Submitted by MistWeaver80 t3_10infh2 in science
I knew seeing some of my family made me feel sick to my stomach
For some even online interaction is enough
I mean if we are to believe in the theory of epigenetics- this would make sense. CDC explaining epigenetics for those who do not know
They did say "if we are to believe" though, as though it's a hypothesis. Theory colloquially can mean hypothesis.
Epigenetics is a field of study, not a theory.
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What do you think theory means? Theory is the highest form of a scientific explanation. I think you’re confusing it with hypothesis.
For example, see theory of gravity or germ theory.
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I would imagine it improves diversity and overall health depending on exposure type, considering it is known that exposure to different environments early in life increases diversity and promotes immune systems in children. That's why some countries keep children outside. Kinda only makes sense. However, I doubt it would be as concrete as the title. People are always doing something in their environment. What they are doing alters a lot, like the butterfly effect.
I would imagine your biome is shaped by your family because your family affects your early exposures to life and even later in your life. Sharing the same food, areas, people, etc. Good chance you and your friends have the same environmental exposures and share similar things as family, and, obviously, your neighbors would have part of the same environmental exposure as you on the daily. Same with the people living in your house. You and your SO would share a similar biome because yall typically do a lot together and share a lot on the daily. Honestly, the title comes off as sensational when it really seems like this could just be chalked up to sharing the same environment and environmental factors like food, drugs, activities, people, etc.
Fascinating
Like if you go to parties, the likelihood is more alcohol and junk
Which might change depending on city vs small town because of the type of parties and food
Just very interesting
This is unrelated to the food at parties. It's the social interaction itself (person-to person transmission) that would induce this microbiome diversity.
food is a vector of microbiome transmission. if food isn't itself covered in microbiome friendly microbes (as all things are always covered in microbes if not in sanitary conditions), then it causes shifts in your microbiome. food changes what's allowed to grow inside of your gut as it can kill off or help various microbes thrive.
Food is more associated with microbiome composition, and relative shifts in that composition (like you said).
As for food-to-gut transmission, food has been found to be mostly a non-factor in introducing new strains to our microbiome. Mostly, this is because the microorganisms that make up our microbiome cannot survive for long outside the body.
That said, food-to-gut transmission may play a bigger role than currently theorized. As of now though, it's person-to-person strain transmission that looks to be mostly responsible for microbiome diversity.
Food is less of a vector of transmission, cause we cook it which kills the bacteria.
The nutrients provided by the food can accelerate the growth of bacteria, so foods high in fiber provide a substrate for bacteria to grow on, get the right kind of fiber and you can get the beneficial bacteria to grow faster and out pace the non beneficial bacteria.
Unless of course you’re eating all your food raw only certain foods which aren’t cooked like lettuce, would contain surface bacteria at very low concentrations.
Making out?!?!? And more?!?!? Wink wink
Yeah I am really curious about that to if anyone has got any idea about it then let us know I would like to know.
Because these are the disease who kill a lot of people around the world every year.
My guess is that it does… but I think it also depends on the social interaction to receive positive or negative effects.
I have terrible microbiome health and I'm abnormally isolated. So diversity might be a good thing in this case?
Could the reason for this be that shared household usually means shared economy, and shared diet? When I'm visiting my parents I eat like them. When I'm eating out with friends we tend to find a compromise.
That's been the previous theory. We tend to want to blame people for their health issues.
This is a new take that says perhaps the habits arise from the bacteria. We know bacteria are in a daily battle, putting out chemicals to kill each other. Those chemicals influence the human brain.
We are a colony animal.
I've seen nothing that indicates humans are slaves under their bacteria. Rather, the bacteria seem to influence our behaviour. But, like peer pressure, we can decide to go against their influence.
I don't think we should blame people for their health issues, but I also think we should be careful to absolve them from any and all responsibility. In the end, we're the captains of our ships.
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The commenter you replied to said bacteria "influences" the brain, and provided a source to that effect. I don't know where you got the idea that anybody - but you - said anything about completely controlling the brain.
The commenter implied otherwise by introducing “blame”. If my bacteria pressure me and I listen to them as opposed to exert my sentient willpower, then I am still to blame. Suggesting otherwise means I no longer have control, which is what the responder derived. I think maybe there was just a completely understandable miscommunication between these two and nobody is hurling insults. Gut microbiome absolutely influences our cravings, which is why stool transplants from healthy individuals can sometimes work to change the eating habits of someone obese.
It’s all super interesting!
