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 and 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.
[Intro]
Research suggest 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 remove the
small intestine and push those to the side. That way, we can more easily view this large intestine
but the micro 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 going to 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 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 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 micro-organisms 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, as 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. Well, 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.
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 - the fibers 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 farts are microbe farts. It's second hand
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 but that's - 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 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 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?" ands 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 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
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 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 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
in 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 likely cause of just of getting a C. diff infection,
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 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. C. diff, the 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 antibiotic 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 straight forward - you take the micro
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 encapsulated 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 it's easier for 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.
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 microbiotic transplantation. However,
this is not only being performed for CDF. 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 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 of 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. 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 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 like, comment, subscribe if you feel so inclined
and I appreciate you watching and I will see you in the next video.