Be prepared to learn that whatever you thought you knew about our bodies,
we are uniquely tied to our flora in so many ways we have never considered!
Our gut flora is being altered from ideal due to antibiotics in our food
and those we take and due to insecticides and pesticides we ingest daily.
Remember GMO foods produce their own pesticides Bt or Bacillus theringensis so
when ever we consume corn, wheat, soy, etc we are disturbing this amazing
world within us.
I continue to believe that one reason I can eat anything with no apparent
remaining food sensitivities is because I recognize that while I am not
willing to do as Dr Nicholas Gonzales does, two coffee enemas a day, and
although I strongly recommend one or two ozonated colonics a year, I need my 5
ingredients in my POWER DRINK twice a day. I use MACA, Beyond Fiber Organic
Greens and BioEn'R-G'y C along with ZeoGold daily to remove toxins and
support a healthy flora but I also take my Kyodophilus 9 (whatever probiotic
you like) daily. And, since I want to prevent any contribution from my mouth
to systemic inflammation, I also use at a separate time 25 sprays of ACS
200 silver, which I swish through teeth for a minute or so before swallowing.
That will lower some of my intestinal flora but I take the acidophilus
separate from that by a few hours. The Beyond Fiber has a special from of
artichoke that provides a long-chain FOS that supports and feeds healthy flora,
and the Stabilized Rice Bran is a very nutrient dense food that also
supplies Beta Sitosterol, which works like a cholestyramine to remove many
toxins other molecules miss, as well as EDTA.
Read the attached and be prepared to learn why sometimes severe crippling
ulcerative colitis only responds to fecal implants from a healthy donor. So
there is lots more to learn here about our relationship to microbes!!
Garry F. Gordon MD,DO,MD(H)
President, Gordon Research Institute
www.gordonresearch.com
http://discovermagazine.com/2011/mar/04-trillions-microbes-call-us-home-help
-keep-healthy
The Trillions of Microbes That Call Us Home—and Help Keep Us Healthy
The human body is a habitat for a huge range of harmless and beneficial
microbes, which may be the key to fighting disease without antibiotics.
by Michael Tennesen
From the March 2011 issue
In the intensive care nursery at Duke University Medical Center, doctors
and nurses attend to premature infants in rows of incubators surrounded by
ventilators and monitors. As new parents holding packages of breast milk
watch their tiny babies, neo¬natologist Susan LaTuga makes her rounds,
checking vital signs and evaluating how the infants tolerate feeding. She consults
with nurses, dietitians, and pharmacists about the course of the day's
treatment for the babies, some of whom weigh as little as one pound and were
born as much as 17 weeks early.
At the end of her shift, LaTuga stops at a freezer and inspects stool
samples from some of the infants that are at the center of a remarkable new
study. Across the Duke campus, technicians are waiting to analyze them with a
powerful gene sequencer capable of penetrating the hidden world of the
billions of microorganisms growing inside each infant.
LaTuga is one of several medical researchers at Duke working with
microbial ecologists to study the development of the human microbiome—the enormous
population of microbes, including bacteria, fungi, and viruses, that live
in the human body, predominantly in the gut. There are 20 times as many of
these microbes as there are cells in the body, up to 200 trillion in an
adult, and each of us hosts at least 1,000 different species. Seen through the
prism of the microbiome, a person is not so much an individual human body
as a superorganism made up of diverse ecosystems, each teeming with
microscopic creatures that are essential to our well-being. "Our hope is that if we
can understand the normal microbial communities of healthy babies, then we
can manipulate unhealthy ones," LaTuga says.
The Duke study is just one of many projects begun in the past five years
that use genetic sequencing to explore how the ¬diversity of the microbiome
impacts our health. Two of the largest efforts are the Human Microbiome
Project, funded by the National Institutes of Health (See "Your Microbial
Menagerie," page 4), and the European Union's Metagenomics of the Human
Intestinal Tract. Although these groups have only just begun to publish their
findings, it is already clear that the micro¬biome is much more complex and
very likely more critical to human health than anyone suspected.
Understanding and controlling the
diversity of our germs, as opposed to assaulting
them with anti¬biotics, could be the key to a range of future medical
treatments.
In-depth analysis of the human body's microflora has been possible only in
the past few years—a by-product of the same new gene sequencing techniques
that have allowed scientists to cheaply and accurately identify the DNA of
the human genome. "Gene sequencing has opened a huge door to how complex
these communities are," says Patrick Seed, a Duke pediatrician specializing
in infectious disease, who with biologist Rob Jackson is a lead investigator
of the premature infant study.
Before sequencing was available at a reasonable price, microbes were
identified by growing them in a petri dish. But "not all microbes will grow in
culture," LaTuga says. "It identifies only about 20 percent of the microbes
in the gut."
Like a lush rain forest, a healthy microbiome in the human gut is a
diverse ecosystem that thrives only when all the interdependent species are
healthy too. "In an ecological sense, more diverse communities are healthy on
land and in the seas," Jackson says. "No one species is dominant, and the
ecosystem is more productive and resistant to major changes." The comparison
is more than just a convenient analogy. Jackson was studying microbial
communities around the world, including in the Amazon, when he realized that
the ecological balance in those environments was not so different from the
balance present in a healthy human gut. (One of his more counterintuitive
findings is that microbial communities are more biodiverse in the American
Plains than in the Amazon rain forest.)
Jackson's work on microbial diversity caught the attention of Seed, who
was already interested in the microbiome in the guts of preterm infants but
who did not have a background in ecology. He sought out Jackson, and the two
decided to collaborate on what they call the Preemie Microbiome Project.
The Duke medical researchers and ecologists who have joined that project
hope to identify which species flourish in early stages of the human
microbiome, how they are influenced by the consumption of breast milk, and what role
they play in critical diseases affecting infants as well as in chronic
diseases that occur later in life.
Your Microbial Menagerie
Two hundred trillion microscopic organisms bacteria, viruses, and fungi
are swarming inside you right now. The largest collection, weighing as much
as four pounds in total, clings to your gut, but your skin also hosts more
than a million microbes per square centimeter. One population thrives among
the hair follicles on your scalp, while an entirely different one resides
in the crook of your elbow. About 1,000 species can live in the human mouth,
where different sides of the same tooth sustain distinctly different
combinations of bugs.
Surprisingly little is known about these invisible communities and how
they affect us. In 2007 the National Institutes of Health (NIH) launched the
Human Microbiome Project, a $115 million initiative exploring the bugs that
exist in the human body, whether people all share a core population of such
organisms, and how changes in microbial ecosystems influence human health
and disease. In 2009 NIH geneticist Julie Segre published a study showing
that physiologically comparable parts of the body host similar microbial
ecologies, whereas contrasting areas—say sweaty underarms and dry forearms—
have drastically different communities. "My scalp community is much more
similar to your scalp than to my own back. That's because bacteria thrive in
particular environments," Segre says. For instance, she notes, the face is
ideal for Propionibacterium acnes, a bug that thrives on the oily, waxy
remains of dead cells. People often associate P. acnes with acne problems, but
it also breaks down oils into a natural moisturizer for the skin
The notion that the human body is teeming with hidden life may seem
creepy, but our resident microbes seem to be overwhelmingly harmless. They
educate the immune system and outcompete and block potential pathogens. For
instance, Staphylococcus epidermidis, which lives all over the skin, prevents
deadly staph strains from taking hold. "It's remarkable how Americans are so
focused on sterilizing our exterior using antimicrobial products," Segre
says. "Bugs throughout the body keep us healthy. We need to lose some of that
language of warfare."
—Amy Barth
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
