Gut Germs

Let's hear it for our gut microbiotica - rah, rah, and another, big, rah! Whence comes this enthusiasm? Well, I have always been one in avidly pro the notion that kids and adults need to get bugs into our systems that may help us fight off diseases, and one of these ways is through eating food that hasn't been sterilised to a point where any bugs that might be useful for us have been nuked. I've wrote an article about this some years back in Divine magazine, which you can read also here. The article mostly looks at health regulations on the production of food borne of an over-concern for litigation from people who get a touch food poisoning.

And there I'd left it till I read a recent article in New Scientist 22nd January 2011 - Bugs from your gut to mine. The article is about emerging links between gut flora - bugs. microbes, greebies, germs - and a number of life threatening illnesses like Parkinson's disease, type 1 diabetes, multiple sclerosis (MS), chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), and rheumatoid arthritis, and, wait for it, obesity. For example, Thomas Borody, a gastroenterologist at the Centre for Digestive Diseases in Sydney has used faecal transplants now to alleviate chronic constipation. Yes, folks, this does mean taking faeces from a person who isn't suffering chronic constipation and them into the gut of a person who is, thereby changing the gut flora in the recipient. Borody found that some of his patients post faecal transplant have shown improvements in Parkinson's. The possible reason is a line of inquiry that Parkinson's may be caused by a gut bug that 'breaks through the mucosal barrier of the GI [gastrointestinal] tract and enters the central nervous system via the vagus nerve'. Restoring the gut floral balance via the faecal transplant may lead to a reduction then in Parkinson's symptoms.

Equally startling is a study by Alexander Chervonsky of the University of Chicago that showed a link between gut microbiotica and type 1 diabetes in mice. In a test group of what the article describes as 'a particular breed of engineered mice' that were kept 'germ-free' (visions of John Travolota-esque mice-in-the-bubble occur at about this point), 80% developed type 1 diabetes. But when they were given a dose (the article says 'cocktail' and now I have very strange visions indeed of mice with a martini glasses in paw lounging on velour couches) of bacteria similar to those living in a human's gut, only 34% developed type 1 diabetes, suggesting that some human gut bacteria are a good thing.

Finally, Geoffrey Gordon of Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, has shown differences in the gut flora of obese people and 'lean individuals'. Their analysis suggests 'the microbes in obese individuals are releasing nutrients from food that would have remained undigested in lean infividuals'. Even more telling, transferring microbiotica from obese mice into lean mice led to the latter putting on weight. Gee, you mean it ain't McDonalds after all? Well, we don't know yet and won't till the results of a study that is going to do - yes, you guessed it - a trial where some obese people get a faecal transplant of their own poo and others get the poo of healthy, lean donors and we see what impact this has on gut germs.

But apart from the obesity link, and hey, we don't really want to let the fat food franchises entirely off the hook, what has this got to do with a food blog and dirty food? Well, I have been set to wondering how our gut flora get in there in the first place and to what extent they come from food we eat. Here's what I found on Wikipedia about the origins of gut flora in infants:

The gastrointestinal tract of a normal fetus is sterile. During birth and rapidly thereafter, bacteria from the mother and the surrounding environment colonize the infant's gut. Immediately after vaginal delivery, babies may have bacterial strains derived from the mothers' feces in the upper gastrointestinal tract.[Hmm, so that's where they got the idea for faecal transplants! And I thought it was just a bunch of researchers thinking up ever new ways to irritate funders]. Infants born by caesarean section may also be exposed to their mothers' microflora, but the initial exposure is most likely to be from the surrounding environment such as the air, other infants, and the nursing staff, which serve as vectors for transfer. The primary gut flora in infants born by caesarean delivery may be disturbed for up to six months after birth, whereas vaginally born infants take up to one month for their intestinal microflora to be well established.After birth, environmental, oral and cutaneous bacteria are readily transferred from the mother to the infant through suckling, kissing, and caressing. All infants are initially colonized by large numbers of E. coli and streptococci. Within a few days, bacterial numbers reach 10 to the powe of 8 to 10 to the power of 10 per gram of feces.During the first week of life, these bacteria create a reducing environment favorable for the subsequent bacterial succession of strict anaerobic species mainly belonging to the genera Bifidobacterium, Bacteroides, Clostridium, and Ruminococcus.Breast-fed babies become dominated by bifidobacteria, possibly due to the contents of bifidobacterial growth factors in breast milk.In contrast, the microbiota of formula-fed infants is more diverse, with high numbers of Enterobacteriaceae, enterococci, bifidobacteria, Bacteroides, and clostridia. After the introduction of solid food and weaning, the microflora of breast-fed infants become similar to that of formula-fed infants. By the second year of life, the fecal microflora

So, my interest here is in that second last sentence in particular - the one that talks about how the introduction of solid food and weaning makes the flora resemble that of adults. Hmmm, this is where I have to do some digging that may take me some time, but ain't it fascinating that somehow, somewhere, we apparently need to externally get some germs into our gut if it is to function as it needs to for both digestion and for some key intervention in the body's immune response.

If you have anything that can shed light on this please add a comment or email me at pvanreyk@optusnet.com.au.