>The commenter implied otherwise by introducing “blame”. If my bacteria pressure me and I listen to them as opposed to exert my sentient willpower, then I am still to blame. Suggesting otherwise means I no longer have control, which is what the responder derived.
Yes, that's how I saw it. I also see now that I misunderstood what the other person was trying to communicate.
Dude, I gave you one link because you said you had never seen anything on the topic. There are thousands. Go do some research if you're interested in the topic.
I'm not trying to confirm a bias with all this. I just like the science. Continue on with blaming people for their weight or bad health or whatever floats your boat.
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No one here ever said humans are slaves to bacteria. When did anyone say that? You're knocking down a strawman you set up yourself. All they said is that bacteria influences the brain.
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> we decide what we consume
As far as we know now... ;) Scientific determinations are ever changing as more data comes to light.
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bacteria aren't battling though?? most microbes produce signaling molecules dependent on their environment and may shift their chemical output dependant on other microbes present. but it's not all out war all the time. it's just a bunch of little organisms excreting chemicals because substrates were available. we do contain colonies though
Bacteria produce antibiotics as a defense mechanism against neighboring microbes to secure their patch, so it’s a kind of all out chemical war for supremacy because they evolve so quickly.
That would apply to neighbors too. If you live in a predominately rich white area, with lots of greenery, and open space, your around wildly different things than if you live in a multi family high rise in the middle of the city, with zero green space.
Indeed! That can happen even if your neighbors are not white, believe it or not.
Please show me these highly affluent but predominately non-white neighborhoods across America.
Red lining is part of our history, most nice neighborhoods have consistently stayed veering white & non-white neighborhoods were targeted for less than desirable stuff to go in (like things we know cause environmental pollution), it's not racist to point that out, it's acknowledging our history of systemic racism & the lasting impact of it.
Sugarland Texas, minority majority https://datausa.io/profile/geo/sugar-land-tx
Edit: also Missouri City, minority majority https://datausa.io/profile/geo/missouri-city-tx
Ah, the exceptions that prove the rule.
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Forgot about environmental flora. Absolutely!
Why are you eating environmental flora?
The fauna is just moves too fast.
This research specifically investigated person-to-person bacterial strain transmission. Diet is considered more of a factor in the relative composition of our microbiome, not the uniqueness of the bacterial strains that it's composed of. Very few strains in our microbiome can survive for long outside the human body.
Apparently, they tried to correct for food-to-gut transmission by disregarding strains that had any genome-based similarity to what's been found in commercially available food. How effective this correction was is TBD because there's so much unknown regarding microbiome transmission.
As of now, it seems person-to-person strain transmission is distance-based within shared environments. Still, food-to-gut strain transmission could be a factor. Lots more to discover.
Oh, that's fascinating!
I’m thinking water supply plays a large role in this.
If we admit that there's a proximity effect of unhealthy food sources, then how might we blame something else for our poor diet and lifestyle choices!?
Simply: just because one factor has some effect on our behavior doesn’t mean it’s solely to blame for our behavior.
Babies need that poop. Children born cesarean section have more Asthma as do those in very clean households. Further a bad microbiome makes you less responsive to cancer chemotherapy. This area needs more aggressive research and funding to bring real products and treatments to the market.
Agreed, and also I think the increased research will help us to understand what lies outside the sphere of gut microbiome influence.
I've seen so many studies about how the gut affects almost every aspect of life, and at this point I'm skeptical that these are all practically significant findings and not just statistically significant correlations.
Attention and ADHD. Willingness and motivation to exercise. Autism. The list goes on.
I guess we'll see if personality really is dictated to such a large degree by the invisible bugs in our stomachs, but like I said, for now I remain skeptical - and I'll wait to see what research continues to be confirmed by further study.
They give people with autism fecal transplants ingested orally to help with their behavioural and GI symptoms. You are what you eat man, I don’t think you can really deny the power of the micro biome.
I'm so sick of microbes running my life.
Babies need what poop?
Women sometimes poop a bit when giving birth. Even those that don’t have residual fecal (gut) bacteria on and around their crotch.
A theory is that small amounts of the moms gut bacteria transfer to the baby during natural birth. This seeds their system with moms gut biome.
Cesarean births are sterile and don’t come into contact with the moms crotch and thus are getting their gut bacteria from elsewhere.
Edit: as the pedants below have stated, the OPs focus on poop is mostly for comic effect. There’s a lot of bacteria in and around the vagina that gets transferred to the baby during vaginal birth. Don’t go smearing poop on your newborn.
