insomniaaa said...
How would you go about achieving that?
Just recently an immunocompromised patient underwent FMT treatment and unexpectedly died. It was all over the news.
Would you recommend eating sourkrout and ingesting lots of probiotics instead?
Thanks for sharing your knowledge.
I'm OK at telling people what is wrong, but I don't treat anyone but myself so I'm not the right person to ask this question. With that said, the main factor for determining bacterial assortment of the GI tract is pH. The main determinant for GI tract pH is what we eat. Therefore, what we eat is the main determining factor for bacterial assortment of the GI tract. As always, there are major exceptions to this and that is for people with bacterial infections of the GI tract. The inflammation reduces pH and bacterial/protozoal toxins or chemicals can alter pH.
From what I have seen, we never have one thing wrong with us, it is always more than one thing. In the GI tract, it is more than one bacteria that is out of ratio or more than one nutrient that we are lacking. Our environment around us (house we live in, office where we work, etc) plays a big role in our health. Even how we eat plays a role. I'll use myself as an example. If I eat a couple meals a day of raw, leafy green vegetables, but in bulk, it makes more of a difference than eating 5 smaller meals of raw, leafy green vegetables. If the same amount of food is ingested, I will benefit more from the twice a day feedings. That is the opposite from what one would expect. If I put an acidic salad dressing on those two big meals, I will benefit less from them. It's all about
pH and surface area exposure of the GI tract.
Some people with CBS mutations don't handle sauerkraut very well. Probiotics can be helpful but if the GI pH isn't correct, the probiotics won't be useful. An example that often occurs in Lyme patients is the reduction of Lactobacillus strains. They are called LAB or Lactic Acid Bacteria because they produce lactic acid that kills unwanted bacteria. When Lactobacillus decreases, the body can increase other strains of LAB like Enterococcus or Streptococcus. In higher numbers, these can be pathogenic in nature but this helps keep the pH of the colon in the desired pH range. If other LAB don't increase their numbers, then the pH gets raised and more pathogenic bacteria can grow. Having all these pathogens in the GI tract takes away from our immune responses ability to handle other pathogens. If we are fighting a major war in our GI tract, our immune system sometimes can't see the skirmish that is happening in the blood or our joints. Those bacteria may get a pass.
High ammonia levels is one way the body keeps Enterococcus and other LABs growth in check. It may harm us and make us feel bad, but it is the lesser of two evils.