I’ve been discussing how the microbe, Lactobacillus reuteri, is ubiquitous in mammals and in people unexposed to antibiotics and different microbiome-disruptive elements resembling meals components, glyphosate, different prescribed drugs, and so on.
If we had been to look at the feces of squirrels, raccoons, or chickens, all of them have L reuteri. If we studied the feces of indigenous human populations in distant jungles of New Guinea or the Brazilian rainforest, in addition they all have L reuteri. A current fascinating examine of historical microbial DNA in southeastern Spain has recognized what’s believed to be fecal materials from Neanderthals who populated the area 45,000 to 60,000 years in the past—they usually had L reuteri. (Anthropologists have proof that Homo sapiens and this completely different species, Homo neanderthalensis, co-existed for tens of hundreds of years earlier than they turned extinct.)
Even Dr. Gerhard Reuter, who found this microbial species in human breast milk in 1962, had no drawback discovering it at first. Over the following 40 years of his microbiology profession in Germany, he had growing issue in recovering this microbe. And, certainly, subsequent analyses have demonstrated that this species has nearly disappeared from the trendy human microbiome.
The widespread lack of L reuteri ought to come as no shock, given its susceptibility to frequent antibiotics resembling ampicillin, amoxicillin, and others. Sarcastically, regardless of its susceptibility to antibiotics, it’s itself a producer of potent bacteriocins, pure peptide antibiotics efficient towards stool species resembling E coli, Klebsiella, and Campylobacter. L reuteri is such an efficient antimicrobial towards gastrointestinal pathogens that my microbiologist associates inform me that they sometimes clear their fermentation vats with this species. However not solely is L reuteri a producer of a minimum of 4 sorts of bacteriocins, it is usually distinctive in that it colonizes the higher gastrointestinal tract, exactly the place the battleground for SIBO happens. Might the widespread lack of L reuteri from fashionable human microbiomes be one of many causes that small intestinal bacterial overgrowth,SIBO, has turn out to be epidemic, now afflicting a minimum of 100 million People by my estimation? I feel it’s—restoring L reuteri might due to this fact be a part of the answer and the rationale why I embody this species in my recipe for “SIBO Yogurt” that, thus far, has eradicated SIBO, as detected by AIRE H2 breath testing, in 90% of people that have tried it. (See my Tremendous Intestine ebook for the SIBO Yogurt recipe when you’d like to provide this a attempt earlier than resorting to antibiotics to eradicate SIBO.)
Animals have it, indigenous human populations have it, even Neanderthals had it, and it is best to have it, too.
Photograph courtesy Smithsonian Journal and John Gurache/Chip Clark through Wikicommons below Public Area
