibiotics, then perhaps further studies would be warranted.

    BTW, I’m on clindamycin for an absessed tooth, and clindamycin can lead to fatal diarrhea months after you’ve quit taking it, so it certainly does a number on gut bacteria. Needless to say, I’m not hanging out with fat people right now. On the upside, clindamycin is also one of the main drugs used to treat toxoplasmosis gondii infections, the cat parasite that infects the brains of up to one third of humans and is suspected of causing behavioral changes. Since I’ve been on it, I’ve noticed that I’m not raiding kitty’s Little Friskies Indoor Delights as often, and today I started eating dog treats (duck jerky!).

  4. Mr. Anthony – To be fair to you, what you might have read is that there are as many bacterial cells as (actually, probably more bacterial cells than) human cells in the average human. Since the mass of a bacterium is lower than that of almost any human cell, the total mass of bacteria is lower.

    Also interestingly, it isn’t just bacteria that live as symbionts on people. The eyelash mite, Demodex folliculorum, lives on most people and is thought to have a beneficial effect by clearing dead skin cells and dried-up skin oils out of the hair follicles – not just in the eyelashes. Although very small, it is multicellular.

  5. Fecal transplant is already being used for a number of conditions including irritable bowel syndrome and CDI.

    The problem with the obesity theory is that so many people with so much vested interest ‘know’ what causes fatties to get fat and persuading them they might be wrong would be like persuading people that a lot of ulcers are caused by bacteria, or that the continents float around on plates and were once all joined together. Madness.

    I’ve long held that the obesity and diabetes II epidemics, are actually real epidemics caused by an infective agent, but would they listen?

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