I believe this is related to the baby not coming into contact with the vaginal microbiome. It's not related to poop.
Edit: I laughed at OPs comment. Yours was simply unfunny, irrelevant misinformation. Everyone is a pedant when you're a moron.
You believe wrong.
>It appears that any contact between the unborn fetus and the mothers’ vaginal microbiome (for example, through rupture of membranes in labor) results in early microbial seeding and potential long-term health benefits for the newborn. In a study of 18 maternal/newborn dyads, the microbiome of mothers and babies in three groups were compared: newborns born vaginally, newborns born via cesarean with standard post-op treatment, and newborns born via cesarean who were exposed to maternal vaginal fluids immediately following birth Dominguez-Bello et al., 2016. Within two minutes of birth, newborns in the last group had their mouth, face, and body swabbed with a gauze pad that had been incubated for an hour in their mothers’ vagina. These gut, oral, and skin microbiome of these newborns were more similar to vaginally-born newborns than to other newborns who experienced the standard cesarean birth. This similarity persisted through one month of life, when the study ended. These findings are consistent with population-based studies showing that children born via elective cesarean birth (no labor) are at higher risk for health problems like asthma compared to children who had some exposure to their mother’s vaginal microbiome during labor, even if labor ended in cesarean Kristensen & Henriksen, 2016.
Every baby that isn’t born via c-section goes through the vaginal canal, not every birthing mother poops or has a baby that comes into contact with her poop.
There is constant transfer of bacteria from gut to vagina. These systems are completely linked.
The person I was responding to brought up poop as a joke. Poop indirectly plays a role in all vaginal births.
““Every generation of mothers hands over its microbiome to the next, as the baby is coated with beneficial germs while being squeezed through the birth canal – but this doesn’t happen for babies born through C-section,” said co-author Martin Blaser, director of the Center for Advanced Biotechnology and Medicine at Rutgers.” Link. It’s not a poop/poop residue adjacent crotch that provides the bacteria, it’s the vaginal bacteria. There’s a reason they tell women to wipe from front to back.
Are you claiming that there is no gut bacteria in the vagina?
No, I’m not claiming that. There is gut bacteria in poop. There is gut bacteria in the vagina. That does not mean they are interchangeable. The exposure received in the vaginal canal is what’s beneficial for the baby.
I amended my post warning folks not to smear poop on kids. Hope that satisfies.
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Don’t smear poop on your babies but if you know you’re having a C-section and you want to, you can ask if they do the thing where they transfer your germs to them specifically for this reason.
In Germany, that's actually standard practice. :)
That’s great to hear! Love it when we use the scientific knowledge we do have to the best of our abilities.
Have they tried smearing poop on the babies though?
Thanks for this explanation! I don’t have children (yet) and was kind of confused. Makes a lot of sense!
As others have noted it’s a more complex system than just “poop” but this explains the joke.
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This person specifically asked for an explanation.
Go be toxic somewhere else.
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Something wrong with this. First of all women doesn’t usually poop a bit when giving birth. This is not as common as described. That can happen in different amounts, but in modern days different procedures and medication are used to prevent it from happening as most of the births take place under some form of medical care. More often than ever the exterior parts are sterilised several times during birth. Significant part of microbiology should have been passed to the child from vaginal microbiome.
I still have olfactory nightmares about the poop that came out of my wife during child birth. Every time some would drizzle out the nurse would put a rag on top of it until the stack got too high then start over.
Birthing suite staff truly are in a league of their own. I have a lot of respect for those midwives, OBGYNs and nurses.
It’s called humor.
Humor is supposed to be funny.
Most childbirths expose baby to moms fecal bacteria.
A baby in my family was a c-section baby and the doctor swabbed his face with whatever was on mom's genitals in order to inoculate him with whatever helpful bacteria were there. So, it's a thing that is done. As for allergies and stuff, it's coming to be fairly well known that exposure to house pets at an early age reduces the chances of developing allergies to animals and some other stuff.
Yup, when you birth cows, they live more often if you let them birth out in the field versus clean warm hayed barn. We need the guck we have, we’ve had it for a long ass time.
It's really important to keep this in mind, as during the pandemic social isolation (that was helpful for those 2years) might have shifted some peoples view on how to socially interact.
It's not normal to live a sterile life for anything alive.
Great so our not very clean house full of cats is actually helping my child recover from being born by c-section! I'll tell my wife.
What can I do now to improve my own microbiome in the meantime?
