There's an entire ecosystem of microbes living inside of you right now. How many species and how strong they are depends on a wide variety of factors including your sleep habits, stress levels, diet, and antibiotic usage. In today's video, we're going to use the cadavers to help us understand why this even matters to you and what you can do to help level the playing field including maybe possibly transplanting poop from one person to another. It's going to be an interesting video for sure. Let's do this.
Research suggests that there's anywhere between 200 and 1100 microbial species on average in the human gut. Now, the gut refers to your digestive tract running from the mouth all the way down to the anus but the vast majority of those microbes are going to be located here inside of what's called the large intestine or the colon. Now, this is essentially what it would look like in the human body.
I've gone ahead and removed the small intestine and pushed those to the side. That way, we can more easily view this large intestine. But the microbes that live here in the gut are referred to as the gut microbiota. The gut microbiota belong to an even larger microbial ecosystem called the microbiome.
And in fact, we did an entire video dedicated to the microbiome that I encourage you to check out. But in today's video, we're gonna be focusing our attention here on the gut microbiota and specifically the microbes. Inside of the large intestine.
Now, it's important to understand that your gut microbiota is highly variable. So variable that if I were to actually take a sample of every single human being on the entire planet, I would be unlikely to find one common species among everyone which is crazy to think about. Now, the things that create this variability are going to be sex, age, ethnicity, where you live on the planet.
Your actual location matters quite a bit. As so does who you associate with. They actually find that couples that have been together for an extended period of time, their microbiomes start to look more similar to one another than they did when they first met.
The million-dollar question is, does this matter? Does this variability, this diversity matter? And if so, how much does it matter?
There are so many questions out there. Does the individual who has 200 microbes, are they less healthy than the individual who has 1100? These are all questions that researchers are aiming to find answers to and the only way we're going to find answers to them is to do a whole lot of tests of the gut microbiota.
And that's why I'm excited about the sponsor of today's video, Ombre. Ombre is a lab that provides you with a home test kit that makes it possible to test your own gut microbiota and determine the species that are living inside of you. Here's how it works.
They send you the kit in the mail which you will then take to the nearest restroom and you will sample your poop. I know that sounds disgusting but it's actually super easy to do and very sanitary. They provide you with detailed instructions, a swab, a test tube, and the packaging necessary to mail it back to their lab for analysis. In a few weeks, you'll be able to view reports on the number and types of bacterial species living inside your gut and what they do for you.
You'll then be able to view food recommendations to help support your microbial ecosystem. And on top of that, they even provide you with prebiotic and probiotic supplement recommendations to help this process along. If you're interested, visit tryombre.com institute or you can just click the link in the description below and you can get $30 off your own home test kit. Alright, let's get back to it.
As I mentioned earlier, there are quite a few different sources of impact on the gut microbiota populations and that's going to include things like how much sleep you're getting, whether or not you've moved recently, as well as how stressed are you. Now, stress is such a large ...factor in this that we're going to devote an entire video to what just stress does to the body but just note that it has quite the impact on these microbial species in the gut. Instead, for the rest of this video, I want to focus on two of the other big impactors, that's even a word I guess you could say and that's going to be diet as well as antibiotic usage.
Now, your diet having an impact on the microorganisms inside of your gut is probably the least surprising thing I'm going to say to you today. However, to best understand how it impacts it, there's a couple terms that we need to go over. The first is probiotics and it's the one that you're probably the most familiar with and that is going to be actual living organisms that you are consuming. These are microbes.
Maybe they are in fermented foods. Maybe you consume some nice sauerkraut or some kefir or some kimchi and you get those microbes that way but you can also get them in supplemental form. And so what the idea here is, is you consume the microbes. and they will help to repopulate or bolster up the ecosystem inside of the gut. So, that's the entire premise behind probiotics but the one that's probably people are least familiar with are going to be prebiotics.
