This is part 9 of a series. For part 8, click here.
No one probably ever told you this, but your body is an intergalactic space station.
Quite literally, trillions of microscopic “ships” arrive and depart from Space Station You every single day. For every cell with your (human) DNA in your body, there are between four and ten “foreign” cells.
Some of these incoming ships to Space Station You are colonizers who, after they arrive, decide to put down roots and become locals. Other, outgoing “ships” are carrying ex-pats who have decided they’d rather seek greener pastures elsewhere.
Still others are “business travelers” who dock for a short time, conduct a few transactions, and then depart.
And, of course, a tiny, tiny percentage of those “ships” docking at Space Station You are hostile raiders, pirates who have come to plunder and loot the vast riches abundant in such a wealthy ecosystem as your body.
Collectively, these microscopic visitors, travelers, raiders, employees, business partners, and colonists are known as the microbiome, which is a bit of a misnomer since viruses are included (as we learned previously, viruses are neither alive nor microscopic).
Unlike Pasteur and Koch’s sterile vision of a pure, “immune” body being occasionally invaded by hostile outsiders (“pathogens”), the truth is that human bodies (as well as animal and plant bodies) are gigantic space stations teeming with inbound and outbound microscopic traffic.
The word “fiber” (or “fibre”) has a lot of meanings, depending on the context. For example, your muscles are composed of fibers, but so are carpets and some computer cables.
However, for our purposes, we’re going to use the term fiber to describe what is better known as dietary fiber, otherwise known as “the fibers that you eat” as opposed to the fibers that you don’t eat like tree bark and cloth.
A much shorter and better description of dietary fiber is “the stuff the human body cannot digest.”
For instance, if you’ve ever tried nibbling on a stalk of (lawn) grass, you might have noticed that it came out “the other end” looking virtually untouched. Certainly, that’s happened to people in the case of food items like corn (maize), peanuts, or seeds.
The human body breaks down food in three ways:
- Mechanical action
- Chemical action
- Enzymatic action
Mechanical action refers to things like using your teeth to chew (grind/rip/tear) food and various muscles in your stomach and intestines squeezing the food.
Chemical action refers to things like lowering the pH level (highly acidic environments like your stomach) or mixing the food with water.
Enzymatic action is something we’ll discuss later in this article.
Whatever can be processed by your digestive system is considered “food” and whatever cannot be processed is called “shit” – the stuff that literally comes out of your rectum on a regular basis.
The fact that fiber goes in your mouth and comes out the “other end” virtually unscathed unfortunately caused a hell of a lot of scientists to assume that fiber was useless.
Fiber was thought of, quite literally, as a waste product.
It’s worth mentioning here that the nutritional “experts” who were the most hostile towards the value of dietary fiber were working with or being sponsored by industrial food companies.
But it was almost impossible for any doctor to deny that people who eat foods very low in dietary fiber are often in ill health. Conversely, people who are eating a lot of dietary fiber are often in quite good health indeed.
If fiber was so useless, then why is it so important for human health?
The explanation for the discrepancy that these numbnuts came up with is that dietary fiber supposedly works much like a “scouring pad” or “scrub brush,” physically cleaning out your bowels as it moves along through your digestive tract.
Therefore, if you aren’t eating enough fiber, your body won’t have enough “scouring pads” keeping your innards unclogged, so after a while, your systems will get “backed up” and cause chronic diseases like arthritis and heart problems.
I hate to say it, but that is simply ludicrous.
Whatever role dietary fiber plays in physically “scrubbing” your digestive system via ablative action is minor at best and, frankly, largely irrelevant.
Look, just because a thing isn’t digestible to a person doesn’t mean it isn’t digestible to another species of life.
In fact, dietary fiber is Snack Time for your microbiome!
Here is what I’m talking about:
New knowledge about the gut microbiota and its interaction with the host’s metabolic regulation has emerged during the last few decades.
Several factors may affect the composition of the gut microbiota, including dietary fiber. Dietary fiber is not hydrolyzed by human digestive enzymes, but it is acted upon by gut microbes, and metabolites like short-chain fatty acids are produced.
