The media and science is pushing the idea that people in modern industrial countries have poorly diverse populations of gut microbes. I read an article about a scientist that did his own DIY fecal transplant from a donor in Africa living a hunter gatherer lifestyle and claimed benefits like farting less.
Where are these diverse microbes coming from? Even food from a modern production isn’t sterile.
To specify what are they eating, or doing that gives them the bacteria? Raw wild caught meat, wild fruits and plants, water contaminated with animal feces?
I wonder if you could replicate at least some of that instead of waiting for hunter gatherer poo to arrive in the mail.
Your question is backwards. Humans have carried a rich biota of gut bacteria and parasites since before we started banging rocks together. They coevolved with us.
Modern food production, distribution, and preparation along with recent ideas about cleanliness (in the home) has caused many of us to have an impoverished intestinal flora
But every new human is born without them, sterile digestive tract. The process of birth is the first exposure and it continues on from there. So is it just picking them up from other people?
You’re going to get the gut bacteria of other people you live with no matter how clean you are, its inevitable.
So where was this chain broken in industrial societies?
Basically I’m asking how to diversify gut bacteria without access to a donor with an unbroken chain of transmission from the beginning of time.
You didn’t provide a source for you claim in the OP, but if there’s an effect it may be due to the widespread use of antibiotics.
http:/e/www.scientificamerican.com/article/artificial-sweeteners-may-change-our-gut-bacteria-in-dangerous-ways/
Along with antibiotics, all the crap Americans eat can damage the bacteria.
I imagine primitive people probably consume a lot more dirt than us civilized folks. Dirt has bacteria.
Cite? I believe babies get microbes from their mothers.
When I was a kid I would drink from the local creeks on a daily basis. These were not pure mountain creeks, they ran through the heart of Los Angeles suburbs. I never once got sick from it. I watch that show naked and afraid and they get dissentary every time they sample unboiled water. If left in a situation where we had no access to clean water would we quickly build up a tolerance to the dirty water?
All the info I can find says in the womb assuming the amniotic sac is unbroken yes, in the process of birth the baby gets mom’s bacteria yes.
And from nursing, kissing, handling, etc. That’s also how we pick up the bacteria that cause tooth decay.
A cite off wikipedia’s Gut Flora page indicates that microbial colonization may occur in the fetus. (Collado, M and Bӓuerl C et al. Defining microbiota for developing new probiotics. Microb Ecol Health Dis.2012;23 PMCID:PMC 3747743)
You wouldn’t. In places where clean water is not available, water-borne illnesses are a major killer. When they don’t kill, they just sap strength and productivity.
Go to a village with bad water and you’ll see a lot of people who are sick all the time, and a lot of kids dying from diarrheal diseases.
To be precise, it depends on what’s in the water. The body can build up a tolerance to a lot of things.
In nature water holes are common watering places for birds and other animals. They walk in the water as well as poop in the water. Would primitive humans have been able to tolerate this water as well as the local animals?
Interesting, I wonder how they get to the fetus. That cite is not online and the paper’s title is vague.
I guess my real question is can I only get these diverse bacteria from people have them, or enviromentally?
It would depend on the specific disease wouldn’t it?
They either develop tolerance or they die from them. So the ones still alive, yes, they developed tolerance. You don’t see the ones that didn’t.
It’s not that humans are any worse at surviving water-borne diseases. It’s that we have a very low tolerance for death. If 10% of the wildebeests who drink from the watering hole die, hey, that’s 90% survival, and that’s pretty good. If 10% of the humans die, though, that’s a huge tragedy.
You aren’t going to develop a tolerance for giardia, schistosomiasis, amoebas, cholera, wormds, etc. There is no part of the planet where people drink contaminated water and are not affected. Water born diseases account for 1.8 million deaths yearly, and is one of the top 10 causes of death globally. Additional, it costs millions in lost productivity. These diseases are just as deadly to someone who has lived around them their whole lives as they are for you and me.
Most cultures, particularly those that have become urban, have developed some kind of tradition to get around water borne diseases-- drinking tea, beer, whatever. That happens for a reason. People who drink contaminated water get sick and sometimes die.
I saw a couple hundred Peace Corps volunteers pass through Cameroon, where water generally isn’t safe to drink. Different volunteers had different philosophies. Some dutifully boiled and filter their water, refused to drink water they had not personally processed, and observed all of the rules around keeping food safe. Those volunteers rarely got sick. Some did as the locals and drank water as it came, accepting glasses of water when they went out and not worrying too much about food. Those people were sick for two years straight. Soem people, like myself, took the middle road. I ran my water through a serious filter but did not boil it, and while I didn’t usually accept water when out, I would drink cold teas that had theoretically been boiled. I was sick about half the time. Then I got a wicked case of giardia, lost 15 pounds in a week, and quickly joined the people who take better care of their water. There is a perfect correlation between how safe your water is and how often you get sick.
Good points, but taking oral antibiotics are the main culprit.