Prebiotics are fuel sources for the pre-existing microbes or if you take them in conjunction with probiotics, they can kind of work together. So, prebiotics are just going to be things that Fiber is probably the most well understood of all the prebiotics. While there's likely and definitely more, the ones that we understand the most are going to be fiber, specifically dietary fiber. So, there's two different types of dietary fiber. You have fermentable fiber and non-fermentable fiber.
Non-fermentable, that's the type that gets into your colon. It just acts like a chimney sweep and helps to push out feces, right? It's what keeps you regular as they say.
While fermentable fiber on the other hand, this is the stuff that makes you gassy. So, you can go ahead and think like beans, legumes, garlic, onions, skins of fruit. Those are going to have fermentable sources of fiber and what will happen is those five of those. The fiber is going to be consumed by the microbes inside the large intestine and as they break it down, they will produce gases and as those gases accumulate, you will then open up the anus and you will fart.
So it's kind of weird but your farts are microbe farts. It's secondhand farts. So let's say you don't like onions which to me is crazy because onions are delicious.
You just need to know how to use them, how to cook them. That's besides the point but let's say you don't like onions. Well, onions come with a form of fermentable fiber called inulin and there are microbes inside of the intestine here that specifically consume inulin. So, if you're not consuming inulin, you are starving those microbes but let's say, well, you don't like onions but you love apples, right? Apple skins have a form of fermentable fiber called pectin.
So, that means there are going to be Microbes inside of here that love pectin. So what will happen is you will feed them while starving out the ones that want the inulin. So, the main question is, is this a big deal?
Because obviously, this is going to have an impact on the populations, right? As you starve one, there's going to be less of it as they start to die out and as you feed another, that's going to get bolstered, right? So then, we start to see a populational shift and the question researchers are trying to tackle here is, I mean, we see this happening but how important is it?
In some instances, it's clearly important but in others, it's hard to really decipher how important these differences are. Now, the thing is onions are not the only source of inulin so there's other things you can eat to get that inulin but the question is, should we be eating onions regardless? And that's something researchers are trying to tackle and try to figure out but it's one of those really difficult questions to answer. Next up, we have antibiotics.
which are going to be the polar opposite of prebiotics. Prebiotics sustain bacteria, antibiotics kill bacteria. Now, there are different types of antibiotics. You can have a narrow spectrum which is going to just target specific species of bacteria and then you can have a broad spectrum which hates bacteria equally, right?
It doesn't discern the difference between good bacteria that may be living here in the colon and bad bacteria that may be causing an infection at some other place or in the colon itself. Now, But it cannot be understated how important antibiotics have been to human beings as a species. If we did not have antibiotics, we'd be living in a very different world. However, it's okay to have the self-awareness to also admit that we have been over prescribing them by far and large and they have unforeseen consequences on aspects of the body like the good bacteria living here inside of the colon.
And one of those unforeseen consequences is a C diff infection. C diff stands for Clostridium difficile and it's a very resilient type of bacteria that resists many different kinds of antibiotics. So think about it like this, let's say you take an antibiotic and it starts to kill the good bacteria inside of your colon.
Well, that creates a land grab opportunity and C diff being resistant will take advantage of it, grabbing up real estate inside of here. Now, C diff is very common. It's all over the place.
It's likely inside of you right now and in the environment around you. But normally, these other microbes are keeping a balance inside of the colonic ecosystem, right? You have microbes all over the place so when C diff comes in, there's no space to occupy or if it does have some space, it's so little that it's not able to really cause any havoc. But if you take antibiotics or happen to be over the age of 65, that is another... A likely cause of just of getting a C diff infection is simply being older because you have a diminished and less efficient microbiota but simply being hospitalized.
Is another big risk factor for contracting a C diff infection. I mean, think about it. You're in a place with a lot of different bacteria coming from a lot of different sick people and C diff can make its way in here.
So, if you go to the hospital with one thing, you may take some antibiotics and then leave with a C diff infection or maybe not leave at all, right? But some people are asymptomatic with their C diff and well, and they just literally experience no problems but others, what will happen is they get watery diarrhea. See, look, the large intestine, its job is to extract water from the feces as well as salt. The longer the feces spends inside of the colon, the more hard and stool-like it gets.
