Excerpt: from (Don’t Be Squeamish) The Unlikely Cure for a Gut Disease: The success of fecal transplants to combat hospital-acquired diarrhea shows how crucial gut bacteria are to our bodies. (Gabriel Weston, 05.02.2025, UnDark)
It turns out the gut isn’t a simple tube after all, but the largest sensory organ we have, the most receptive interface that exists between a person and the outside world. With more immune cells than across the rest of the body put together, and an internal surface area a hundred times bigger than the skin, the gut is held within an elaborate harness we now call the gut-brain, which contains up to 600 million neurons. This plexus of nerves doesn’t just chivvy food along. It is like a delicate switchboard, continually integrating information about what we’ve eaten, our blood chemistry, our immune state, and our microbiology.
In 2004, a landmark study by the Japanese gastroenterologist Nobuyuki Sudo showed that mice raised with no gut flora have a disrupted stress response, which can be partly corrected by colonizing their intestines with normal bacteria. Since then, countless experiments have demonstrated that the brain, the gut, and its resident bacteria coexist in an intimate three-way circuit. With the vast majority of all gut research published in the last 20 years, we’re learning more every single day about the importance of these previously disregarded life forms, why it matters to have a diverse gut flora, and the numerous pathological consequences that may occur if this balance gets disrupted. […]
Powerful modern informatics have revealed a hidden universe of hundreds of trillions of viruses, fungi, yeasts, and bacteria which make our bodies their home, 99 percent of which reside in the gut. Research has also showed us what they do. Bacteria extract nutritional goodies, especially in times of food scarcity. They break down fiber into short-chain fatty acids, which regulate sugar metabolism and appetite. They make vitamins by a process of fermentation.But they operate well beyond the gut’s traditional remit of digestion and absorption. Gut bacteria actually keep us healthy. In the case of C. diff, simply having a gut with a rich array of different species keeps the microbe in balance with its neighbors, and stops it taking over and causing disease.
You’d think these headlines about the importance of gut diversity must be hot off the press. But it isn’t so. As far back as 1886, Austrian pediatrician Theodor Escherich described the rich variety of infant gut bacteria, including their role in the decomposition of food. Just before the turn of the 20th century, Henry Tissier successfully treated a group of children suffering from gastrointestinal disease with a concoction of bacteria taken from healthy breastfeeding babies. During the First World War, microbiologist Alfred Nissle developed and patented gelatine capsules which contained a particular strain of E. coli as a treatment for dysentery in soldiers. […]
The march to beat C. Diff continues apace. A potential mRNA vaccine against the bug has yielded promising results in mice.