May 13, 2014 • 30 mins
If it was possible to take a full scan of all of the DNA of every cell in and on your body the results would be startling: Only 1 percent would be human. The other 99 percent comprises all of the bacteria, fungi, viruses and other microbes you literally cannot live without.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to you stuff. You should know front House stuff
where its dot com. Hey you, and welcome to the podcast.
And Josh Clark, I almost just forgot what I was
gonna say your name. Yeah. Uh, there's Charles w. Chok
Pribb piping in, and there's the trio. Yeah, the trifecta
(00:26):
and it's terrible Ikea lamp. Uh do you think, well
we are getting a little heat off of it right now?
It's a nice Did you ever see that Ikea commercial
about the lamp that was thrown out on the street. No,
it was really good. Well what happened to it? Was
it like the monkey at the Ikea? No, it was
like a lamp gets thrown out with the like someone's
just redoing parts of their apartment and the lamp is
(00:49):
kicked to the curve as a computer animated. So it's
it's a human formed not human forms? What am I saying? Anthropogenic?
Anthropomorphized and like looks up at the apartment that he
is just thrown out of it and stuff like that.
Does he go back to Sweden? I don't. I don't
remember how it ends. Just remember the lamp like turns
out human. It was sad. It was like sad. Okay,
(01:10):
I got teared up. Did you go buy one of
those lamps? No, it didn't work. Um, so, I guess
you're feeling pretty good since we're talking about lamps and everything,
and lamps I do. That means it's a good days.
A clear signal checks in a good mood everybody. Uh.
You know. One of the reasons why you're in a
good mood because your guts are functioning properly. Yeah, ish, yeah,
(01:38):
you know me, it's day to day. Yeah, with my stomach. Well,
that's exactly right. Things change very quickly because of your stomach,
and your stomach can't affect your mood. As a matter
of fact, the vast majority of the serotonin, which is
a mood stabilizing neurotransmitter, is produced in your gut. Yeah.
And the way that things like serotonin and other stuff
(02:00):
uh is produced is thanks to our microbiome. Dude, Yeah,
our microbiome. This is the most fascinating thing going on
in medicine science right now. Yeah. I get the impression
reading various articles. When scientists talk about it, they all
seem really pumped up. It's like the breakthrough of the
(02:20):
century and this thing like just started it's two and
like this could remain the breakthrough of the century. Yeah.
And I mean if you think about the timeline up
until the twentieth century, you were like a plant or
an animal, right, And then it was literally like the
nineteen fifties and sixties that they started saying, maybe we
should break things down a little further, and they came
(02:43):
up with the five kingdoms. And I think they're now
even as a six kingdom. Well, there's three domains, now
eight kingdoms, there's eight and three two of the domains
are account for two of the kingdoms as well. Bacteria
and archia and archia used to be thought that they
were the same as bacteria. Yes, then they started looking
(03:04):
into them a little more and they're like, oh, these
guys are made up of different amino acids and they
have different characteristics. And our chia, for example, are the
kind of microbial life that you'll only find around undersea
hot water sulfur vents like volcanos, not not in your
vagina or in your mouth. Well, no, because they're extreme
(03:28):
aphiles and a vagina or a mouth isn't that extreme?
Well it is because our kia lives there, that's right.
So the fact that we figured out that ar chia
are different than bacteria, and not only that they don't
just live in extreme environments, but also on the human body.
That was something we can thank the Human Microbiome Project for. Yeah,
(03:50):
and that wasn't I think they didn't even discover our
key until the nineteen seventies. So this all this stuff
is brand new and exciting. And by the way, the
three domain are bacteria, or chea and eukaryotes for us
or eukaryotes because we have nucleus as nuclei. Yeah, let's
(04:10):
talk about this man we we have before. I'm sure
you remember in the fecal transplant episode, because it definitely
factors into it. You can, um, Yeah, you can cure
claus Stradium difficile, which is something where that it's a
gut microbe. It's very harmful to humans that can colonize
(04:31):
your guts after you take antibiotics, which is basically just
like a slash and burn approach, which again thanks to
the Human Microbiome Project. Um, we're starting to understand we
might want to use antibiotics because what we used to
just think of is almost entirely bad are actually mostly
beneficial and even some of the bad bacteria a k a.
(04:54):
Germs um are actually present in our microbiome and normally
living harmony. It just appears that when the microbiome gets
out of whack, that's when disease happens. Yeah, Like you
may have E. Coli in your body right now. Yeah,
I probably do, but it's not a big deal. If
you're always talk about stasis, keeping things balanced in life
(05:17):
is the key. And uh, it's definitely the key with
your own personal microbiome, which we have learned is very individualized,
which we'll get to with the project. Right, So, if
you take a human body and you scanned all the
genes in it, well, you would find is there are
(05:37):
about a hundred times more microbial genes than human genes
in a genetic scan of a human body. Yeah, are
are Human cells only make up about ten percent of
the cells in the body. And here's another great stat
We actually the healthiest person on the planet as between
(06:00):
two and five pounds of bacteria pounds. Yeah, of your
body weight, about up to five pounds. Yes. What's crazy
is is that that's even considering that microbial cells are
anywhere from a tenth to a hundredth the size of
an average human cell. Yes, you do, you know how many?
(06:20):
How much five pounds would have to quite a few.
As a matter of fact, there's um an estimated hundred
trillion microbes on an average human person, just in on
and a part of such a such a part of
us and our our normal functioning that we're finding very
(06:42):
quickly that they're they're pretty much interchangeable. There, they are
one with us and UM as their host. We are
kind of one with them, like you have fungus on
your skin. Yeah, no big deal. Right. Well, that's another
thing too we should talk about. When people say microbe UM,
it's kind of a catch all word for yeah, any tiny,
(07:03):
typically unicellular life. And that's the case here too. But
it doesn't just mean bacteria. The human microbiome is made
up of lots of bacteria and lots of lots of
different types of bacteria um. For example, the mouth may
have up to five thousand different species of bacteria. Yeah,
and they're not just lazing around in your body like
(07:26):
they are responsible for keeping your body in check or
you know, sometimes responsible for it being out of whack.