The short-chain fatty acids may be absorbed into the circulation and affect metabolic regulation in the host or be a substrate for other microbes.
That one summary packs a lot of powerful punch.
- Microbes in the gut eat fiber.
- Microbes then shit out short-chain fatty acids.
- Other microbes eat the microbes that ate the fiber.
- Other even bigger microbes then eat the microbes that ate the microbes that ate the fiber.
- Repeat several more times.
Oh, what are short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs), you say?
They’re the special molecules used to communicate a message from your “gut” to your brain.
Yep, your brain.
What messages is your gut sending to your brain? Well, no one is quite sure:
The pathways through which SCFAs might influence psychological functioning, including affective and cognitive processes and their neural basis, have not been fully elucidated.
Hopefully, future research will provide more answers.
But what’s clear at this point is that people who eat fiber are feeding their gut microbes which send messages to their brain while people who don’t eat fiber aren’t getting the messages.
A lack of those messages has been tied to depression, mood regulation, obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, digestive disorders, inflammations, and respiratory diseases, including pneumonia.
Eat Shit and Die… Healthy
Once you remember that your body is an intergalactic space station, it’ll be easy to understand why the consumption of human feces plays an important role in improving human health.
To begin with, as we’ve already learned, a lack of contact with feces is what directly led to polio. Between the natural version of the disease and the vaccine-derived version, millions of people have been killed, maimed, or crippled because of that colossal mistake.
When the “load” of pulped, unused fiber comes out your “other end,” there are also trillions of microscopic “space ships” onboard. And many of those are long-time locals from your body’s microbiome.
If your body’s microbiome is healthy (and/or contains a beneficial mix of microorganisms), then scooping up those “travelers” who just departed your space station by gravity assist allows you to transplant them to another body.
If the procedure works, the new arrivals will take root and start to get married and have kids, and pretty soon, that second body’s microbiome will be populated by healthy locals, too.
And, thusly, the second person’s illnesses and medical problems are cured.
I’ll let our medical overlords explain it:
Fecal transplantation (or bacteriotherapy) is the transfer of stool from a healthy donor into the gastrointestinal tract for the purpose of treating recurrent C. difficile colitis.
When antibiotics kill off too many “good” bacteria in the digestive tract, fecal transplants can help replenish the bacterial balance.
By the way, in all cases, the recommended way to “introduce” a healthy person’s feces into your system is by squirting it up your ass.
During the colonoscopy the colonoscope is advanced through the entire colon. As the colonoscope is withdrawn, the donor stool is delivered through the colonoscopy into your colon.
If I ever start up a rock band, I’m going to name it Donor Stool 🎸🎸🎸
Smooth as a Goose
By the way, you don’t need to look up any websites to find how much dietary fiber is in your food.
If you have to chew it (and it isn’t fried), it has fiber.
Biologically speaking, we grew up eating a hell of a lot of high-fiber food, and we resented every minute of it.
In some parts of the world, monkeys eat such high-fiber food that they invented a technique called wadging (PDF).
It’s when you “wad up” a piece of food and stick it between your cheek and your jaw. You then press your cheek from the outside to squeeze out the juice.
Try “wadging” with an orange slice, some time. It’s fun for kids of all ages!
And just like humans, once monkeys get a taste of low-fiber food, they never look back. Monkeys will take low-fiber (human) junk food over a banana or mango every time.
What’s interesting about fast food restaurants is that they all specialize in low-fiber foods. With the exception of salads, everything at McDonald’s (and all the rest) barely requires any chewing at all.
Ray Kroc started out as a milkshake man and ended up creating an empire of low-chew food.
Low-fiber, low-nutrition, and low-good-bacteria (i.e. highly processed) food kills and sickens, by far, more people in “developed” countries than any bacteria or virus. Just ask the World Health Organization.
Hey, did you forget about enzymatic action? I almost did.
Enzymes aren’t so much a thing as they are a class of things. To be more specific, they are proteins which “unzip” all of the processes of life.
Enzymes are like special keys or apps which unlock certain cellular reactions (or serve as the spark plug to get them going) that power all the components of life, including food digestion.
And one of the biggest suppliers of food-digesting enzymes is bacteria.
