How to Take Care of Your Gut Health
This week we’re talking about faecal transplants, probiotics, intestinal flora and more. Do bacteria in your gastrointestinal tract affect your mood? How does your microbiome affect your overall health? We visit the laboratory of computational biologist Dr. Jose Clemente, where he and his team are studying the effectiveness of fecal transplants in patients with irritable bowel disease.
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A few questions to Dr. Clemente
What is the microbiome?
The microbiome is the collection of bacteria that we have in our bodies. When people think of bacteria, most of the time they think of pathogens, that is, things that are bad for you. The microbiome is not that. The microbiome is bacteria that do something for us. For example, many gut bacteria are responsible for the digestion of nutrients. … They extract energy from nutrients. They break down fiber and produce certain vitamins that our bodies cannot produce. So, the microbiome is the collection of bacterial organisms that are really important to our well-being.
How many different types of bacteria are there in the microbiome?
I would say that in a person here in the US, you can expect to find anywhere from a hundred to a thousand different bacteria, depending on how you define the bacterial species. Right. We all have, for example, a bacterium that you probably know about: E. coli. Right. We all have E. coli, but your E. coli is different from my E. coli. So these organisms are changing very quickly. They very quickly acquire mutations. And although we have the same species, it is not exactly the same. So my E.coli can do very well certain things that yours doesn’t, or vice versa. Therefore, I always tell people that it is difficult to give the exact number, because it is difficult to count.
What is the difference between the microbiomes of healthy people and the microbiomes of people with inflammatory bowel disease?
In patients with IBD, the microbiome tends to be much less diverse. And that goes back to the idea of an impoverished ecosystem: we have fewer species, and since we have fewer species, it’s a more fragile environment … So I think one of the things that we constantly find is that we are missing species that are capable of producing certain compounds that have anti-inflammatory properties.
How will a faecal transplant work for someone with IBD?
The idea is that we’re going to replace the patient’s germs with germs from someone else from a healthy donor. It’s conceptually similar to organ transplants … So fecal transplants are basically about you screening a group of donors to meet certain criteria – they can’t have any infectious diseases, and they can’t have antibiotics for many … months. You are transferring germs from one person to another person, [so] you want to make sure that you are not passing on anything that could harm the patient. And then the procedure is relatively simple – you get feces from a donor. You mix them, then filter this mixture and transplant this mixture to the patient using a colonoscopy.
Would you like to know more about faecal transplants, for example, how effective they are and what other diseases and problems can they be used for in the future? Wondering if you should be taking probiotics? Listen to the episode to find out more.