But they're all they're all doing something or laying there
waiting to do something. You also have a what's called
a virume. You have viruses in your microbiome, and they
appear to be present to keep the bacteria populations from
(07:51):
getting out of control. Like they're there to infect bacteria
to kill them off. And they it's kind of like, um,
they're the lions to the gazelle of the microbiome. Okay,
you take away the lions. You've got too many gazelles. Yeah,
they all start to starve, they don't function correctly. They
may even eat each other. You don't want to see
a gazelle eat another gazelle. So you have lions there,
(08:14):
and the lions, these apex predators keep the gazelle population
and check and ultimately healthy. Paradoxically, the same thing with
the virum in your microbiome. Yeah, I mean they we
know they aid like gut bacteria aids digestion, and we'll
get the gut bacteria more. I mean, they're discovering just
all kinds of things that affects uh, synthesized vitamins. Um.
(08:36):
When you poop in the toilet and you look at
your poop, which you should do, by the way, like
you know, on a regular basis um, how much is it?
Is it half? From a third to half, so a
third to half of that is microbial biomass. It's not food. No,
it's like dead and living bacteria that you're pooping out
(08:58):
about half half. I saw something that was kind of
mind blowing to um. It's it's really neat and accurate,
especially on a microbial level. To imagine your alimentary system,
your digestive system, as the inside of that is technically
outside of your body. You have a hole, a trail
(09:19):
running through the middle of your body. That's that's technically
the outside. Uh yeah, I guess I see what you mean.
It's just chew on it for a minute, like the
the inside of your digestive system is technically the outside
of your body, Like that's outside of your body. Yeah,
(09:41):
it's confusing, it is. But once once your head wraps
around it, it's like one hand clapping kind of thing
and you're just like, whoa, that is neat. Uh all right,
So that's I guess the briefest of overviews of microbes
and bacteria, which we've talked about ad nauseum on the
show and our Great Suggestion podcast. That was one of
(10:02):
my favorite ones and then we've already talked about the
poop shakes. Uh. So the National Institutes of Health came
up with a plan, got some money together, and said,
let's try and do what the Human Genome Project did.
Let's try and map out the micro the human microbiome,
which is a very tough task because everyone is different. Yeah. Well, yeah,
(10:27):
everyone's microbiome is different. And I just saw today it
was released from the University of Michigan. They've kind of
already determined there is no such thing as a baseline
healthy microbiome. Yeah, and that was one of the goals
of this project that was started in two thousand and seven,
was that um to to establish a baseline micro biome,
(10:49):
Like they didn't know what one looked like like. They
knew that people had tons of bacteria and protozoa and
viruses all over us and in us, but what is
that supposed to look like? And when you figure out
what it's supposed to look like, then you can figure
out what what an unhealthy one looks like and then
possibly how to correct that by adjusting this this microbial
(11:11):
ecosystem back to a baseline. But I'm not surprised that
they found that there isn't a baseline that is two different,
and that doesn't mean that they can't like learn a
lot and help us out a lot. What they're basically
saying is you take a dozen completely healthy people and
their microbimes are gonna be completely different. Still, and there
was UM. There's one huge revolution in UM in the
(11:37):
study of bacterial or microbial life that that made this
project possible. Same with the human genome, but UM much
more for this it's called metagenomics. And prior to the
event and metagenomics, if you wanted to study bacteria, you
had to find a bacteria that could be replicated cloned, yeah,
(12:00):
in the laboratory setting, and UM disaccounted for just a
very very small fraction of the number of microbes out there.
What's more so, not only did you not have a
representative sample, but you also didn't have UM any kind
of anything less than an artificial setting. So even if
(12:22):
you did get these microbes, if you could replicate them
in the lab, UM, they weren't gonna behave the way
they would in their natural setting, like on your body.
So what metagenomics did UM was you can now take
like a representative sample, say like a clump of soil
or a swab of somebody's earful and get all of
(12:44):
the microbe microbes in there, and then basically just do
this rough scan of them, separate all the DNA out
at these enzymes that go and clip coherent fragments of
this DNA out, and then you take it and you
put it into what's all the model organism, and that
model organism starts to replicate as cells, and then each
(13:06):
cell displays a certain characteristic associated with a different microbe.
So all of a sudden you can start studying the
different cells and say, oh, well, this has to do
with this microbe, and this means that this protozoa is present,
and so on and so forth, and now you can
get a truly representative sample of what's in a microbiome.
(13:27):
And without metagenomics like this, none of this would be possible.
But now we're starting to find all sorts of new
uh not just information, but even new species of bacteria
and protozoa. And fun, guy, from the study of this stuff,
which is a great thing. It is a great thing,
and we'll explain why it's a great thing right after
this break. Hey, Chuck, Hey, you know me I'm a
(13:59):
snack guy. I love snacks. You do. I also love
convenient snacks. Well, I've got some news for you, then,
my friends, what nature Box? Oh? Yes, I love nature Box.
You want convenient snacks. We're talking healthy and great tasting snacks.
Like have you ever had the P V and J granola? Oh? Yeah,
that's good stuff. I also love the salted caramel pretzel pops,
which are awesome. They're like basically four different great things
(14:21):
all mixed together, and I have to have men. I'm
addicted to the Serata roasted cashews. Well, the great thing
about all that is there are zero transpats, zero high
fruit toset, corn syrup, and nothing artificial. My friend, that's right.
There's also snacks that are gluten conscious and non GMO
plus chuck. Like we said, it's convenient. You can get
nature Box shipped right to your door by heading over
(14:44):
to nature box dot com. Yeah, and it's free shipping
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F Stay full, stay strong, go to nature box dot
com slash stuff. That's nature box dot com slash stuff. Okay,
(15:08):
we're back, all right. So now I guess we can
talk about some of these great findings, some of the
newest findings in the last what yours it? Well, they
started in two seven seven years old, and it seems
like the first crop of like amazing stuff started in
about two twelve, so after they had categorized things and
got like throwing all the crawfish out on the table,
(15:30):
right in the corn. Yeah, a little corn is good.
