It’s an entire ecosystem, teeming with bugs – or more accurately, bacteria – that work both for or against your health. Do right by them and they can help you sustain a long and healthy life and alimentary canal.
Treat your bacteria well
Abuse them and you may find yourself plagued by many of the ills of the modern world: ulcerative colitis, irritable bowel syndrome (experienced by around a fifth of adult westerners) allergic conditions such as eczema.
Why all the fuss? Partly because we know just enough to realise that we know very little: the average gut is home to hundreds of species of bacteria and every inch of stool you pass contains around a trillion (That’s many zeroes lined up).
It’s been estimated that bacteria make up about 60 percent of the solid mass of your faeces. While we’re on big numbers, it’s estimated that the number of bacterial cells in your gut outnumbers those in your body by about 10 to one.
Like any variety of species in large numbers, these bacteria work out ways to annihilate each other. In this case they do so by triggering fluctuations in the pH levels of the gut and other dirty tricks. Impressive so far, except that researchers say they’ve only identified about a quarter of the bacteria living in the average human gut.
Watch what you eat – these bugs can kill you
There’s a lot of research still to be done, but the folk in the white coats know this much: mistreat your gut and the bugs in there can produce by-products that can make you ill. They’re able to survive on things we produce naturally, like digestive juices, but given access to the wrong stuff they can produce things that can kill you.
In the ’80s for instance, researchers at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada, discovered that gut bacteria can produce carcinogens from nitrites, found in preserved meats like ham and bacon.
Keeping your gut healthy?
So there’s a demonstrated need for looking after that long, dark passage, but how? One way is to be breastfed as an infant, which gives your gut bacteria a good kick-start. If you’re reading this there’s an odds-on chance that you’re off mother’s milk, so look for other ways, like eating some live, natural yoghurt each day. Yoghurt contains live cultures that promote healthy growth of bug bacteria, although it’s debatable how much live bacteria remains in shop-bought yoghurt even if it clarions “live AB cultures” at you.
Probiotics like Inteflora can be bought from health shops and seem to help maintain a healthy balance in the gut. They seem to play an especially useful role after taking antibiotics, which wreak havoc with bacteria, good and bad, in the gut.
Part of the problem is that your stomach is good at digesting whatever your eat, so something you ingest in the hope of nourishing your gut bacteria may not make it past your stomach.
The journal New Scientist says that one way around this is to combine probiotics (stuff that’s good for the gut) with prebiotics (Foods that can resist digestion long enough to make it through the stomach and the small intestine intact, like oats, leeks, onions, porridge and artichokes). They’re called synbiotics.
Research shows synbiotics good for you
It seems to work: a recent edition of the journal Nutrition reported that researchers at the Centre for Research on Nutrition Support Systems in New Delhi, India, found that children taking synbiotics for six months gained weight better than those who didn’t. That’s healthy weight gain as opposed to childhood obesity, which is a growing problem.
As far back as the ’80s, researchers at Tufts University of Medicine in Boston, Massachusetts, demonstrated that eating fermented milk supplemented with lactic acid bacteria reduced the growth of carcinogenic bacteria in the gut.
A healthy diet may help to avoid the drastic action such as that suggested by a German company called Biocure (They have a sister company specialising in leeches and maggots). The company sells a drinkable concoction of pig whipworm eggs, which it says have achieved excellent results in curing ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease, collectively known as inflammatory bowel disease. The pig whipworm apparently lives for only a short time in the human gut, during which time it helps rectify the imbalance in gut bacteria that causes the bowel trouble.
If you’d prefer to avoid that extreme measure, your gut feel - which would be correct - would be to eat healthy foods low in saturated fats. Watch out for partially hydrogenated fats in food such as pastries. Drinking plenty of water will help keep things moving in the gut.
Grim accident brings medical knowledge
Finally, spare a thought for one Alexis St Martin, a Canadian trapper who had a hole blown in him when a shotgun went off accidentally, just two feet away from him. The wound was horrific, with pieces of lung, rib, cartilage and sternum protruding. Amid the gushing blood, the 18-year-old trapper’s breakfast leaked out.
It was 1822 on the northern Canadian frontier, so nobody expected him to live, not even William Beaumont, a military surgeon who tended him.
But St Martin survived severe blood loss, raging fever and a hideous wound from which pieces of bone and cartilage oozed for weeks.
Beaumont had treated dreadful war wounds – one biographer notes that during a battle in the war of 1812, he amputated arms and legs for two days straight. So he did what he could for St Martin. He discovered that St Martin had an inch-wide hole in his stomach, from which food leaked when he ate.
In time the wound closed a little and St Martin could at least eat normally. Having done his part as primary caregiver, Beaumont the scientist took over: he found he could lower bits of food through the hole into St Martin’s stomach on a piece of string.
The morsels were removed at intervals and analysed. Beaumont could also see how St Martin’s stomach churned up the food, warmed it and treated it with its own chemicals – the gastric juices.
It was groundbreaking work. Until then, and for centuries before, the medical fraternity had assumed that digestion was the work of some ethereal “vital spirit,” notes his biography on the website of the William Beaumont Army Medical Center.
All this led to Beaumont being dubbed the Father of Gastric Physiology and having hospitals named after him. And St Martin? Despite becoming an alcoholic and a bit of a reprobate, he lived for 58 years with the hole in his stomach, outlived 12 of his 17 children and died at the age of 86, outliving his doctor by 27 years.
- (William Smook)