It seems to be common knowledge that germs in our guts are “necessary”. But what exactly happens if they weren’t there? Would we die? Have constant diahorea? Or just be fine. I suspect the last one. Since we are born without them and bubble boys are kept sterile without them, they can’t be necessary.
Here is the thing, it is the good bacteria that keep the levels of bad bacteria down.
Wipe out the nice guys and the bad guys (which are going to get in through your food anyway) can multiply at a much increased rate because they don’t have any competition. This isn’t good.
“Bubble boys” are special cases, their food is sterilised to remove ALL bacteria, both good and bad, and they are on a constant course of antibiotics to prevent any kind of infection.
I’m asking whether they do anything positive, like digest undigestable things. To the extent that they actually are required.
I’d like to nominate this thread for Best Thread Title Ever, and from now on I’m going to add “What about bubble boys?” to all of my thread titles. I may even add it to all of my conversations IRL too.
For one thing, dead bacteria make up about half the mass of our feces. That helps give it the firmness that allows it to slip out without tearing up the delicate anal tissues. Try taking a course of antibiotics that kills all the bacteria and gives you liquid stools to see the difference. I speak from current experience. :eek:
The problem is that it’s not really meaningful to speak of what would happen if we took away something our bodies have adapted to over millennia. Of course there would be adverse results. But all higher animals have adapted to bacteria in their guts. See the current thread about termites. We can only do without bacteria by taking extraordinary measures that would be impossible for the mass.
We can get a fairly good idea of what would happen if we had no gut flora by looking ta those animals that have ben produced without them. Since the foetus in utero is usually sterile it’s relatively simple to produce a sterile animal via caesarian. Andpnce you have a few germ free animals you can breed them to one another quite happily. You can buy your own germ free mice for only a few hundred dollars each these days.
You can get more information on the effects of lacking gut flora by doing a Google search on germ free animals, but the basic problems are:
- Vitamin deficiency. Humans get a large chunk of our Vitamin K needs form bacteria in our guts, eliminate the bactera and we need to get all our vitamin needs from our food.
2)Undeveloped digestive tract. The digetsive tract in mammlas normally thickens up considerably after birth, and it also develops an ability to reposnd to pressure by contracting, thus moving food along faster or slower depending on diet. Without exposure to bacteria the digetsive tract of animals remains in the foetal state. It never thickens and it never develops and real ability to respond to stimulus. That produces a tendency to tear easily, as well as causing gross swellings of the caecum (appendix), which simply keeps filling until the food is forced out under pressure. There are also several absorptive problems associated with the undeveloped digestive tract, and germ free animals commonly need beter diets to meet their needs even for macronutrients like fat and protein.
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Depressed immune system. Exposure to gut flora seems to be vital in developing a normally functional immune system. Without such exposure animals are lacking in most antibodies and the immune system are slow to produce any reaction in response to infection.
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Susceptibility to infection. Even without the depresse immune system, germ free animals will succumb to infection by organisms that aren’t considered pathogenic in normal animals. Without any normal gut flora to compete withy anything that gets into the gut is free to proliferate in a natural incubator.
If you could somehow avoid developing any gut flora and were exposed to the real world you would almost certainly die within a year. A nonfunctioning immune system and a susceptibility to infection by every microbe you breath in would result in a state of permanent food poisoning. The real question woudl be whether you’d die form sepsis from a ruptured gut wall, dehydration from constant vomiting and diarhea or from malnutrition due to inabilty to eat.
But as EM says, it’ all rather academic. You couldn’t actually manage not to develop a gut flora and be exposed to the real world. It’s a bit like asking what a circle would look like if it had three sides.
I’d like to add that there was only one bubble boy - David Vetter. He lived his whole life under completely sterile conditions and died age 12 from a virus passed on in a bone marrow transplant. Nobody else has even been isolated to a remotely similar extent. Whatever problems he had or didn’t have are his alone.
It’s not only the bacteria in our guts. Ask your lady friend what she often has to deal with when she takes antibiotics.
TMI!
You mean there wasn’t really a Tod Lubitch?
A movie based on a true story actually isn’t? I’m shocked.
It was based on David Vetter’s story. Tod Lubitch = David Vetter. Sorta.
sorta. Now bone marrow transplants are used to attempt to cure the disaese. While they are wating for their transplant or waiting to see if it worked they live in “bubble” conditions -as sterile as possible though actual bubbles are not common
e.g. see http://www.sciencentral.com/articles/view.php3?article_id=218392257&language=english
That’s what I came in here to mention. You can check out my post to the “Happy Period” thread detailing the experience I had during a two-week course of two antibiotics (Warning: the post contains very much TMI!).
Suffice it to say here that killing off the good bacteria in your body has definite negative results!
I ended up in the hospital for 6 days this summer because of a lack for good bacteria in my gut. I had a skin infection and was treated for it, but the antibiotic they gave me killed the good bacteria in my gut and I got really sick. Ended up in the hospital for 6 days. While I was there, they gave me a bunch of Vitamin K (as another poster mentioned) as well as iron. After I was released they told me to avoid carbonated beverages for 30 days to help the good bacteria return to my gut.
I was told to eat yogurt with live and active cultures twice a day to repopulate the bacteria in my gut. Seems to be working very well, too.
I’ve taken 500mg of oxytetracycline daily for the past few years (where the anti-inflammatory side effects of antibiotics are used to treat rosacea), and I’ll probably need to take them for life. I’m still around, though I’ve lost the capacity to digest cheap cheese. I will admit my stomach was pretty screwed for the first few months, but eventually it settled down to some sort of quasi-normal state as long as I was a bit cautious about my diet.
I did wonder whether I’d be able to breed oxtytracycline-resistant strains of bacteria in my stomach, a bit like the MRSA superbug but benign, but alas it seems that it doesn’t seem to work that way with gut bacteria.
It’s possible to supplement a diet with proprietory digestive bacteria capsules, but they only contain a few species at most (often only a single species), whereas the natural stomach fauna contains thousands of species. I find the acidophilus bacteria capsules much more effective than live yoghurts or expensive milk cultures in little plastic bottles.