The less time it spends in here, the more watery it's going to be. Well, what's going to happen is it senses there's an infection so it starts contracting to try and evacuate the bowel to get rid of the infection. And so, what you end up getting is watery diarrhea multiple times a day. You're also going to get abdominal pain, you're going to get fever, nausea, vomiting.
It's a miserable experience. However, it can turn into something far worse. Into something let's say, let's look at this.
This is the transverse colon here and this is just going to take feces from one side to the other but imagine it bloating and getting extremely large into what is called toxic megacolon. It can literally push into other structures in your abdominal cavity creating a lot of problems. C diff infections can also create holes or perforations inside of the colon. It can lead to sepsis and even death.
It is not a good thing to have a C diff infection. Now, ironically, the way it's most commonly treated is with more antibiotics. This time, however, they're stronger and they're more capable of handling the infection.
But there's another way to treat it. It's my favorite way to treat it and that is what's called a fecal microbiota transplantation. Poop transplants as I prefer to call them are nothing new.
They date back to nearly 2,000 years ago within traditional Chinese medicine. However, the way they are administered has changed significantly over that time. The idea is pretty straightforward. You take the microbiota in the feces of a healthy donor and you transplant that to the colon of an unhealthy recipient. Now there's different ways you can do this.
The first is actually through... an encapsulation form. So, you actually take the feces and you can put it into a capsulated form and ingest it orally and it will then go through the digestive tract and it will then hopefully populate the colon.
The next option is going just directly to the colon. So, you could do an enema which would target the rectum or you could do a colonoscopy which they could use a colonoscope to go all the way to the entirety of the colon. And what they'll do is they'll take the feces and mix it.
in a saline solution so you have a sprayable format or form and then they put it in here and imagine just like with the colonoscope and you just spray the wall of the colon with that new feces or if it's an enema, you're just flushing into the rectum. However, with the enema, it's easier for that to evacuate, right? For the patient to then have to poop it out and so you may have to administer several different enemas in order to get a similar effect. effect. Another option is to just go into the upper digestive tract and so they can actually insert tubes that will go all the way down the esophagus through the stomach and into the small intestine where it can then release the microbiota there.
Again with the idea of it making its way into the colon. But I mean, it makes sense. I mean, if you're able to kill off the C diff with the antibiotics, then you have a blank slate to then administer.
That fecal microbiota transplantation. However, this is not only being performed for C diff. Researchers are experimenting with several other metabolic disorders.
Maybe you have inflammatory bowel disease like Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis. Maybe you have celiac disease, right? And as we start to figure out whether or not this works, I mean, it could be super exciting. Imagine if poop is the answer.
That thing, that thing that we've all Viewed as being the most disgusting substance that can come out of a person actually happens to be the thing that saves or cures or at least is the best treatment for several of the worst conditions out there. That to me would be absolutely hilarious. Real quick, I want to let you know that we have launched a second YouTube channel solely in Spanish.
So, this is for the Spanish speakers in your life. This is not a YouTube channel with Spanish subtitles. We actually got native Spanish speakers to dub over our videos.
So, we're slowly re-releasing all the videos you've loved and seen already on this channel on this secondary channel. I encourage you if you are a Spanish speaker or if you have Spanish speakers in your life that you don't want to have to read subtitles and captions in Spanish. You just want to listen to it to check out the link in the description below.
So, I'll put that down there. So, head on over that way, subscribe. It's going to be... awesome to be able to get more global and we want to start doing this with even more languages over time.
I also want to give a quick thanks again to the sponsor of today's video, Ombre. Be sure to click the another link in the description below and get $30 off your own home test kit so you can see what kind of microbes are inside of here, right? What is your microbial landscape? What is that going to look like and what can you do to better help it? As always, be sure to like, comment, subscribe if you feel so inclined and I appreciate you watching.
And I will see you in the next video.