I’ve wondered about this since both my bio parents are morbidly obese but I was adopted at 13 by tall slender Norwegians. Didn’t help with the height but I’ve always suspected it helped with weight.
Bonus is they taught you good eating habits.
Not particularly.
Might be that weight / obesity isn't that much about genetics, but dietary habits?
They definitely ate junk food so not necessarily in this instance.
My roommate was raised in a household of what I would call stocky individuals. I was raised in a household of, well, beanpoles.
Lo and behold, a few years later of me cooking and prepping every meal and roomie looks like he grew up around my family, not his.
Definitely eating habits, how much you eat, and the quality of what you eat….at least in my very limited experience.
Obesity is not a disease. It's a lifestyle choice.
It’s not a choice if you don’t know it’s a choice
I’m not saying it’s a disease but don’t be fooled that people always have “a choice”. You had the choice, celebrate that and share your knowledge and recognize your privilege and bring ppl with you
but don’t punch down
>You had the choice, celebrate that and share your knowledge
Yes, I had the choice to not inform myself about healthy eating habits and nutrition, but I choose to educate myself about proper nutrition as an adult. Internet is great tool for things like this.
I also had the choice to eat way more than my body needs, I had the choice to eat fast food, sodas because it is cheaper and more readily available, instead I choose to eat moderately and as nutritiously as I can afford.
I also had the choice never to workout, but I still choose to occasionally exercise during the week. I have been making this choice pretty much my entire adult life. I've never been to a gym btw, it's too expensive for me. I've always worked out at home/ in uni dorm room with very basic equipment like fitness bands and a couple of weights and YT videos.
Overall, I have the choice to live an unhealthy, sedentary lifestyle, but I very consciously choose not to live that way.
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>and recognize your privilege and bring ppl with you
That's the thing I don't have any privilege. I'm not some rich white person shitting on poor people, I'm not even American.
You have curiosity, literacy, internet and intelligence. They are also privileges. And the fact you’re not white and not American, is also another privilege. Chances are you’re better educated than most people in America. Privilege isn’t just financial, class or a preferred skin color. And you recognize your own consciousness; that’s a great privilege. You’re very privileged. Millions have no idea. Have pity on them for not have any
don’t punch down.
Many obese people are sugar addicts and have no idea that they might be addicts; sugar is super normalized here unlike in other parts of the world.
And addiction? if you don’t know… is a disease.
>You have curiosity, literacy, internet and intelligence. They are also privileges.
These are not privileges! Please stop dismissing human traits as making a lifestyle choices and motivation or continuous personal development as privileges. It's called being a responsible adult.
Not only it sounds like a defeatist excuse, but it also dismisses the fact that many people all over the world stay in moderate weight range just by being aware of their food intake and moving regularly. These are lifestyle choices.
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>And the fact you’re not white and not American, is also another privilege.
A number of POC/ non-white folks will disagree here.
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>Chances are you’re better educated than most people in America.
Literacy rates of the US/ North America are higher than where I grew up.
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>Privilege isn’t just financial, class or a preferred skin color.
It absolutely is. It's so naive to believe it is not.
When you attain a higher plain of consciousness, you will understand that some humans, even though they look like adults to you, are indeed irresponsible children in the body, as if in the costume, of an adult. They aren’t. Sadly, globally, we have lots of them
If you wanna punch down at them, go ahead. It’s a lose-lose tho
> some humans, even though they look like adults to you, are indeed irresponsible children in the body, as if in the costume, of an adult. They aren’t. Sadly, globally, we have lots of them
You say don’t punch down, but this attitude of yours comes through clearly when you deal with people, and being patronising is, as you demonstrate very well, a self-deceiving form of ‘punching down’.
You haven’t achieved a higher plane of consciousness to other people. You’re expressing a patronising attitude to keeping people you feel are lower than you safely in their place, to be looked after so that you can feel more adult than them. Which is very convenient for their addictions.
Americans with the idea that no one with other approaches could be as civilised and intelligent as their approach to public health allows is pretty laughable. As your circular, self-congratulatory logic demonstrates.
Obesity is most certainly a disease and is recognized as so by the American Medical Association. No reason not to call it one it, fits the definition. It's not much of a choice tho, it's rooted in your genetics, wealth, and upbringing. You could just choose to exercise, just as a smoker could choose to stop, but it's not that easy to say no to your body is it.
My wife and I both did microbiome sequencing with uBiome before they were shut down. We couldn’t compare wether ours had grown more similar over time, but it was really interesting to see predominant strains, associated demographics, and possible health outcomes.