Have you ever done that? I've had that before. Yeah,
it's good stuff. It's fun. Go to a big party.
There's a place in um on Beuford Highway called, um
the Crawfish Shack. I've heard of that, but I haven't been.
Did they do it like that? Did they just dump
it on the table and it's all picnic tables? No,
(15:51):
it's in the bowls and stuff like that, but um,
but it's all picnic tables inside and um just huge
rolls of paper towels and it's that place is so good. Yeah,
I guess you can't do that as a restaurant. But
if you go to a true crawfish boil at someone's home,
you have the picnic table covered with the plastic thing
and you just dump it on the table and everyone
(16:12):
stands around like a bunch of animals, right, getting drunk
and eating, like sucking the heads of crawfish. But my
my family used to do something similar to that when
I was little in Toledo. We would eat um my
dad call it garbage pail stew. Are you familiar? Is
it like all the leftovers? No, it's like you use
a trash can to make it. Oh, I never heard
(16:33):
of it over like a flame, and obviously use a
new trash can, like a brand new one. So I
guess when dad got a new trash can, we would
have garbage pails stew. Anyway, the metal trash can it was, yes,
it was more like a the plastic just just trying
to like a one of the old timing ones. What
(16:53):
kind of flame you got in your house? And I
don't remember what it cooked it on? I don't like
in my in my mind's eye, I can't look down.
I can just see you can just see the kind
of the top of it. But anyway, it was like
a Yankee northern Midwestern version of it. So there's like
lots of cabbage in it and and like kill Bossa
and stuff like that, but it was essentially the same
thing and you would eat it on like like newspaper.
(17:17):
I can't wait to get emails from people who are like,
we did that same thing. I've looked around, I've never
seen it since. I'm sure that, Yeah, that sounds like
a thing that or your dad is very unique person,
is the way to put it, all, right, So back
to the project and the findings. Um, one of the
things they've learned is that periodontist this is gum disease.
(17:40):
Some bacteria are elevated if you have periodontists. So that's
gonna give you a little insight to maybe how you
can better take care of your mouth. What kind of
bacteria you need in there, what kind of you don't, Yeah, exactly,
And like for example, Strip, the caucus mutans is responsible
for cavities. Um, so you wanna take care of your
(18:01):
strep to caucus mu cans mue Can's. The thing is
Chuck that reading this maybe wonder like, are we gonna
go the other direction now where it's like we understand
that you can't just use antibiotics to get rid of everything.
But if we identify bacteria that's like, oh, well, that
one gives you cavities, let's get rid of all of
that and find some sort of medicine that just gets
(18:22):
rid of that, it could make things even worse than
a whole other direction. Like one thing that I fact
I figured out from this is that the the microbiome
appears to exist in balance, like stuff that should make
us sick E. Coli um, kinds of strepped staff, that
kind of thing, like it exists on a healthy person's
(18:43):
microbiome and it's just hanging out there. So it doesn't
mean that they're inherently disease causing for us, or that
they're they're inevitably disease causing UM. Apparently if they exist
in harmony with their neighbors. That's the way it's supposed
to be. And we can't just route out just ones
that make a sick and get rid of those because
I think it will have repercussions, But they might. We
(19:05):
might have a future where instead of an antibiotic you take,
you actually take a bacteria that will attack the other bacteria,
like the bad stuff, right, or you can write exactly
like that that as long as we're not intervening and
going after a specific bacteria, we can aid the bacteria
like you say that will fight it naturally, like by
(19:28):
eating some sort of sugary paste, you know, or probiotics.
I mean that's what that is, right, and that I mean,
that's that's an issue that's being um examined in in
more detailed thanks to the microbiome. Like do probiotics work? Uh?
And apparently the jury is still out like injury. They
(19:49):
should work, but it depends on you know, whether these
things are actually colonizing your guts. And also I have
the impression that it's like you don't really know what
you're do wing when you're adding like all these new
people of the neighborhood. Yeah, and because everyone's microbiome is
so different, some one probiotic for one person might be
(20:09):
great and for another person might not do anything or
may make things worse. I don't know. Yeah, which is
another goal of the Human Microbiome project that if we
start to understand, you know, what a colony. Maybe there's
not a normal colony for everybody, but what an individual's
normal colony looks like then you can take blood or
(20:29):
samples and make adjustments based specifically on what you need.
Right there, it could be the end of pharmaceutical drugs conceivably.
Another they're doing a lot of research into um, how
your gut bacteria affects obesity and your weight. Um. They
have found obese mice and transferred micro microbes from their
(20:52):
gut into skinny mice, and the skinny mice gained weight.
And um, there's just type in um gut bacteria and obesity,
and there are a lot of studies going on now
thinking that maybe correcting your gut bacteria could actually help
you help your metabolism, you know, straighten out right, Like
they think the bacteria itself directly informs how the body
(21:16):
uses their stores energy. Yeah. Um. The one that blew
me away was there's a type of um bacteria that
helps that helps break down milk in humans and typically
it's in the gut, but um, as a woman advances
in pregnancy, Uh, some of it moves down to the vagina.
(21:38):
And they at first, the researchers who found this were like,
what's the deal with that? And then they figured it out.
They think when a baby is born um, and it
passes through the vagina. It basically it's becomes covered in
this bacteria, ingests some of it, and that bacteria goes
down and colonizes the baby's guts and prepare is it
(22:00):
almost immediately to start breaking down breast milk. Yeah, evidently
brand new babies are just sponges. And like they're experimenting
with cesarean sections to just swab like after you have
the cesarian section, you bring the baby out, swab it
with with vaginal mucus and basically it just sucks right
(22:21):
into the skin and maybe have the same result or
swab their mouth or something like that. Yeah, um another way,
And I guess that's kind of related to is UM.
