Impressive as it sounds, you have more microbes in your intestines than people living in our planet. There’s an estimate 100 billion bacteria living and reproducing inside, and you don’t even notice. According to the revisited measures of the human digestive tract, it has the surface area of 30 to 40 square meters, which can be compared to the surface of an apartment. This area is in constant movement and dynamic changes, and our digestive bacteria make up an important part.
There’s almost no place in the earth without bacteria. Our skin, the food we eat, the water we drink, and even the mouse you’re using to scroll down has bacteria on it. The only way we can rid of bacterial organisms would be to sterilize everything we touch, which is something surgeons need to do in the operating room. But even so, what about your skin? What about your gut? They have plenty of healthy bacteria, and if they fail to colonize those areas, harmful microorganisms would easily cause severe health problems. The problem arises when we try to get rid of pathogenic bacteria and sweep our healthy microbiota in the process.
Most of us know about microbes and have the tendency to avoid them, which is a healthy approach that saved thousands of lives since hygiene and sanitation made their way into society. Nowadays, preventing infections have become so important that some people even develop a pathological fear of being contaminated with germs. But we can’t really generalize by saying that all microbes are bad guys, some of them might be actually beneficial for our health.
The concept of probiotics has become very popular nowadays. There are many probiotic foods and supplements in the market, and they all start from t...
The world of probiotics is continually evolving as novel research makes new applications available to the public. However, other concepts have been...
Impressive as it sounds, you have more microbes in your intestines than people living in our planet. There’s an estimate 100 billion bacteria living and reproducing inside, and you don’t even notice. According to the revisited measures of the human digestive tract, it has the surface area of 30 to 40 square meters, which can be compared to the surface of an apartment. This area is in constant movement and dynamic changes, and our digestive bacteria make up an important part.
There’s almost no place in the earth without bacteria. Our skin, the food we eat, the water we drink, and even the mouse you’re using to scroll down has bacteria on it. The only way we can rid of bacterial organisms would be to sterilize everything we touch, which is something surgeons need to do in the operating room. But even so, what about your skin? What about your gut? They have plenty of healthy bacteria, and if they fail to colonize those areas, harmful microorganisms would easily cause severe health problems. The problem arises when we try to get rid of pathogenic bacteria and sweep our healthy microbiota in the process.
Most of us know about microbes and have the tendency to avoid them, which is a healthy approach that saved thousands of lives since hygiene and sanitation made their way into society. Nowadays, preventing infections have become so important that some people even develop a pathological fear of being contaminated with germs. But we can’t really generalize by saying that all microbes are bad guys, some of them might be actually beneficial for our health.
