Curious about gut bacteria from nonhuman species
I was just reading about cow rumen for instance and I guess basically a lot of their carbohydrate intake gets consumed by gut bacteria in the rumen, which puts them into a state of constant gluconeogenesis like humans experience during fasting, low carb diets, intense exercise, etc. Has anyone played with modifying their gut bacteria with bacteria from other species or thought much about it? Obviously the gut is kind of like its own little ecosystem so I guess you'd want to model inputs / outputs and stuff I guess ....
Comments
I guess actually I could go at it (weight loss currently) from other angles.. like feeding my existing gut bacteria a bit better. Just found some articles on resistant starch and butyrate and stuff... really interesting.
Love to see what pops up, though. Watching. .3.
A lot of the gut bacteria stuff is either connected to morphological setups (cow stomachs) and or dietary setups. This is one of the reasons that probiotics and fecal transplants both have the same issue of not sticking in certain cases. If you eat a certain diet (let's say soda and burgers) and you use a supplement or suppository to increase or alter gut bacteria, they will eventually go back to what they were, because you are making the environment that harbors a certain type of organism.
Also, I would add that gut bacteria is a really new emerging area and there’s still a lot that we do not know about (and there’re some claims that I have serious doubts about) even just for normal human gut flora, let alone what happens when foreign bacteria gets in. Heck, even a different strain of the same bacteria that is otherwise in normal gut flora can cause problems (think E. coli).
We seriously know too little at this point to be considering putting gut flora from another animal species into our gut.