Driving to NSW recently the Health Report on Radio National was talking about poo.  I went for a walk with my son recently and he mentioned an article he had read, about faecal transplant to overcome some inappropriate immune response disease.  Then a work colleague mentioned the Catalyst programme on ABC TV recently which was again about faecal transplant for weight loss,  I think.  And of course,  Nutrition Facts,a website devoted to bringing the latest in nutritional research (link in side bar) is run by Michael Greger and he seems to have a fascination with poo.  A quick search on his website using stools as search term brings up twenty (20) videos.  http://nutritionfacts.org/video/microbiome-the-inside-story/ is perhaps the one to start with to give you an overview, if you haven’t caught up with all of the excitement.

Unfortunately, the ways to make money  out of the latest research, are the things to get attention.  So what gets attention is buying pro-biotics, eating yoghurt with certain pro-biotics or having a faecal transplant (having  someone else’s poo stuck in your bowel).  As usual when the sickness system( health system) gets involved in making money exercises, the costly solutions pursued,  only address the symptoms, they don’t address the problem.    After all, their is no money to be made out of people getting better ( that’s why their is very little research going into developing new antibiotics even though animal agriculture is rapidly developing antibiotic resistance, by using more antibiotics on factory and intensively farmed animals than are used to treat infections in humans.  No research into new antibiotics, as you only take them for two weeks or less-the big bucks are in something you need to take for the rest of your life, like a statin for cholesterol or diabetes medication.  In other words, chronic illnesses).

Having good bacteria in our gut and bowel has been causally related to a great number of surprising things to do with our health:

• positive mood
• mental health
• artherosclerosis or your blood vessels becoming blocked which relates to heart attacks, stroke, impotence and sexual pleasure (yes, women need good blood flow for an orgasm), dementia
• high cholesterol (good bacteria come from eating a lot of fibre, that is plants, which is the only place fibre is found.  One of the effects of fibre is to increase stool frequency and size, flushing toxins and cholesterol out of our body.  If we have a small amount of fibre the length of time waste/toxins stay in our body increases, which leads to them being  re-absorbed
• no bowel problems such as all of the conditions relating to inflammation of the bowel (Crohns Disease, Irritable Bowel Syndrome, Ulcerative Colitis, Diverticulitis) and a greatly reduced risk of bowel cancer
• reduction in  chronic, low level inflammation in the body generally.  This type of inflammation is causally related to many if not all chronic conditions including cancer.  see inflammation as an agent in angiogenesis, which is the provision of a blood supply to cancer cells, so that they grow.

The solution to our gut bacteria being healthy and therefore us being healthy, is to eat a shit load of fibre.  The only way to do that, is to eat a shit load of beans, rice, lentils, etc and fruits and veggies.  No animal food has any fibre.  Worse still, different unhelpful bacteria are promoted in our gut, by eating animals and animal products like milk and eggs.  This is because bacteria are living organisms and like all living things they need certain conditions in their environment to live.  There is no point in planting a rainforest tree in the desert and expecting it to live a do good things for you.  It is going to die.  It is the same with bacteria -they need the right conditions to live and multiply.

This is why having a faecal transplant or taking pro-biotics is a waste of money, unless you also change the conditions in your gut, by eating lots of fibre.  Fibre will provide the conditions  where they will live and multiply.   If you don’t change what you eat, the result will be that you are shitting money down the toilet, because you are just attacking the symptoms, not the problem.

The type and quantity of the bacteria in our gut can be changed within a few days by changing what we eat.  Changing what we eat by changing the amount of fibre, changes the conditions, which means some bacteria live and multiply and others die.

The other reason that adding good bacteria to our bodies either by faecal transplant or pro-biotics is not the right solution,  is that there are a huge number of different species of bacteria and we don’t even know what they are and how they work.  A few species have been identified and there is some idea about which ones that we know about seem to go together to promote health.  But there is much more that is not known about the bacteria in our gut, than is known.  (There are 10x as many bacteria cells in and on our body than there are human cells, so that gives some idea of the complexity).   This means that we could be paying good money for what is not the optimal mix of bacteria, as we don’t actually know what that mix is.   Remember that if we don’t change the conditions in our bowel by eating more fibre, we are just flushing our bowels with good bacteria and quickly flushing dead good bacteria down the toilet, as those good bacteria can’t live in the wrong conditions.   This is why fibre is sometimes called a pre-biotic.  It precedes the pro-biotics by creating the right conditions for their growth naturally, without having  to be seeded by a purchased pro-biotic- it will just  happen like it has been happening for 100’s of 1000’s of years.   The simple answer is eat lots of fibre/plants and the body will produce the right bacteria in the right proportions and we’ll be right.

 

Our body is always trying to do the right thing by us.