With the immune system. Apparently, the microbiome acts as kind
of like a teacher to the early immune system and
says like, hey, these are the good ones, these are
(22:42):
the bad ones. Um, why don't you go ahead and
produce some T killer cells or killer T cells, but
not too many um, and uh, we'll just go ahead
and keep the homeostasis going. And they basically like teach
a young immune system how to operate at an optimal
let hole. And they found that by engineering mice that
(23:03):
are like totally germ free, their immune systems have a
tendency to go crazy, like they'll become inflamed in the
presence of what are say, um, non harmful fungi. Um,
They'll they'll become so inflamed that they'll damage the surrounding
tissue or they'll have like irritable bowel syndrome or Crohn's disease.
(23:26):
They think also is a a flux state of the
microbiome in the gut, so apparently it directly impacts the
immune system as well, which my friend lends a lot
of weight to the hygiene hypothesis. Yeah, that's that's basically
the notion that uh here in the West and even
in developing countries now, children are seeing such a decrease
(23:51):
in infection when they're when their kids that when they
grow up they have an increased number of allergies and
maybe autoimmune issues, and um, you kind of see it
playing out, you know, like it it's a real thing.
Like if you're slathering your child with pure l you're
not doing them many favors, right, So they may have
(24:13):
asthma later on because of that exactly, and they are
becoming they're coming to think that it's because of the
the just a stunted growth of the microbiome. Yeah, and
I think they found now even they think they have
a direct link between your gut bacteria and allergies. So
if you're if you get hay fever, it may be
(24:33):
because of your gut bacteria. And it makes just utter
and complete sense too, Like your body has been exposed
to these things early on, learned that they're not harmful
and no longer produces antibodies as a result of their presence,
because that's all analogy is. It's a a m it's
a case of mistaken identity. Your immune system thinks that
(24:54):
pollen or something is a harmful for an invader and
launches your your immune response. Pretty cool. Uh. Some of
the other interesting things they found so far is that
there wasn't a single microbe that everyone had in the study,
which is pretty interesting. Um, And that microbes are most
(25:15):
similar on the same site of different people. So like
you and I have more similar microbes in our armpit
even there were different people. Right then you You're microbes
in your armpit has to do with your belly button. Yea,
ours are more similar than the ones in different places
on your body. Yeah, that's pretty neat. And different microbes
can do completely different things, like the way you digest
(25:38):
food might use one microbe and I might use another,
or that same microbe might have a completely different function
in you than it doesn't mean, right, So it's so personalized.
It's like, it feels like the beginning of like hyper
personalized medicine. I think it is in the future, I
definitely think is. I think it's also the beginning of
(25:59):
a kind indler, kinder gentler approach to treating disease at all, disease, like,
it's entirely possible, especially if you take a brain based
view of mental illness. It's possible that every bit of
disease can be cured by by understanding the microbiome, even cancer.
Apparently they found from this that some types of cancer
(26:21):
managed to cloak themselves by taking like um resin or
residue from certain types of bacteria and basically sneaking past
your your immune system and going and lodging itself into
cells and hijacking them and creating tumors. But it cloaks
itself by getting buddy buddy with certain kinds of bacteria.
(26:43):
Cancer is a jerk. Yes, cancer is a big time jerk.
You know, we've kind of covered it here and there,
but I could see more specific cancer podcasting our futures,
you know what. So Like, so far we've done to
that specifically got into the microbiome, but we've never done
like a microbiome one. So I think we should come back,
like a year from now and even more stuff is
(27:04):
out and do like the microbiome. Yeah, it seems like
they're they're making breakthroughs at a pretty rapid pace. Yes,
so in a year they might everyone might be skinny. Yeah,
because of the microbiome pill. Have you seen a picture
of like an obese mouse next to like a skinny
or normal sized mouse. It's pretty depressing. Um sad mouse. Okay,
(27:25):
So I will see you here at the end of
next April. Uh, God willing for the microbiome on deal?
All right, if you want to learn more about the
human microbiome, you can type that well those words into
the search part how stuff works dot com? Uh, And
I said how stuff works dot com. So it's time
for the listener mail. Josh, I'm gonna call this response
(27:47):
from a creationist. Okay, we got a few of these,
Hey guys, listen to your podcast on natural selection and
really enjoyed it. I'm a biologist who is a Christian
and creationist. Natural selection is not what we disagree on,
and when I say we, I mean most creationists, but
of course with every group their outliers. We agree with
micro evolution changes that occur within the species, not macro
(28:12):
evolution species developed into a completely different species, which is
what most people tend to associate with evolution. The only
major differences between creationists and evolutionists is that we believe
the Earth is between six and ten thousand years old
UM and again excluding the outliers, and that all organisms
were created in their basic form by our God. For example,
(28:35):
we believe that everyone came from Adam and Eve, who
through methods of natural selection, evolved into the many nationalities
we have today. Same thing with animals. We believe that
a small number of species were created by our God,
and all the forms we have today evolved through natural selection.
So the only main difference that we have with evolutionists
is the ultimate origin of species, the areas of evolution
(28:58):
that we can see clearly occurring and run of our eyes,
we agree with. It's the areas the evolutionists theorized about
that we don't agree with. So while there are differences
between creationism and evolution, they're actually more similarities. And that
is Eric from South Bend, Indiana. Thanks a lot, Eric,
very salient points biologists. Yeah, I love it when like
(29:19):
experts come out of the out of the woodwork, especially
when they're experts with a twist. Yes, And we love
being refuted and refuting and reading refutations, and uh, we'll
always read these things refutation life. That's right. If you
want to refute something we've said, or agree with us
or whatever. If you just want to get in touch
(29:40):
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(30:03):
thousands of other topics, visit how Stuff Works dot com.
M
Welcome to you stuff. You should know front House stuff
where its dot com. Hey you, and welcome to the podcast.
