Science a GoGo's Home Page Forums General Discussion General Science Discussion Forum How much do your bacteria weigh?

I just got the new Scientific American (June 2012). The cover article is about "Your Inner Ecosystem". The story title inside is "The Ultimate Social Network". According to SciAm there are a lot more bacteria in your body than there are of your own cells. But since the bacteria are smaller than your body cells they only add 5 to 10 lbs (2.5 to 5 kg).

Those bacteria have big effect on you, mostly good. Some of them are in a way a mixed blessing. Take H. Pylori, the bacteria that can cause stomach ulcers. It seems that in addition to causing ulcers it also helps regulate your diet. It puts out a substance that causes you to feel satisfied when you are eating. So it actually helps you keep your weight down. They suggest that part of the obesity epidemic that we have with children nowadays is that almost all children have been dosed with antibiotics and their H. Pylori killed. That is a "may", not a certainty.

Investigation over the past 20 or 30 years has started to reveal the way that our bacteria work with our bodies to keep us healthy, or make us sick. But it seems that there are a lot of bacteria that are pretty much essential to our health. And the loss of some bacteria to antibiotics may be helping to spur the surge of autoimmune diseases. Once again that is a "May".

Lots of research to be done before they finally get some positive guidance on how to manage or bacteria for our best health but they are headed that way.

Bill Gill

Thanks Fiend. That was a good talk.

Bill Gill

That's a good video.

As long as they don’t manage them out of existence……….

One has only to look at some environmental schemes to realize that management of nature is rarely as simple as it might seem.

Well, there is always the problem of keeping just the right bacteria. In the video the idea seems to be that they are looking for broad spectrum replacements for our current antibiotics. But using broad spectrum antibiotics may be causing some of our current health problems. So we have to be really careful how we use antibiotics. They are extremely valuable to cure a host of really bad diseases, but as shown in the SciAm article, they can also lead to some side effects that may lead to a lot of other problems.

It looks to me as though we really need to be trying to find some very specific treatments. So if you have TB, for example, they give you the TB treatment, and it doesn't impact the other bacteria. It seems as though the ideas discussed in the video might be adaptable to that sort of thing.

Of course then we run into the problem that pharmacies would have to stock thousands of special purpose medicines that may only be used a few times a year. That can lead to some serious problems with having what you need when you need it.

Bill Gill