Microbial Garden in Your Gut

The paradox that scientists are trying to come to terms with is that our “healthy” human body is loaded with germs, and that these germs might be conferring positive health to our bodies. To be specific, we carry over a trillion (1014) bacteria in our guts. And they belong to as many as 400 different species. If we could scoop them all out and place them on a weighing scale they would weigh as much as 1.5 to 3 Kg, even more than the clothes we wear!

The presence of this huge bustling wild-life sanctuary of little animals or microbial garden in our guts has puzzled scientists for decades. There was a time when “germs” were those terrible little things that caused nasty infections and often took lives. In fact, when some of these germs migrate from the gut to “abnormal” places such as the urinary tract, they produce illnesses such as urine infections.

The logical approach that scientists therefore took in the last two centuries was to rid the body of all germs, in an attempt to “sterilise” it. They soon realised that removing the “good” germs often cleared the field for disease-producing bacteria to invade the body and cause diseases.

It has now become clear that just as good germs need our warm moist slushy guts to survive, breed and colonize, we need them just as much to act as guards preventing invading germs from coming in and causing diseases.

The most dramatic example in current times is a condition called “antibiotic associated diarrhea (AAD)” or the upset tummy that many of us experience when we take antibiotics for infections such as those of the chest, urine, skin or bones.
The gripes and ‘loosies’ we get are best managed by consuming “good” germs, called probiotics, either in the form of curd or yogurt, or as preparations that come as capsules or liquids. A particular variety of healthy germs called Saccharomyces boulardi has been shown to work best for this condition.

Scientists have now gone even a step further. Why not take germs from a person with a healthy gut and “transplant” or put them into people with weak guts? Stool transplant or Faecal Microbiota Transplant (FMT), as it is called, involves taking stools from healthy donors, running it through labs to ensure absence of harmful ones, and instilling them into the intestines of patients through a tube passed from either end of the gastrointestinal tract.

There are 25 medical centres in the USA that have started doing FMT, as have some in India. In conditions such as C difficile toxin disease, the results with this procedure are thrice as good as any other form of treatment.

While these are still early days and one has to study and observe more to recommend it in wider indications, the initial results are very promising.

The Chinese seemed to have known all this from as far back as the 4th century BC. They had a practice of young mothers feeding a small bit of their stools to their new borns to make their guts strong.

And we seem to have come a full circle now with faecal transplantation to regain our health!