And Josh Clark, I almost just forgot what I was
gonna say your name. Yeah. Uh, there's Charles w. Chok
Pribb piping in, and there's the trio. Yeah, the trifecta
(00:26):
and it's terrible Ikea lamp. Uh do you think, well
we are getting a little heat off of it right now?
It's a nice Did you ever see that Ikea commercial
about the lamp that was thrown out on the street. No,
it was really good. Well what happened to it? Was
it like the monkey at the Ikea? No, it was
like a lamp gets thrown out with the like someone's
just redoing parts of their apartment and the lamp is
(00:49):
kicked to the curve as a computer animated. So it's
it's a human formed not human forms? What am I saying? Anthropogenic?
Anthropomorphized and like looks up at the apartment that he
is just thrown out of it and stuff like that.
Does he go back to Sweden? I don't. I don't
remember how it ends. Just remember the lamp like turns
out human. It was sad. It was like sad. Okay,
(01:10):
I got teared up. Did you go buy one of
those lamps? No, it didn't work. Um, so, I guess
you're feeling pretty good since we're talking about lamps and everything,
and lamps I do. That means it's a good days.
A clear signal checks in a good mood everybody. Uh.
You know. One of the reasons why you're in a
good mood because your guts are functioning properly. Yeah, ish, yeah,
(01:38):
you know me, it's day to day. Yeah, with my stomach. Well,
that's exactly right. Things change very quickly because of your stomach,
and your stomach can't affect your mood. As a matter
of fact, the vast majority of the serotonin, which is
a mood stabilizing neurotransmitter, is produced in your gut. Yeah.
And the way that things like serotonin and other stuff
(02:00):
uh is produced is thanks to our microbiome. Dude, Yeah,
our microbiome. This is the most fascinating thing going on
in medicine science right now. Yeah. I get the impression
reading various articles. When scientists talk about it, they all
seem really pumped up. It's like the breakthrough of the
(02:20):
century and this thing like just started it's two and
like this could remain the breakthrough of the century. Yeah.
And I mean if you think about the timeline up
until the twentieth century, you were like a plant or
an animal, right, And then it was literally like the
nineteen fifties and sixties that they started saying, maybe we
should break things down a little further, and they came
(02:43):
up with the five kingdoms. And I think they're now
even as a six kingdom. Well, there's three domains, now
eight kingdoms, there's eight and three two of the domains
are account for two of the kingdoms as well. Bacteria
and archia and archia used to be thought that they
were the same as bacteria. Yes, then they started looking
(03:04):
into them a little more and they're like, oh, these
guys are made up of different amino acids and they
have different characteristics. And our chia, for example, are the
kind of microbial life that you'll only find around undersea
hot water sulfur vents like volcanos, not not in your
vagina or in your mouth. Well, no, because they're extreme
(03:28):
aphiles and a vagina or a mouth isn't that extreme?
Well it is because our kia lives there, that's right.
So the fact that we figured out that ar chia
are different than bacteria, and not only that they don't
just live in extreme environments, but also on the human body.
That was something we can thank the Human Microbiome Project for. Yeah,
(03:50):
and that wasn't I think they didn't even discover our
key until the nineteen seventies. So this all this stuff
is brand new and exciting. And by the way, the
three domain are bacteria, or chea and eukaryotes for us
or eukaryotes because we have nucleus as nuclei. Yeah, let's
(04:10):
talk about this man we we have before. I'm sure
you remember in the fecal transplant episode, because it definitely
factors into it. You can, um, Yeah, you can cure
claus Stradium difficile, which is something where that it's a
gut microbe. It's very harmful to humans that can colonize
(04:31):
your guts after you take antibiotics, which is basically just
like a slash and burn approach, which again thanks to
the Human Microbiome Project. Um, we're starting to understand we
might want to use antibiotics because what we used to
just think of is almost entirely bad are actually mostly
beneficial and even some of the bad bacteria a k a.
(04:54):
Germs um are actually present in our microbiome and normally
living harmony. It just appears that when the microbiome gets
out of whack, that's when disease happens. Yeah, Like you
may have E. Coli in your body right now. Yeah,
I probably do, but it's not a big deal. If
you're always talk about stasis, keeping things balanced in life
(05:17):
is the key. And uh, it's definitely the key with
your own personal microbiome, which we have learned is very individualized,
which we'll get to with the project. Right, So, if
you take a human body and you scanned all the
genes in it, well, you would find is there are
(05:37):
about a hundred times more microbial genes than human genes
in a genetic scan of a human body. Yeah, are
are Human cells only make up about ten percent of
the cells in the body. And here's another great stat
We actually the healthiest person on the planet as between
(06:00):
two and five pounds of bacteria pounds. Yeah, of your
body weight, about up to five pounds. Yes. What's crazy
is is that that's even considering that microbial cells are
anywhere from a tenth to a hundredth the size of
an average human cell. Yes, you do, you know how many?
(06:20):
How much five pounds would have to quite a few.
As a matter of fact, there's um an estimated hundred
trillion microbes on an average human person, just in on
and a part of such a such a part of
us and our our normal functioning that we're finding very
(06:42):
quickly that they're they're pretty much interchangeable. There, they are
one with us and UM as their host. We are
kind of one with them, like you have fungus on
your skin. Yeah, no big deal. Right. Well, that's another
thing too we should talk about. When people say microbe UM,
it's kind of a catch all word for yeah, any tiny,
(07:03):
typically unicellular life. And that's the case here too. But
it doesn't just mean bacteria. The human microbiome is made
up of lots of bacteria and lots of lots of
different types of bacteria um. For example, the mouth may
have up to five thousand different species of bacteria. Yeah,
and they're not just lazing around in your body like
(07:26):
they are responsible for keeping your body in check or
you know, sometimes responsible for it being out of whack.
