Thu, Aug-23-18, 14:01
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Plan: Muscle Centric
Stats: 238/153/160
BF:
Progress: 109%
Location: UK
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The latest probiotic drink: a baby poo smoothie
Quote:
From The Times
London, UK
23 August,2018
The latest probiotic drink: a baby poo smoothie
It’s healthy, it’s organic, it already comes at a smoothie-like consistency — and it uses a resource that we would otherwise just throw away. What’s not to like about the latest promising probiotic supplement?
Well, there’s the fact that it comes out of a baby’s bottom.
Scientists have created a health “cocktail” made from scouring the nappies of infants and then culturing the bacteria they find within.
After testing the resulting drink on mice and on a simulation of the human gut, they claim it could help people with diseases such as diabetes and autoimmune disorders by improving their production of chemicals called short chain fatty acids.
Scientists are increasingly learning about the importance of gut bacteria to our general health. In particular, diseases related to obesity and to dysfunctions of the immune system seem to have a link to the microbial communities that we carry around, known as the microbiome — which can be altered by antibiotics, diet and illness.
For years, health food companies have tried to capitalise on the idea of helping our “good bacteria”, with probiotic drinks. But, said Hariom Yadav, from Wake Forest School of Medicine, these all have a common flaw: the provenance of their bacteria.
“Probiotics are in high demand, because of the health benefits of manipulating the microbiome,” he said. “With several of the probiotics the origin is not known. Some others are isolated from the soil, still more from fermented food.” Given their purpose is to restore a human microbiome to peak health, he said this was an odd way of going about it. “The origin of probiotics should be from humans.”
As unpalatable as it may sound, treatments have already been developed on this basis. The most effective way of combating infection by Clostridium difficile, a debilitating condition, is faecal transplants — in which someone else’s bacteria are used to repopulate sufferers’ guts.
For a paper in the journal Scientific Reports, Dr Yadav and his colleagues decided to go to the purest source of gut bacteria they could think of, as yet unsullied by junk food or medicine. “The baby microbiome remains the healthiest microbiome,” he said. They scraped baby poo from 34 used nappies, then isolated promising strains to be cultured and tested.
They found that these strains seemed to increase production of short chain fatty acids. Dr Yadav said this was significant. “In many diseases — obesity, diabetes, cancer — the levels of these metabolites go significantly down. There is a lot of data suggesting that if we produce them it could be beneficial.”
He said they were now putting the bacteria into yoghurts, with a view to eventually testing them in humans. “They grow nicely in milk,” he said. “We are smelling it, looking at it — but we are not eating it yet.”
Although, he said, once they have approval he would have no problem in doing so. “These are just bacteria. The origin does not matter — they are not poop.”
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https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/...othie-p3clssltn |
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