Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body’s Most Underrated Organ

by Giulia Enders

Pre bios means “before life.” Prebiotics are foodstuffs that pass undigested into the large intestine, where they feed our beneficial bacteria so that they thrive better than bad bacteria.

Anti bios means “against life.” Antibiotics kill bacteria and are our saviors when we have picke...

The higher the hygiene standards in a country, the higher that nation’s incidence of allergies and autoimmune diseases.

The more sterile a household is, the more its members will suffer from allergies and autoimmune diseases.

Is this really true?

Thirty years ago, about one person in ten had an allergy. Today that f...

When researchers were planning a study of the effect of antibiotics on the flora of the gut, they were able to find only two people in the entire San Francisco Bay Area who had not taken antibiotics in the previous two years.

Antibiotics can be problematic for children and old people. Their gut flora is already less stable and less able to recover after treatment with antibiotics.

For as long as two years after taking antibiotics, bad bacteria are still present in the gut, telling their great-great-great-... -grandchildren stories about the war.

The thing is that antibiotics rarely kill all bacteria. They kill certain communities depending on the toxins they use. There will always be some bacteria that survive and become experienced fighters.

SO HERE ARE four pieces of advice for anyone who wants to keep out of unnecessary antibiotic gut wars.

Do not take antibiotics unless it is really necessary. And if you do have to take them, then always complete the course. This is because resistance fighters who are less skilled will eventually give up the cause and succumb to the drug. So the only ones that remain are those that would never have been killed by the antibiotics anyway. But at least the rest will have been well and truly done in.

In organic farming, the Department of Agriculture forbids the use of any antibiotics, and an animal given antibiotics—for example, to relieve suffering—must be removed from organic production.

Our relationship with antibiotics is an arms race: we use them to arm ourselves to the hilt when faced with dangerous bacteria, and they respond by arming themselves with even more dangerous resistances.

Africans have fufu...

Didnt know fufu ws fermented

The diversity of bacteria in fermented foods has fallen sharply. Industrialization has resulted in standardized production processes using single bacteria species isolated in laboratories.

Many foods that used to be full of bacteria are now preserved using vinegar, as is the case with most pickled gherkins today.

The Nobel Prize winner spent his time observing Bulgarian mountain peasants. He realized they often lived to be a hundred years old or more, and they were unusually contented. Metchnikoff suspected the key to their longevity lay in the leather bags they used to transport the milk from their cows. The peasants had to walk long distances, and their milk often turned sour or transformed into yogurt in the bags before they reached home.

Amazing

Many probiotic bacteria take good care of our gut. They possess genes that enable them to produce small fatty acids like butyrate. This soothes and pampers the villi in the gut. Pampered villi are much more stable and likely to grow bigger than unpampered ones.

The bigger the villi grow, the better they are at absorbing nutrients, minerals, and vitamins. The more stable they are, the less rubbish they let through. The result is that our body receives more nutrients and fewer damaging substances.

Good for treating diarrhea. This is the number-one use for probiotics. Gastroenteritis

Good for the immune system. For people who tend to get sick often, it can be a good idea to try different probiotics, especially when colds are rife.

Possible protection against allergies. This is not as well documented as the effect of probiotics on diarrhea or a compromised immune system. Still,

Some gastro-enterologists will advise you about the kind of bacteria that are more likely to be the ones you are looking for.

The best-researched probiotics to date are lactic-acid bacteria (Lactobacilli and Bifidobacteria) and Saccharomyces boulardii, which is a yeast. This yeast has not received the attention it deserves. It is not a bacterium, so it is not one of my favorites either, but it does have one huge advantage: as a yeast, it has absolutely nothing to fear from antibiotics. So, while we are massacring our entire bacteria population by taking antibiotics, Saccharomyces can move in and set up house without a worry in the world. It can then protect the gut from harmful opportunists. It also has the ability to bind toxins. However, it does cause more side effects than bacterial probiotics.

The fact that almost all the probiotics we know—give or take a yeast or two—are lactic-acid bacteria shows how little we have yet discovered in this area.

So, currently, probiotics work like hair conditioner for the gut. When you stop taking them, the regular flora folk have to continue their work.

The treatment is known as fecal bacteriotherapy, or more directly, a fecal transplant.

Food we cannot digest in the small intestine is called dietary fiber or roughage.

Too many meat toxins can damage the large intestine and, in a worst-case scenario, can even cause cancer. The end of the gut is more prone to cancers on average than the rest of the organ.

That’s why researchers are so keen to test how well prebiotics can protect against cancer. Early results are promising.

When we speak of sugar, we often mean a particular molecule extracted from sugar beet or sugar cane, but there are more than a hundred different kinds of sugar.

If, historically, we had developed a sugar industry based on endive sugar, our sweets would not cause tooth decay.

So, we should remember: good bacteria do us good. We should feed them well so they can populate as much of our large intestine as possible.

This roughage can also satisfy a sweet tooth and taste delicious. It can be fresh asparagus, sushi rice, or pure, isolated prebiotics from the pharmacy.