But they're all they're all doing something or laying there
waiting to do something. You also have a what's called
a virume. You have viruses in your microbiome, and they
appear to be present to keep the bacteria populations from
(07:51):
getting out of control. Like they're there to infect bacteria
to kill them off. And they it's kind of like, um,
they're the lions to the gazelle of the microbiome. Okay,
you take away the lions. You've got too many gazelles. Yeah,
they all start to starve, they don't function correctly. They
may even eat each other. You don't want to see
a gazelle eat another gazelle. So you have lions there,
(08:14):
and the lions, these apex predators keep the gazelle population
and check and ultimately healthy. Paradoxically, the same thing with
the virum in your microbiome. Yeah, I mean they we
know they aid like gut bacteria aids digestion, and we'll
get the gut bacteria more. I mean, they're discovering just
all kinds of things that affects uh, synthesized vitamins. Um.
(08:36):
When you poop in the toilet and you look at
your poop, which you should do, by the way, like
you know, on a regular basis um, how much is it?
Is it half? From a third to half, so a
third to half of that is microbial biomass. It's not food. No,
it's like dead and living bacteria that you're pooping out
(08:58):
about half half. I saw something that was kind of
mind blowing to um. It's it's really neat and accurate,
especially on a microbial level. To imagine your alimentary system,
your digestive system, as the inside of that is technically
outside of your body. You have a hole, a trail
(09:19):
running through the middle of your body. That's that's technically
the outside. Uh yeah, I guess I see what you mean.
It's just chew on it for a minute, like the
the inside of your digestive system is technically the outside
of your body, Like that's outside of your body. Yeah,
(09:41):
it's confusing, it is. But once once your head wraps
around it, it's like one hand clapping kind of thing
and you're just like, whoa, that is neat. Uh all right,
So that's I guess the briefest of overviews of microbes
and bacteria, which we've talked about ad nauseum on the
show and our Great Suggestion podcast. That was one of
(10:02):
my favorite ones and then we've already talked about the
poop shakes. Uh. So the National Institutes of Health came
up with a plan, got some money together, and said,
let's try and do what the Human Genome Project did.
Let's try and map out the micro the human microbiome,
which is a very tough task because everyone is different. Yeah. Well, yeah,
(10:27):
everyone's microbiome is different. And I just saw today it
was released from the University of Michigan. They've kind of
already determined there is no such thing as a baseline
healthy microbiome. Yeah, and that was one of the goals
of this project that was started in two thousand and seven,
was that um to to establish a baseline micro biome,
(10:49):
Like they didn't know what one looked like like. They
knew that people had tons of bacteria and protozoa and
viruses all over us and in us, but what is
that supposed to look like? And when you figure out
what it's supposed to look like, then you can figure
out what what an unhealthy one looks like and then
possibly how to correct that by adjusting this this microbial
(11:11):
ecosystem back to a baseline. But I'm not surprised that
they found that there isn't a baseline that is two different,
and that doesn't mean that they can't like learn a
lot and help us out a lot. What they're basically
saying is you take a dozen completely healthy people and
their microbimes are gonna be completely different. Still, and there
was UM. There's one huge revolution in UM in the
(11:37):
study of bacterial or microbial life that that made this
project possible. Same with the human genome, but UM much
more for this it's called metagenomics. And prior to the
event and metagenomics, if you wanted to study bacteria, you
had to find a bacteria that could be replicated cloned, yeah,
(12:00):
in the laboratory setting, and UM disaccounted for just a
very very small fraction of the number of microbes out there.
What's more so, not only did you not have a
representative sample, but you also didn't have UM any kind
of anything less than an artificial setting. So even if
(12:22):
you did get these microbes, if you could replicate them
in the lab, UM, they weren't gonna behave the way
they would in their natural setting, like on your body.
So what metagenomics did UM was you can now take
like a representative sample, say like a clump of soil
or a swab of somebody's earful and get all of
(12:44):
the microbe microbes in there, and then basically just do
this rough scan of them, separate all the DNA out
at these enzymes that go and clip coherent fragments of
this DNA out, and then you take it and you
put it into what's all the model organism, and that
model organism starts to replicate as cells, and then each
(13:06):
cell displays a certain characteristic associated with a different microbe.
So all of a sudden you can start studying the
different cells and say, oh, well, this has to do
with this microbe, and this means that this protozoa is present,
and so on and so forth, and now you can
get a truly representative sample of what's in a microbiome.
(13:27):
And without metagenomics like this, none of this would be possible.
But now we're starting to find all sorts of new
uh not just information, but even new species of bacteria
and protozoa. And fun, guy, from the study of this stuff,
which is a great thing. It is a great thing,
and we'll explain why it's a great thing right after
this break. Hey, Chuck, Hey, you know me I'm a
(13:59):
snack guy. I love snacks. You do. I also love
convenient snacks. Well, I've got some news for you, then,
my friends, what nature Box? Oh? Yes, I love nature Box.
You want convenient snacks. We're talking healthy and great tasting snacks.
Like have you ever had the P V and J granola? Oh? Yeah,
that's good stuff. I also love the salted caramel pretzel pops,
which are awesome. They're like basically four different great things
(14:21):
all mixed together, and I have to have men. I'm
addicted to the Serata roasted cashews. Well, the great thing
about all that is there are zero transpats, zero high
fruit toset, corn syrup, and nothing artificial. My friend, that's right.
There's also snacks that are gluten conscious and non GMO
plus chuck. Like we said, it's convenient. You can get
nature Box shipped right to your door by heading over
(14:44):
to nature box dot com. Yeah, and it's free shipping
anywhere in the US. Baby, that's right. So we have
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F Stay full, stay strong, go to nature box dot
com slash stuff. That's nature box dot com slash stuff. Okay,
(15:08):
we're back, all right. So now I guess we can
talk about some of these great findings, some of the
newest findings in the last what yours it? Well, they
started in two seven seven years old, and it seems
like the first crop of like amazing stuff started in
about two twelve, so after they had categorized things and
got like throwing all the crawfish out on the table,
(15:30):
right in the corn. Yeah, a little corn is good.
