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Patrick

Good old Slashdot. For me, the story is almost spiritual - if our "selves" are actually colonies of many organisms, then much of our "selves" live on even after the brain dies.

I read a while back that polyunsaturated oils are toxic to rumen bacteria, and that they saturate them because of this. Wonder how our gut bacteria feel about fish oil?
I guess capmikee is just more spiritual than me. I'm trying to figure out whether I should go to war against the little boogers.

Too much of the wrong ones makes you sick. But if you killed them all, I'm pretty sure you would die too. Fortunately that's basically impossible.

Another bit of old news that gets recycled every 6 months or so.

These seem to be the most resilient at reappearing:
Obesity may be caused by a virus.
Obesity may be caused by gut bacteria.

Actually probably not. They raise mice without any gut bacteria at all, keep them in sterile environments. I don't know how healthy they are, but they tend to be something like 30% skinnier than mice with bacteria.

I wonder if probiotics are wasted on low carbers, those guys down there thrive on undigested carbs and fiber.

Well it was news to me

I saw that mentioned in the article, but I didn't understand it. How the heck do they get sterile mice?

Peter from Hyperlipid had an interesting article recently, with a surprising perspective on gut bacteria:
http://high-fat-nutrition.blogspot....-endotoxin.html

Heh, I know. The idea that another living creature has so much influence over my brain chemistry, wild. Coevolutionary theory poses that since the bacteria were here long before everything else was, that bacteria influences the evolution of the vehicles they travel in. If this is true, then imagine yourself as an organic, singing, dancing container designed to protect E. coli and Streptococcus.

Well, I suspect their parents have to be sterile mice too... which leads to a chicken and egg kind of thing.

I had that moment of... omg, who or what is in control of me really? When I read about toxoplasmosis and rats. Basically the pathogen disables the rat's fear of cats, the rat gets eaten, the pathogen ends up in the cat, which I guess is it's preferred host.

Then again, according to Michael Pollan, corn is probably controlling our destiny in ways beyond or ken.

Yeah ! That's why we have an obesity epidemic. The grains wants to multiply, so they got humans to start agriculture. And the more grains we grow, the more grains we eat, and those carbs makes us hungrier for more grains. So we grow more! And now look where we're at.

Patrick

This sounds like the parasite that infects ants. I think the eggs are deposited in the ant and then slowly grow inside it, making it appear insane, until they break out of the ant, killing it in the process.

Lifecycle of zombie ant parasite

Fungus in an ant's brain

These are so trippy to me. Who needs drugs when nature is so crazy all on its own.

--Melissa

Not it's only preferred host - basically many parasites have a 2-phase life cycle with the forms from two phases having different hosts.

e.g. malaria http://www.cdc.gov/malaria/biology/life_cycle.htm (humans to mosquitos to humans)
Bilharzia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schistosomiasis#Life_cycle (humans to water snails to humans)

Aphids do a similar thing too, swapping between different host plants at different stages in their complex life cycle.

Oh and toxoplasmosis doesn't just affect the behaviour of infected rats - it appears to change human behaviour too and might even affect mental health.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxopl...avioral_changes

I've read about toxoplasmosis before. Crazy stuff! I've heard that in countries where people eat a lot of rare or raw meat, a large percentage of the population has latent toxoplasmosis. Occasionally I'll read about how well human physiology is adapted to parasites; recently there was an article suggesting that people with pig roundworms have a lower incidence of asthma.