Pooped
Lately I've been pooped, a term* used in this sense to mean dog-tired or exhausted; much of this is likely because my wife is away for a few weeks visiting family which means that I take over her side of things, primarily the hour-plus it takes to feed her menagerie of wild ducks and geese and feral cats. It's that old adage of never knowing how much the other half does until it's dumped into your lap (my mother said that all the time when my stepfather passed away). Throw in the growing older bit and well, another adage comes up of just not being able to do what I used to...in other words, it boils down to being pooped. But it got me to thinking about that word in general...
It's something that's universal to all animals, even insects...that is, poop. And no matter our views on it --disgusting, necessary, smelly, whatever-- it might be time to look again at it, all of it, at least on the human side. There's an interesting TED Talk from a few years ago by journalist Rose George and in the talk she says: 2.5 billion people worldwide have no adequate toilet. They don't have a bucket or a box. Forty percent of the world with no adequate toilet. And they have to do what this little boy is doing by the side of the Mumbai Airport expressway, which is called open defecation, or poo-pooing in the open...the problem with all that poop lying around is that poop carries passengers. Fifty communicable diseases like to travel in human shit. All those things, the eggs, the cysts, the bacteria, the viruses, all those can travel in one gram of human feces. How? Well, that little boy will not have washed his hands. He's barefoot. He'll run back into his house, and he will contaminate his drinking water and his food and his environment with whatever diseases he may be carrying by fecal particles that are on his fingers and feet. In what I call the flushed-and-plumbed world that most of us in this room are lucky to live in, the most common symptoms associated with those diseases, diarrhea, is now a bit of a joke...This is Marie Saylee, nine months old. You can't see her, because she's buried under that green grass in a little village in Liberia, because she died in three days from diarrhea — the Hershey squirts, the runs, a joke. But she wasn't alone that day, because 4,000 other children died of diarrhea, and they do every day. Diarrhea is the second biggest killer of children worldwide, and you've probably been asked to care about things like HIV/AIDS or T.B. or measles, but diarrhea kills more children than all those three things put together. It's a very potent weapon of mass destruction.
Serious enough. Indeed one of the first responses by rescue workers when severe flooding occurs in a disaster is to try and prevent the spread of cholera or other diseases that can produce uncontrolled diarrhea. And of course you likely already know that as disgusting as it sounds, the job of our and any colon in addition to being the exit point is to squeeze out any remaining nutrients that may still be there for use in the body. But it doesn't end there, for likely you've also read about the billions of beneficial bacteria that also exit, bacteria often used to treat patients suffering from C. difficile, an infection that generally appears in the elderly from hospital stays (but is now appearing more frequently in younger people and even people with no history of taking antibiotics); the treatment (with close to a 94% success rate) is to re-insert a tiny bit of this poop back into a person, generally via a sterile pill format, a process which re-populates the beneficial bacteria inside your gut. Okay, that sound awful but there's more...turns out that while antibiotics can be extremely helpful, they also enter your body with the goal of near-total annihilation, destroying both the good and bad bacteria in your system and often leaving your body so devastated that it can take over a year for your body's defense system to return to normal (I wrote earlier on this in more detail). The diarrhea thing makes it worse as the liquids pouring out of you dehydrate your struggling system as well. But remember that earlier I had mentioned about there being more bacteria in your gut alone than there are stars in the known universe (as in like trillions of bacteria vs. billions of stars)...now that alone is proving fascinating (stay with me here).
A few years ago there appeared a fascinating documentary, The Gut: Our Second Brain. Researchers are discovering that the neurons in our gut are virtually identical to those in our brain and that the two seem to communicate regularly, possibly controlling our behaviors and actions such as obesity and Type II diabetes, perhaps even some of our cardiovascular reactions (one bacteria now being isolated and studied is akkermansia, which when moved into mice has been shown to reduce body fat by 50%). But the gut-brain connection is explained in a bit more detail in the book The Good Gut. An excerpt from Scientific American had this to say: Our brain and gut are connected by an extensive network of neurons and a highway of chemicals and hormones that constantly provide feedback about how hungry we are, whether or not we’re experiencing stress, or if we’ve ingested a disease-causing microbe...The enteric nervous system is so extensive that it can operate as an independent entity without input from our central nervous system, although they are in regular communication...The network of neurons in the gut is as plentiful and complex as the network of neurons in our spinal cord, which may seem overly complex just to keep track of digestion. Why is our gut the only organ in our body that needs its own “brain”? ...The central nervous system is in communication with the gut via the sympathetic and parasympathetic branches of the autonomic nervous system, the involuntary arm of the nervous system that controls heart rate, breathing, and digestion...This circuitry of neurons, hormones, and chemical neurotransmitters not only sends messages to the brain about the status of our gut, it allows for the brain to directly impact the gut environment. The rate at which food is being moved and how much mucus is lining the gut --both of which can be controlled by the central nervous system-- have a direct impact on the environmental conditions the microbiota experiences...Like any ecosystem inhabited by competing species, the environment within the gut dictates which inhabitants thrive. Just as creatures adapted to a moist rain forest would struggle in the desert, microbes relying on the mucus layer will struggle in a gut where mucus is exceedingly sparse and thin. Bulk up the mucus, and the mucus-adapted microbes can stage a comeback. The nervous system, through its ability to affect gut transit time and mucus secretion, can help dictate which microbes inhabit the gut. In this case, even if the decisions are not conscious, it’s mind over microbes...Does the brain-gut axis run in one direction only, with all signals going from brain to gut, or are some signals going the other way?...Recent evidence indicates that not only is our brain “aware” of our gut microbes, but these bacteria can influence our perception of the world and alter our behavior. It is becoming clear that the influence of our microbiota reaches far beyond the gut to affect an aspect of our biology few would have predicted—our mind. For example, the gut microbiota influences the body’s level of the potent neurotransmitter serotonin, which regulates feelings of happiness. Some of the most prescribed drugs in the U.S. for treating anxiety and depression, like Prozac, Zoloft, and Paxil, work by modulating levels of serotonin. And serotonin is likely just one of a numerous biochemical messengers dictating our mood and behavior that the microbiota impacts.