Have you ever done that? I've had that before. Yeah,
it's good stuff. It's fun. Go to a big party.
There's a place in um on Beuford Highway called, um
the Crawfish Shack. I've heard of that, but I haven't been.
Did they do it like that? Did they just dump
it on the table and it's all picnic tables? No,
(15:51):
it's in the bowls and stuff like that, but um,
but it's all picnic tables inside and um just huge
rolls of paper towels and it's that place is so good. Yeah,
I guess you can't do that as a restaurant. But
if you go to a true crawfish boil at someone's home,
you have the picnic table covered with the plastic thing
and you just dump it on the table and everyone
(16:12):
stands around like a bunch of animals, right, getting drunk
and eating, like sucking the heads of crawfish. But my
my family used to do something similar to that when
I was little in Toledo. We would eat um my
dad call it garbage pail stew. Are you familiar? Is
it like all the leftovers? No, it's like you use
a trash can to make it. Oh, I never heard
(16:33):
of it over like a flame, and obviously use a
new trash can, like a brand new one. So I
guess when dad got a new trash can, we would
have garbage pails stew. Anyway, the metal trash can it was, yes,
it was more like a the plastic just just trying
to like a one of the old timing ones. What
(16:53):
kind of flame you got in your house? And I
don't remember what it cooked it on? I don't like
in my in my mind's eye, I can't look down.
I can just see you can just see the kind
of the top of it. But anyway, it was like
a Yankee northern Midwestern version of it. So there's like
lots of cabbage in it and and like kill Bossa
and stuff like that, but it was essentially the same
thing and you would eat it on like like newspaper.
(17:17):
I can't wait to get emails from people who are like,
we did that same thing. I've looked around, I've never
seen it since. I'm sure that, Yeah, that sounds like
a thing that or your dad is very unique person,
is the way to put it, all, right, So back
to the project and the findings. Um, one of the
things they've learned is that periodontist this is gum disease.
(17:40):
Some bacteria are elevated if you have periodontists. So that's
gonna give you a little insight to maybe how you
can better take care of your mouth. What kind of
bacteria you need in there, what kind of you don't, Yeah, exactly,
And like for example, Strip, the caucus mutans is responsible
for cavities. Um, so you wanna take care of your
(18:01):
strep to caucus mu cans mue Can's. The thing is
Chuck that reading this maybe wonder like, are we gonna
go the other direction now where it's like we understand
that you can't just use antibiotics to get rid of everything.
But if we identify bacteria that's like, oh, well, that
one gives you cavities, let's get rid of all of
that and find some sort of medicine that just gets
(18:22):
rid of that, it could make things even worse than
a whole other direction. Like one thing that I fact
I figured out from this is that the the microbiome
appears to exist in balance, like stuff that should make
us sick E. Coli um, kinds of strepped staff, that
kind of thing, like it exists on a healthy person's
(18:43):
microbiome and it's just hanging out there. So it doesn't
mean that they're inherently disease causing for us, or that
they're they're inevitably disease causing UM. Apparently if they exist
in harmony with their neighbors. That's the way it's supposed
to be. And we can't just route out just ones
that make a sick and get rid of those because
I think it will have repercussions, But they might. We
(19:05):
might have a future where instead of an antibiotic you take,
you actually take a bacteria that will attack the other bacteria,
like the bad stuff, right, or you can write exactly
like that that as long as we're not intervening and
going after a specific bacteria, we can aid the bacteria
like you say that will fight it naturally, like by
(19:28):
eating some sort of sugary paste, you know, or probiotics.
I mean that's what that is, right, and that I mean,
that's that's an issue that's being um examined in in
more detailed thanks to the microbiome. Like do probiotics work? Uh?
And apparently the jury is still out like injury. They
(19:49):
should work, but it depends on you know, whether these
things are actually colonizing your guts. And also I have
the impression that it's like you don't really know what
you're do wing when you're adding like all these new
people of the neighborhood. Yeah, and because everyone's microbiome is
so different, some one probiotic for one person might be
(20:09):
great and for another person might not do anything or
may make things worse. I don't know. Yeah, which is
another goal of the Human Microbiome project that if we
start to understand, you know, what a colony. Maybe there's
not a normal colony for everybody, but what an individual's
normal colony looks like then you can take blood or
(20:29):
samples and make adjustments based specifically on what you need.
Right there, it could be the end of pharmaceutical drugs conceivably.
Another they're doing a lot of research into um, how
your gut bacteria affects obesity and your weight. Um. They
have found obese mice and transferred micro microbes from their
(20:52):
gut into skinny mice, and the skinny mice gained weight.
And um, there's just type in um gut bacteria and obesity,
and there are a lot of studies going on now
thinking that maybe correcting your gut bacteria could actually help
you help your metabolism, you know, straighten out right, Like
they think the bacteria itself directly informs how the body
(21:16):
uses their stores energy. Yeah. Um. The one that blew
me away was there's a type of um bacteria that
helps that helps break down milk in humans and typically
it's in the gut, but um, as a woman advances
in pregnancy, Uh, some of it moves down to the vagina.
(21:38):
And they at first, the researchers who found this were like,
what's the deal with that? And then they figured it out.
They think when a baby is born um, and it
passes through the vagina. It basically it's becomes covered in
this bacteria, ingests some of it, and that bacteria goes
down and colonizes the baby's guts and prepare is it
(22:00):
almost immediately to start breaking down breast milk. Yeah, evidently
brand new babies are just sponges. And like they're experimenting
with cesarean sections to just swab like after you have
the cesarian section, you bring the baby out, swab it
with with vaginal mucus and basically it just sucks right
(22:21):
into the skin and maybe have the same result or
swab their mouth or something like that. Yeah, um another way,
And I guess that's kind of related to is UM.