I wonder will this ultimately lead to more profiling? If some bacteria are leading indicators for cancer or obesity, would knowing who has the bacteria lead to social consequences?
I hope it leads to better treatment for these conditions. We could simply collect healthy bacteria and give it to unhealthy people. While it wouldn't be a cure all, it could still be a life changer for people who have unhealthy gut biomes.
That's called a stool transplant and it has already been done. Lots of paperwork though and very hard to access, given that the active ingredient is, well, poop.
I know people are already trying DIY fecal transplants
I believe that's called rimming
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Yeah. With more understanding of how it works I’d hope that we could come up with something easier and better than the current process though. Like how different modern insulin is from the very first treatments involving it.
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Those couples that look like each other after years. Well, this maybe why.
I wonder if eating ass speeds along the process
No time like the present to test that theory out.
How much of other people' poo do you have on your skin right.this.second?
That’s between me and my poo dealer.
So what's the best way to improve our gut microbiome?
Healthy and balanced diet. Reduce alcohol and drug intake. Don’t spend a fortune on “pro-“ and “pre-biotic” snake oil
Fiber is what I heard. Have salads and stuff like that.
Probiotic foods and supplements
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So does this mean that living with, or spending time with, people who have obesity, diabetes or cancer would put you at higher risk of those things yourself? Would there be any way to mitigate that risk?
Probably to the same risk that there is benefit from the supporting article. Some influence, but probably not a lot. It would be interesting looking at specific disease clusters that do exist and checking the genetic makeup that might make certain people more susceptible. Maybe cancers with strong genetic predisposition could have significant relevance to the environmental biome. But this wouldn’t mean the cancer is contagious.
I don’t think that implies transmission, it implies food access and contamination sites.
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It is transmission. most of these bugs have no habitat outside of the mammalian gut.
And that's why you never do ass to mouth
Or why you do
But we already know that, for instance, oral biomes are built around social interaction. Some oral cultures are much more cariogenic, and the more secondhand oral bacteria you're exposed to, the greater the odds that you'll have a tooth-damaging oral biome, yourself.
If your parents had a lot of cavities while you were growing up, odds are you already contracted pernicious species, but the point is that we know that some kinds of microbiome dysfunction diseases are transmissible. Acne is another example.
Don't get me wrong. Keep working on this.
Shouldn't the oral biome be the easiest one to replace? I'd imagine regular rinsing with something antibacterial + regular introduction of the desired biome should do the trick. This of course assumes that it's not the conditions (aka diet etc.) that are mainly responsible for the biome. But if that was the case, the paper in OP also wouldn't make much sense
Could taking a probiotic effect this as well? If it was made incorrectly could it have negative effects?
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I think it’s hilarious to think that the most effective modern therapy will be fecal transplants
I wonder how much this will take from the pie slice of genetics.
i doubt it's transmissible but more likely that other than family you will socialize with people with like-minded dietary habits. the family factor is a mixture of genetics and a mixture of stubbornness where some people will only eat the food their parents made and will refuse to eat almost anything outside of their ethnic food style
So French kissing someone with a good clean diet is less cancer inducing than someone who eats ribs and drinks half a 6 pack?
Makes sense.
So if one of us gets h pylori we all get it?
Also since we kind of associate healthy people with a healthy gut does that mean the act of having healthy friends helps that healthy gut growth?
Should we all start licking each others mouths like wolves?
This is really interesting if this is true then I think this is going to help a lot of people out.
Because these are deadly diseases and a lot of people lose their lies because of these kind of diseases.
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I slept with a hot guy twice and now I smell like him
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This is a pretty old theory, but it makes sense. I'm surprised they are just finding this out. I think it was in 1995 that my teacher said that germs (what we used to call microbes) can go from one person to another.
Thank you! Cancer is indirectly transmitted. I've been saying this forever!
Maybe the “genetic” ones…. A little. I’m sure there are tons of studies on transmission of many cancers and a link would be picked up if it were there.
Takes the provers “birds of a feather flock together” to a whole new level
Been saying it for years.
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Pull the clothes out and pile them somewhere. Someone else’s rudeness shouldn’t stop you from getting what you need.
I don't think it's right to biome everyone but yourself
Poor gut health, caused by feeding the unhealthy microbes and starving the good ones via a crap diet is how sickness ‘spreads.’
Time to lock everyone down again.
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Lopsided_Roll_7120 t1_j5fe6mk wrote
II am really curious if social interaction improves microbiome diversity and overall health (and viceversa).