05.06.07
Probiotics
Check out this article title “Hacking your Body’s Bacteria for Better Health” talking about how modern human sanitary customs, e.g. anti-bacterial soap, mouth wash, bathroom cleaners, is causing a wide-range of health concerns. Doesn’t make sense? Well anti-bacterial cleaners kill all kinds of bacterial— both the good and the bad. So in an effort to kill the bad ones, we destroy the good ones in our body that live symbiotically, providing us protection and assisting our body.
But some scientists say we’re overdoing it. All this killing may actually cause diseases like eczema, irritable bowel syndrome and even diabetes. The answer, they say, is counterintuitive: Feed patients bacteria.
“Probiotics (pills containing bacteria) have resulted in complete elimination of eczema in 80 percent of the people we’ve treated,” says Dr. Joseph E. Pizzorno Jr., a practicing physician and former member of the White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Policy. Pizzorno says he’s used probiotics to treat irritable bowel disease, acne and even premenstrual syndrome. “It’s unusual for me to see a patient with a chronic disease that doesn’t respond to probiotics.”I especially like this quote:
To more precisely hack the gut bacteria, Blaser calls for a Gut Genome Project, modeled after the Human Genome Project. It’s a daunting task: The human genome, mapped to great fanfare but still dimly understood, contains a tenth of the genes believed to be in our gut bacteria. But though difficult, such research could prove vital.