With the immune system. Apparently, the microbiome acts as kind
of like a teacher to the early immune system and
says like, hey, these are the good ones, these are
(22:42):
the bad ones. Um, why don't you go ahead and
produce some T killer cells or killer T cells, but
not too many um, and uh, we'll just go ahead
and keep the homeostasis going. And they basically like teach
a young immune system how to operate at an optimal
let hole. And they found that by engineering mice that
(23:03):
are like totally germ free, their immune systems have a
tendency to go crazy, like they'll become inflamed in the
presence of what are say, um, non harmful fungi. Um,
They'll they'll become so inflamed that they'll damage the surrounding
tissue or they'll have like irritable bowel syndrome or Crohn's disease.
(23:26):
They think also is a a flux state of the
microbiome in the gut, so apparently it directly impacts the
immune system as well, which my friend lends a lot
of weight to the hygiene hypothesis. Yeah, that's that's basically
the notion that uh here in the West and even
in developing countries now, children are seeing such a decrease
(23:51):
in infection when they're when their kids that when they
grow up they have an increased number of allergies and
maybe autoimmune issues, and um, you kind of see it
playing out, you know, like it it's a real thing.
Like if you're slathering your child with pure l you're
not doing them many favors, right, So they may have
(24:13):
asthma later on because of that exactly, and they are
becoming they're coming to think that it's because of the
the just a stunted growth of the microbiome. Yeah, and
I think they found now even they think they have
a direct link between your gut bacteria and allergies. So
if you're if you get hay fever, it may be
(24:33):
because of your gut bacteria. And it makes just utter
and complete sense too, Like your body has been exposed
to these things early on, learned that they're not harmful
and no longer produces antibodies as a result of their presence,
because that's all analogy is. It's a a m it's
a case of mistaken identity. Your immune system thinks that
(24:54):
pollen or something is a harmful for an invader and
launches your your immune response. Pretty cool. Uh. Some of
the other interesting things they found so far is that
there wasn't a single microbe that everyone had in the study,
which is pretty interesting. Um, And that microbes are most
(25:15):
similar on the same site of different people. So like
you and I have more similar microbes in our armpit
even there were different people. Right then you You're microbes
in your armpit has to do with your belly button. Yea,
ours are more similar than the ones in different places
on your body. Yeah, that's pretty neat. And different microbes
can do completely different things, like the way you digest
(25:38):
food might use one microbe and I might use another,
or that same microbe might have a completely different function
in you than it doesn't mean, right, So it's so personalized.
It's like, it feels like the beginning of like hyper
personalized medicine. I think it is in the future, I
definitely think is. I think it's also the beginning of
(25:59):
a kind indler, kinder gentler approach to treating disease at all, disease, like,
it's entirely possible, especially if you take a brain based
view of mental illness. It's possible that every bit of
disease can be cured by by understanding the microbiome, even cancer.
Apparently they found from this that some types of cancer
(26:21):
managed to cloak themselves by taking like um resin or
residue from certain types of bacteria and basically sneaking past
your your immune system and going and lodging itself into
cells and hijacking them and creating tumors. But it cloaks
itself by getting buddy buddy with certain kinds of bacteria.
(26:43):
Cancer is a jerk. Yes, cancer is a big time jerk.
You know, we've kind of covered it here and there,
but I could see more specific cancer podcasting our futures,
you know what. So Like, so far we've done to
that specifically got into the microbiome, but we've never done
like a microbiome one. So I think we should come back,
like a year from now and even more stuff is
(27:04):
out and do like the microbiome. Yeah, it seems like
they're they're making breakthroughs at a pretty rapid pace. Yes,
so in a year they might everyone might be skinny. Yeah,
because of the microbiome pill. Have you seen a picture
of like an obese mouse next to like a skinny
or normal sized mouse. It's pretty depressing. Um sad mouse. Okay,
(27:25):
So I will see you here at the end of
next April. Uh, God willing for the microbiome on deal?
All right, if you want to learn more about the
human microbiome, you can type that well those words into
the search part how stuff works dot com? Uh, And
I said how stuff works dot com. So it's time
for the listener mail. Josh, I'm gonna call this response
(27:47):
from a creationist. Okay, we got a few of these,
Hey guys, listen to your podcast on natural selection and
really enjoyed it. I'm a biologist who is a Christian
and creationist. Natural selection is not what we disagree on,
and when I say we, I mean most creationists, but
of course with every group their outliers. We agree with
micro evolution changes that occur within the species, not macro
(28:12):
evolution species developed into a completely different species, which is
what most people tend to associate with evolution. The only
major differences between creationists and evolutionists is that we believe
the Earth is between six and ten thousand years old
UM and again excluding the outliers, and that all organisms
were created in their basic form by our God. For example,
(28:35):
we believe that everyone came from Adam and Eve, who
through methods of natural selection, evolved into the many nationalities
we have today. Same thing with animals. We believe that
a small number of species were created by our God,
and all the forms we have today evolved through natural selection.
So the only main difference that we have with evolutionists
is the ultimate origin of species, the areas of evolution
(28:58):
that we can see clearly occurring and run of our eyes,
we agree with. It's the areas the evolutionists theorized about
that we don't agree with. So while there are differences
between creationism and evolution, they're actually more similarities. And that
is Eric from South Bend, Indiana. Thanks a lot, Eric,
very salient points biologists. Yeah, I love it when like
(29:19):
experts come out of the out of the woodwork, especially
when they're experts with a twist. Yes, And we love
being refuted and refuting and reading refutations, and uh, we'll
always read these things refutation life. That's right. If you
want to refute something we've said, or agree with us
or whatever. If you just want to get in touch
(29:40):
about anything, you can tweet to us at s y
s K podcast. You can join us on Facebook dot
com slash Stuff you Should Know, or on Pinterest or
on Instagram. You can send us an email to Stuff
Podcast at Discovery dot com, and you can hang out
at our awesome clubhouse, our home on the web Stuff
you Should Know dot com. For more on this and
(30:03):
thousands of other topics, visit how Stuff Works dot com.
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