Literally, you can make your beer belly and you don’t even need to drink beer over decades. You can do it just for tonight. You can swallow yeast, the bakers/brewers yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae and eat chips, your beer will be fermented in house, it would be personally artsy-crafted, healthiest, fresh-bio-beer you could ever have in your life.
Well, it was not so easy for Joe (Doe, no real name) for long time until they found out what was going on with his frequent, strange, drunken behavior. His wife was looking for hidden bottles, suspecting him to be a closet alcoholic. Finally, he went to the hospital and his gut meta-genome got sequenced. They found out that Joe suffered from auto-brewery syndrome, his stomach harbored 400% more yeast than normal people’s stomach do.
Generally, the diseases we know as cancer, diabetes, cardio-vascular, autoimmune and mental diseases might represent only the small pictures in our broken health. We suspect that the picture is bigger, more like when the balance of our body falls, our health falls, as well. But why would the “balance” fall? Just because we have a sedentary life style with lots of cheeseburger from fast serving restaurants and chips munching on TV bound sofa? Is that enough? But what if the “balance” of the commensal nature of our body falls.
Normally, we have bacteria, yeast and other microbial cells in our body, even “parasites”. Scientifically, it is proven that the total number of these microbial cells is more than the number of human cells. Well, here I am not going to argue whether we are in fact a multi cellular micro-organism or a complex one-unit human body, but I would say we are certainly a meta-biome, we are certainly a gaia-organism that is governed by our brain. The total mass of micro-organisms make up only about 2% of our body, even if they outnumber our human cells, because microbial cells are 10-20 times smaller than human cells, in general. Microbial cells are less diverse in our body, represent only about a few thousands distinct types, not comparable to the human cellular diversity that carries all the characteristics of human cellular biology.
So, what are these microbial cells doing with us, together? We have a commensal life with them that benefits for all. We feed them and they help us maintain our healthy balance. Sporadically, we do know for long time, if we take antibiotics, we need to eat yogurt, so we will not have stomach ache, I remember this from my childhood, like 50 years ago. If you are in the nutrition-supplement business, you can’t even open your store if you have no probiotic products containing Lactobacillus acidophilus. We know that Candida albicans live in my mouth and to question a two-sided, nasty yeast infection is not about how they got there, but what the problem could be with my immune system, why my un-balanced body let her overgrow.
In a disease related context, we also know from recent advancement of meta-genomic science that our microbes regulate the population and density of intestinal immune cells, and if something goes wrong in this process it could lead to ulcerative colitis, a type of inflammatory bowel disease. Scientific research discovered that microbiota imbalance would lead to other serious diseases, to complex metabolic disorders, to diabetes, to all kind of autoimmune diseases and to Parkinson’s disease. Recent study showed in a mouse exploratory model, that bacterial metabolic products would pass the blood-brain barrier and influence the behavior of mice, in experimental settings.
I love to bake home made pastry and I love to drink beer in microbrewery. I love the smell of the bakers/brewers yeast. I am already planning my next experiment calculating the minimal dose of yeast cells to swallow and feed them in my stomach with the right amount of carbohydrate food, Italian bread, my favorite, to brew three units of the best beer I ever have in my life, in my belly.
If you are interested more in your commensal life, listen to this video clip, but viewer discretion advised, Greg Foot from BritLab has a heavy British accent: why you are more bug than human!
Tibor Gyuris
Personal Genomics Blogger
“Knowledge is always good and certainly always better than ignorance”–Sergey Brin
“Possideo genes ergo sum”—Anonymous Roman Philosopher
Loading ...