Where's my bacteria?

My last post was about the nutrients missing in our food, and how that might be leading people to over-eat in a search for vitamins, minerals, and fats.  But there's something else lacking in the American diet.  We do not eat anywhere near enough bacteria. 

Good bacteria, I mean.  Acidophilus and bifidus and thermophilus and other good guys which our digestive tract expects us to eat in large quantities.  Digestion is a process of symbiosis between our bodies and these little workhorse bacteria.  A healthy adult should have between 5 and 8 pounds of bacteria in his or her gut.  Maintaining a thriving ecosystem of beneficial bacteria used to be no problem, but these days we eat sterilized food, our diets favor the wrong bacteria and fungi, and we use antibiotics and other prescription drugs which decimate bacterial colonies in the gut.

In contrast, consider a (reasonably well-off) 19th century family.  They usually drank raw milk, chock full of acidophilus, on a daily basis.  They also made (depending on ethnic heritage) cottage cheese, farmer's cheese, sour cream, clotted cream, cream cheese, kefir, and yogurt, all of which contained healthy bacteria.  Crocks of sauerkraut and numerous other pickled vegetables were eaten for much of the winter, along with all the healthy bacteria therein.  When you pickle things, the sourness comes from the lactic acid made by bacteria; those lacto bacteria are still in there as long as the pickles haven't been canned.  (Which means store-bought pickles are sterile.)  Vinegar was plentiful with acetobacter (or "mother of vinegar"), which helps to kill harmful yeasts in the gut by raising the acidity level.  These days, most vinegar sold in stores is pasteurized.

The historical reason we fermented and pickled foods was to prolong their shelf life, so you can imagine how common these techniques were.  Raw milk, unrefrigerated, lasts about a day; kefir or yogurt lasts a week (it just gets sourer over time as lactic acid builds up).  Pickled vegetables, stored in barrels or crocks in a cold cellar, can last the whole winter with a bit of monitoring.

In other words, people who lived a century ago ate massive loads of helpful bacteria, day in and day out.  Helpful bacteria take up residence in our digestive tract and become our partners in digesting our food.  Moreover, they actually produce nutrients, such as vitamin K.  Vitamin B12 comes solely from gut bacteria and cannot be made by our bodies.  We can get B12 from animal foods, of course, but that too came from bacteria in the animal's gut.  Healthy gut flora produce other B vitamins as well, including folic acid, niacin, biotin, and B6.  B vitamins, in turn, lower homocysteine levels in the blood, and therefore help to prevent heart disease.  Niacin (in certain forms) improves mood, biotin is important for hair and nails, and folic acid prevents birth defects and lessens the risk of breast cancer.

Certain bacteria found in soil -- which are a regular part of your diet if you eat food grown in your backyard or from the farmer's market -- have been found to alleviate depression.  It turns out that 95% of the body's serotonin is in the intestines (who knew?), where it plays a role in regulating digestion.  These good soil bugs (mycobacterium vaccae) increase serotonin levels, acting much like an anti-depressant might (but without that 5% chance that you go psychotic).  This is by no means the only connection between the gut and the brain.  Check out this article about "the second brain" in the gut-- here's a sample:

The connection between the brains lies at the heart of many woes, physical and psychiatric. Ailments like anxiety, depression, irritable bowel syndrome, ulcers and Parkinson's disease manifest symptoms at the brain and the gut level.

"The majority of patients with anxiety and depression will also have alterations of their GI function," said Dr. Emeran Mayer....

On another front, most of your immune system is in your digestive tract, where good bacteria are key to proper functioning.  Good bacteria reduce inflammation and prevent your immune system from becoming hyper-reactive, as in allergies, asthma, and eczema.  Even more importantly, they prevent your immune system from attacking your own body, as happens in a slew of autoimmune disorders which are now so prevalent, including fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, multiple sclerosis, and rheumatoid arthritis.  In part, good gut flora regulate prostaglandins, which in turn control inflammation.  But they also prevent foreign particles from slipping through an unhealthy intestinal wall (a "leaky gut").  Eroded intestinal linings mean that undigested, foreign, and/or toxic particles are slipping into your bloodstream, causing your immune system to go to Defcon 1, sirens blaring.  This is not a good thing to have going on day and night, to say the least.  You won't have any immune function left for viruses or pathogenic bacteria, and yet you will have fatigue, inflammation, and pain all the time.  Another problem with a leaky gut is that casein and gluten (milk and wheat protein) go through a stage in digestion where they resemble opiates.  Normally, these molecules are not yet ready to be absorbed through the intestinal wall, but if the gut is "leaky" they will indeed enter the blood.  These opioid molecules can then produce symptoms of "brain fog," fatigue, confusion or poor concentration, and a kind of low-level high.  Autistic children often have many gut issues, and often crave dairy and breads because they have become addicted to these opiate-like molecules.  A first step in recovery from autism is often the "GFCF diet" (gluten-free, casein-free).

Speaking of autistic children, those gut issues are one reason why they were not able to eliminate heavy metals as well as typical children do.  Heavy metals such as mercury are taken from the blood by the liver, and excreted into bile.  If the metals are in an organic form then the body mistakes them for nutrients and absorbs them.  In other words, organic forms of heavy metals will circle around endlessly, being grabbed out of the blood by the liver, exiting into the bile, and (alas) re-entering the bloodstream again in the intestine.  However, beneficial bacteria can actually convert organic metals into inorganic forms, which then leave the body.  This is one heck of an amazing symbiosis, in my opinion.  Most bacteria do the opposite, converting inorganic metals into far more dangerous organic ones.  But we've evolved along with our gut flora, and our gut flora "know" that the only way to get rid of metals in their environment is to go the other way, organic --> inorganic, so we can excrete them.  Nature is an awesome thing.