Makes sense, doesn't it...we take a pill (an antibiotic or a tranquilizer or whatever) and we thought that it dissolves and goes right into our bloodstream. But it might be that before any of that happens, our other "brain" influences that decision. The microbiome, as it's called, is only now being studied and what's being discovered is proving even more puzzling. Bacteria that inhabit our microbiome can be both good and bad at the same time (not alternating but at the same time!), both allowing and blocking everything from viruses and disease (and medicine) to cross or not cross over the gut lining. It gets more detailed from there, far more detailed...and in the next post I'll attempt to present just a few of the scientists, books, and articles continuing to open up this new chapter inside our bodies. Call it a gut feeling but I think being pooped might suddenly be defined as a good thing...
*Oddly enough, the origin of the term is vague but thought to be anything but excrement and something more nautical. One of the closest definitions I could find came from the Online Entymology Dictionary: ..."tired," 1931, of unknown origin, perhaps imitative of the sound of heavy breathing from exhaustion .... But poop, poop out were used in 1920s in aviation, of an engine, "to die." Also there is a verb poop, of ships, "to be overwhelmed by a wave from behind," often with catastrophic consequences; hence in figurative nautical use, "to be overcome and defeated" (attested in 1920s) -- It is an easy thing to "run"; the difficulty is to know when to stop. There is always the possibility of being "pooped," which simply means being overtaken by a mountain of water and crushed into the depths out of harm's way for good and all. [Ralph Stock, "The Cruise of the Dream Ship," 1921]
It's something that's universal to all animals, even insects...that is, poop. And no matter our views on it --disgusting, necessary, smelly, whatever-- it might be time to look again at it, all of it, at least on the human side. There's an interesting TED Talk from a few years ago by journalist Rose George and in the talk she says: 2.5 billion people worldwide have no adequate toilet. They don't have a bucket or a box. Forty percent of the world with no adequate toilet. And they have to do what this little boy is doing by the side of the Mumbai Airport expressway, which is called open defecation, or poo-pooing in the open...the problem with all that poop lying around is that poop carries passengers. Fifty communicable diseases like to travel in human shit. All those things, the eggs, the cysts, the bacteria, the viruses, all those can travel in one gram of human feces. How? Well, that little boy will not have washed his hands. He's barefoot. He'll run back into his house, and he will contaminate his drinking water and his food and his environment with whatever diseases he may be carrying by fecal particles that are on his fingers and feet. In what I call the flushed-and-plumbed world that most of us in this room are lucky to live in, the most common symptoms associated with those diseases, diarrhea, is now a bit of a joke...This is Marie Saylee, nine months old. You can't see her, because she's buried under that green grass in a little village in Liberia, because she died in three days from diarrhea — the Hershey squirts, the runs, a joke. But she wasn't alone that day, because 4,000 other children died of diarrhea, and they do every day. Diarrhea is the second biggest killer of children worldwide, and you've probably been asked to care about things like HIV/AIDS or T.B. or measles, but diarrhea kills more children than all those three things put together. It's a very potent weapon of mass destruction.
