Fitness Files: Cooties are our friends
Remember playing cooties? We’d chase each other, touch the person and sing out, “I gave you my cooties!”
Cooties may just be a good thing.
In my column of a year ago, I quoted Dr. Stefano Guandalini, an authority on gluten sensitivity, who believes that the prevalence of autoimmune diseases may be the result of the antiseptic environment parents create for kids.
WebMD’S Dr. Thom McDade of Northwestern University says, “Just as your baby’s brain needs stimulation and input … to develop normally, the young immune system is strengthened by exposure to everyday germs so that it can learn to adapt and regulate itself.”
What about adults? How important is our personal germ collection?
Scientific American’s Melinda Wenner says, “In truth we are walking petri dishes, rife with bacterial colonies from our skin to … our guts, our bodies housing 10 times more bacterial cells then human cells.”
Bacterial cells, smaller than human cells, enter through the mouth and nose and then lodge in the esophagus, stomach and/or intestines.
Until recently, we took antibiotics to kill germs that caused illness, never suspecting that we were destroying bacteria that contribute to our health.
Here’s the latest: Our biome does us a lot of good. First, the Scientific American article teaches us that “bacteria produce chemicals to help us harness energy and nutrients from our food.” Studies seem to show that gut bacteria have a role in our “ability to synthesize vitamins and digest complex carbohydrates.”
Considering the role of the microbiome in obesity, we may like our cooties even more.
According to The Economist’s 2012 article “Me, Myself, and Us”: “Experiments on mice suggest that bacteria actually help in the process of slimming by suppressing a hormone that facilitates fat storage.”
Intestinal bacteria also appear to regulate the density of immune cells, which help a variety of immune functions.
For example, Wenner says UC Santa Cruz researchers observed that the H. pylori bacteria, which is present in the gut, while believed to protect against esophageal cancer and asthma, cause ulcers or stomach cancer in 10% of us. However, other bacteria, possibly, the Clostridium species, are “potential candidates for a protective effect,” keeping the ulcers and stomach cancer at bay.
The Economist says the trillions of bacteria, 100 trillion in the gut alone, can be looked at as another organ. Each of us is an ecosystem, with a microbiome that functions as part of digestion and the immune system.
Recent discoveries say heart disease and autoimmune responses resulting in asthma, eczema and multiple sclerosis seem to result from a component of the microbiome.
The Economist sums up our close relationship with our cooties like this: “Our bacterial cells and human cells exist in a symbiotic relationship.” Humans “shelter [and feed] the microbes, and they are integral to the hosts well-being.” However “in bad times, the alignment …can break down … the microbiome can cause disease.”
So The Economist article asks, “If gut bacteria are making you ill, can swapping them [with a healthy person] make you healthy?”
Here is a low-cost cure for an intractable infection:
Drug resistant C. difficile kills thousands of people a year, mainly in hospitals. Last-chance treatment involves heavy-duty antibiotics that destroy the patient’s entire biome. If the treatment fails, the C. difficile returns, worse than ever.
Dr. Mark Mellow of Baptist Medical Center in Oklahoma City pioneered a treatment of collecting small amounts of feces from a healthy person and preparing it for an enema to fight C. difficile. In effect, this transfers a whole bacterial ecosystem from one gut to another. It often works in curing the infection.
Readers may experience revulsion, but patients whose lives are threatened by a drug-resistant infection must feel gratitude for their new disease-fighting biomes.
So there you have it. Welcoming the gift of cooties when you’re in no condition to run away.
Newport Beach resident CARRIE LUGER SLAYBACK is a retired teacher who, since turning 70, has ran the Los Angeles Marathon, placing first in her age group twice.