Yep, good old bacteria, otherwise known as Pasteur’s Angry Ghost.
Simply put, without bacteria and their enzymes, it would be impossible for you to digest your food.
The vast majority of the “gut microbes” processing that apple you just ate are, in fact, bacteria. Those gut microbes are also the ones who are on the lookout for any dietary fiber that they can “eat” and then “excrete” as short-chain fatty acids molecules to send vital messages to the brain.
The predominance of modern scientific research shows that an “imbalance” (or, to put it more bluntly, a genocide) of healthy “gut microbes” is what is responsible for a host of digestive system disorders including Crohn’s disease and IBS.
And it’s precisely in these cases when fecal transplants have proven so useful.
Bacteria do all kinds of wonderful things to keep us healthy, including unlocking access to the energy in our food, neutralizing poisons, and producing two kinds of vitamins (B12 and K).
You really should be grateful for the trillions of bacterial workers on Space Station You who do so much to keep everything running shipshape.
Life Is a Contact Sport
Unlike what Koch and Pasteur blindly believed, the more bacteria you come into contact with, the overall healthier you are going to be. In other words, a bit of mud is good for you.
Many modern homes are built to be “sterile” and yet that overabundance of hygiene is detrimental to your health.
Sanitizing everything was killing people in places like the United States long before any pandemic came along:
In the Western world, humans spend 90% of their time indoors. The average American spends even more than that—93%—inside buildings or cars.
For years scientists have sounded the alarm that our disconnect from the outdoors is linked to a host of chronic health problems, including allergies, asthma, depression, irritable bowel syndrome, and obesity.
More recently, experts in various fields have begun studying why buildings, even those designed to be as germ-free as possible, are vectors for disease, not the least Covid-19.
Experts at the nonprofit Alfred P. Sloan Foundation began contemplating what role buildings might play in mitigating bioterrorism threats [after 2001].
Realizing we knew almost nothing about which microbes exist indoors, the foundation poured tens of millions of dollars into research. Soon scientists uncovered rich ecologies of fast-evolving indoor microbe populations.
Crucially, most had little overlap with outdoor populations, including salutary species that humans co-evolved with over millions of years.
Simply put, healthy bacteria are mostly found outdoors. Unhealthy bacteria are mostly found indoors.
A handful of dirt is healthier than a squirt of disinfectant.
As far as I am concerned, every tinpot dictator who prevented people from going outside to get some fresh air and sunshine (and bacteria) should be treated for crimes against humanity when this stupid war is over.
Yet Another Folly
Sadly, knowing that the Germ Theory of Disease is utterly useless, it was only too predictable that deluded scientists would discover this far too late:
Gut bacteria tied to disease severity, immune response; high mental health toll seen in ICUs
The microscopic organisms living in our intestines may influence the severity of COVID-19 and the body’s immune response to it, and could account for lingering symptoms, researchers reported on Monday in the journal Gut.
They found that the gut microorganisms in COVID-19 patients were very different from those in uninfected individuals. “COVID patients lack certain good bacteria known to regulate our immune system,” said Dr. Siew Ng of The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
The presence of an abnormal assortment of gut bacteria, or “dysbiosis,” persists after the virus is gone and could play a role in the long-lasting symptoms that plague some patients, she said.
Yes, that’s right. People with unhealthy microbiomes are far more susceptible to disease.
Here’s a completely different study also from 2021:
Poor gut health connected to severe COVID-19, new review shows
…Based on his analysis, Kim proposed that gut dysfunction… may exacerbate the severity of infection by enabling the virus to access the surface of the digestive tract and internal organs.
These organs are vulnerable to infection because they have widespread ACE2–a protein target of SARS-CoV-2–on the surface.
“There seems to be a clear connection between the altered gut microbiome and severe COVID-19,” Kim said.
The correlation between an unhealthy microbiome and severe disease seems pretty well established.
But, as far as I can tell, the only countries where the government was actively promoting eating healthy and getting plenty of sunshine and fresh air in order to fight the pandemic this past year were: Belarus, Madagascar, Indonesia, Nicaragua, Tanzania, and Japan.
What a tragedy.
To be continued…