Serious enough. Indeed one of the first responses by rescue workers when severe flooding occurs in a disaster is to try and prevent the spread of cholera or other diseases that can produce uncontrolled diarrhea. And of course you likely already know that as disgusting as it sounds, the job of our and any colon in addition to being the exit point is to squeeze out any remaining nutrients that may still be there for use in the body. But it doesn't end there, for likely you've also read about the billions of beneficial bacteria that also exit, bacteria often used to treat patients suffering from C. difficile, an infection that generally appears in the elderly from hospital stays (but is now appearing more frequently in younger people and even people with no history of taking antibiotics); the treatment (with close to a 94% success rate) is to re-insert a tiny bit of this poop back into a person, generally via a sterile pill format, a process which re-populates the beneficial bacteria inside your gut. Okay, that sound awful but there's more...turns out that while antibiotics can be extremely helpful, they also enter your body with the goal of near-total annihilation, destroying both the good and bad bacteria in your system and often leaving your body so devastated that it can take over a year for your body's defense system to return to normal (I wrote earlier on this in more detail). The diarrhea thing makes it worse as the liquids pouring out of you dehydrate your struggling system as well. But remember that earlier I had mentioned about there being more bacteria in your gut alone than there are stars in the known universe (as in like trillions of bacteria vs. billions of stars)...now that alone is proving fascinating (stay with me here).
A few years ago there appeared a fascinating documentary, The Gut: Our Second Brain. Researchers are discovering that the neurons in our gut are virtually identical to those in our brain and that the two seem to communicate regularly, possibly controlling our behaviors and actions such as obesity and Type II diabetes, perhaps even some of our cardiovascular reactions (one bacteria now being isolated and studied is akkermansia, which when moved into mice has been shown to reduce body fat by 50%). But the gut-brain connection is explained in a bit more detail in the book The Good Gut. An excerpt from Scientific American had this to say: Our brain and gut are connected by an extensive network of neurons and a highway of chemicals and hormones that constantly provide feedback about how hungry we are, whether or not we’re experiencing stress, or if we’ve ingested a disease-causing microbe...The enteric nervous system is so extensive that it can operate as an independent entity without input from our central nervous system, although they are in regular communication...The network of neurons in the gut is as plentiful and complex as the network of neurons in our spinal cord, which may seem overly complex just to keep track of digestion. Why is our gut the only organ in our body that needs its own “brain”? ...The central nervous system is in communication with the gut via the sympathetic and parasympathetic branches of the autonomic nervous system, the involuntary arm of the nervous system that controls heart rate, breathing, and digestion...This circuitry of neurons, hormones, and chemical neurotransmitters not only sends messages to the brain about the status of our gut, it allows for the brain to directly impact the gut environment. The rate at which food is being moved and how much mucus is lining the gut --both of which can be controlled by the central nervous system-- have a direct impact on the environmental conditions the microbiota experiences...Like any ecosystem inhabited by competing species, the environment within the gut dictates which inhabitants thrive. Just as creatures adapted to a moist rain forest would struggle in the desert, microbes relying on the mucus layer will struggle in a gut where mucus is exceedingly sparse and thin. Bulk up the mucus, and the mucus-adapted microbes can stage a comeback. The nervous system, through its ability to affect gut transit time and mucus secretion, can help dictate which microbes inhabit the gut. In this case, even if the decisions are not conscious, it’s mind over microbes...Does the brain-gut axis run in one direction only, with all signals going from brain to gut, or are some signals going the other way?...Recent evidence indicates that not only is our brain “aware” of our gut microbes, but these bacteria can influence our perception of the world and alter our behavior. It is becoming clear that the influence of our microbiota reaches far beyond the gut to affect an aspect of our biology few would have predicted—our mind. For example, the gut microbiota influences the body’s level of the potent neurotransmitter serotonin, which regulates feelings of happiness. Some of the most prescribed drugs in the U.S. for treating anxiety and depression, like Prozac, Zoloft, and Paxil, work by modulating levels of serotonin. And serotonin is likely just one of a numerous biochemical messengers dictating our mood and behavior that the microbiota impacts.
Makes sense, doesn't it...we take a pill (an antibiotic or a tranquilizer or whatever) and we thought that it dissolves and goes right into our bloodstream. But it might be that before any of that happens, our other "brain" influences that decision. The microbiome, as it's called, is only now being studied and what's being discovered is proving even more puzzling. Bacteria that inhabit our microbiome can be both good and bad at the same time (not alternating but at the same time!), both allowing and blocking everything from viruses and disease (and medicine) to cross or not cross over the gut lining. It gets more detailed from there, far more detailed...and in the next post I'll attempt to present just a few of the scientists, books, and articles continuing to open up this new chapter inside our bodies. Call it a gut feeling but I think being pooped might suddenly be defined as a good thing...
*Oddly enough, the origin of the term is vague but thought to be anything but excrement and something more nautical. One of the closest definitions I could find came from the Online Entymology Dictionary: ..."tired," 1931, of unknown origin, perhaps imitative of the sound of heavy breathing from exhaustion .... But poop, poop out were used in 1920s in aviation, of an engine, "to die." Also there is a verb poop, of ships, "to be overwhelmed by a wave from behind," often with catastrophic consequences; hence in figurative nautical use, "to be overcome and defeated" (attested in 1920s) -- It is an easy thing to "run"; the difficulty is to know when to stop. There is always the possibility of being "pooped," which simply means being overtaken by a mountain of water and crushed into the depths out of harm's way for good and all. [Ralph Stock, "The Cruise of the Dream Ship," 1921]
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