Stephen J. Gould once wrote:

We live now in the "Age of Bacteria."  Our planet has always been in the "Age of Bacteria," ever since the first fossils—bacteria, of course—were entombed in rocks more than 3 billion years ago.  On any possible, reasonable or fair criterion, bacteria are—and always have been—the dominant forms of life on Earth.

Or, as an old roommate of mine once said to her boyfriend, "Look, if every human cell in your body was taken away and all that was left was the bacteria, we'd still recognize you."  You can't eliminate bacteria.  Our bodies are ecosystems of bacteria, good and bad, and they always will be.  What you can do is try to flood your body with healthy bacteria, because they will fight for real estate in your gut and the rest of your body.  I often wonder whether hospitals wouldn't be better off coating every surface in benign bacteria like lacto-acidophilus, rather than attempting to keep everything sterile (and thus evolving super-bugs).

Sterility, unfortunately, is also the goal when it comes to commercial food.  Because our food is now mass-produced in giant processing plants, transported long distances, and shelved for long periods of time, everything today is pasteurized.  Outside of a few brands of yogurt, there is no healthy bacteria in anything you can buy in a supermarket.

You can see the evidence of Bacterial Insufficiency (to coin a term) everywhere in America.  Why are allergies and asthma on the rise?  What's with all these food allergies that didn't exist 20 years ago?  Who ever heard of fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue back in the 60's?  And what about irritable bowel syndrome, constipation, Crohn's disease, and colitis?  According to the government, roughly 1 in 4 Americans has a digestive disease. 

As shocking as that figure is, it's about to rise spectacularly due to a policy change involving infants born to mothers who test positive for group B strep bacteria.  These infants are now routinely subjected to very high doses of penicillin, and this penicillin is present for 48 hours after birth-- exactly the time window when an infant's gut is supposed to be colonized by beneficial bacteria.  Because of the antibiotics, these infants often do not establish healthy gut flora, even when they are breastfed, as I can unfortunately attest to from personal experience.  I received sky-high doses of penicillin by IV when I was in labor with Tristan, and his health suffers from it to this day.  Initially he could not digest proteins found in dairy, wheat, eggs, or soy, which meant I could not eat any of these foods.  Giving him probiotic bacteria (billions and billions of good bacteria from capsules) solved this problem to a large degree.  He still has a bit of eczema (it was terrible when he was younger) and lingering digestive problems, in spite of a variety of probiotics and a supplement (saccharomyces boulardii) that kills candida yeast in the gut.  To cap it all, these prophylactic antibiotics have no benefit in preventing dangerous infections in the baby, unless you have additional risk factors (e.g. the baby is premature), which I did not.  Nonetheless, in the US we give antibiotics to every mom with a positive test (and every mom who hasn't had a test, "just in case").  Mainstream doctors are barely aware of the existence of gut flora, and their interventions never consider gut bacteria.  Children will die from this policy, due to excess asthma deaths and fatal allergic reactions to food.

The 1 in 4 statistic above is from 1985, and the situation has undoubtedly gotten worse due to increases in prescription drugs, the over-consumption of carbs (which yeast love) on these popular low-fat diets, and the decimation of all gut flora in roughly 25% of infants born in the past several years.  And let's not forget the endless commercials for bloating, gas, diarrhea, constipation, hemorrhoids, acid reflux (which means you aren't digesting food properly, thus it's backing up), yeast infections (which come from candida in the intestines), and so forth.  The 1 in 4 figure doesn't include a lot of folks with lesser discomforts like these, nor people who don't realize they're sick because they think it's normal to shit twice a week.  I would guess that more than half of all Americans have an illness caused by not having the right gut bacteria-- known as "gut dysbiosis".

Gut dysbiosis can almost always be improved by:

• taking probiotic supplements
• avoiding antibiotics (about 80-90% of which are prescribed for viral infections)
• eating veggies from your backyard or the farmer's market
• eating yogurt with live cultures (Stonyfield Farms or Dannon Activa)
• consuming raw milk or kefir (if you're lucky enough to have a source)
• finding something that you like to pickle and eat

"Refrigerator pickles" are so easy that I was a bit skeptical the first time I tried it.  All you do is stick any crisp veggie into water and salt and leave it on the counter for 2 weeks, with a loose lid or a cloth over your container.  You can add peppercorns, mustard seed, dill, garlic cloves, etc, but mainly you just need a tablespoon of salt for every 2 cups of water, to cover.  Set it aside and you miraculously get pickles in 10 to 14 days... it's the wonder of bacteria.

In short, the more good guys you eat, the better your health.

Comments

[Oscar Campbell]

Hail bacteria! Nice article - now I have som arguments too keep people from accusing me of being weird or provocative.

I've always shyed away from the sterility-psychosis, but more with a 'little bit of crap cleans the stomach'-attitude. I eat my organic vegetables without cleaning of the dirt (well, just the thin lining of dirt left in cracks). And, well. I'm very fine - and never fart, haha! Both my mother and brother eat anti-depressants, my father was an alcoholic. Me, I'm happy. Now I now why! Bacteria!! (ok, maybe it's not the be-all, end-all, solution but I am gonna argument strongly for some dirt for my family...)

[Mark philip]

Avoid Paracetomol like the palgue.Aloe vera helps as well