A Story of microbes & Mammals !

 Microbes are destiny makers along with our genes.

Right or wrong?

Right.

Gut bacteria flora is our soul mate. The gut flora affects our health, it decides to whom we shall make friends, lovers and partners. It decides our status of sexual life. It decides our sociability in the community.

Sexual reproduction is superior to asexual reproduction, as it is constantly shuffling our genomes helps us stay ahead of the many parasites and pathogens.

Sex guarantees the genetic diversity necessary to persevere in a never-ending war, meaning that you can thank  microbes and parasites for the opportunity to
 fall in love at all.

These microbes change the  chemical structure of  our secretions and excretions.

Kissing,aroma of the sweat.breast milk,vaginal secretions,anal passage and birth passage are avenues for transmitting  dallops of microbes to their contacts.

people who live together do end up with similar microbiomes.

This Valentine’s Day, as you bask in the beauty of your beloved, don’t just thank his or her genes and your good fortune; thank microbes!

Its amazing to know, that  these microbial communities, most of which live in the gut, shape our health in myriad ways, affecting our vulnerability to allergic diseases like hay fever, how much weight we put on, our susceptibility to infection and maybe even our moods.They can also, it seems, make us sexy.

When given to females, the probiotic (friendly microbes ) also prompted deeper changes. Levels of a protein called interleukin 10, which helps to prevent inflammatory disease and ensure successful pregnancy, went up, as did an important hormone called oxytocin.

Oxytocin, the  love hormone, helps mammals bond with one another. Our bodies may release it when we kiss (and mean it), when women breast-feed, even when people hang out with good friends.

The proof is, when mothers(both animals and human) that didn’t imbibe the probiotics were less caring and tended to neglect their children/pups. But mothers that had high oxytocin thanks to the probiotic were nurturing and reared their pups /children more successfully.

Research suggests,that the microbes we carry, the same ones that make us attractive to potential mates, also directly influence our reproductive success. So when mammals choose mates based on the glow of health, they’re choosing not just an attractive set of genes, but also perhaps a microbial community that might facilitate reproduction.

Yes, its win-win situation for mammals and microbes. By making their hosts sexy, and by increasing hormones that bring mammals together, microbes help to ensure their own continued existence — the creation of another host. “Everyone wins in this  game of evolution.

We know that the immune system has two arms: the adaptive immune system, which learns and remembers; and the innate immune system, which operates like a sensory organ, recognizing ancient patterns in the microbial world. 

Stimulation of the innate immune system is critical to preventing asthma,allergy and other autoimmune diseases.

How to stimulate?

With friendly microbes.

Where do we get those microbes? 
Every where. but what we need is symbiotic bacteria. we can get by birth,when we pass along the birth canal. we can get through breast milk. we can get from the fecal excreta, salivary secretions

The findings also reiterate the theme that genes aren’t destiny. Disease emerges from the dance between genes and environment.

These days, one in 12 kids has asthma. More are allergic.

Children who grew up on small farms were between one-half and one-third less likely to have hay fever and asthma, compared with non-farming children living in the same rural areas.

European scientists identified livestock, particularly dairy cows, fermented feed and raw milk consumption as protective in what they eventually called the “farm effect.” Many scientists argued that the abundant microbes of the cowshed stimulated children’s immune systems in a way that prevented allergic disease.

The asthma epidemic may stem, at least in part, from the decline of what Graham Rook, an immunologist at University College London, years ago called our “old friends” — the organisms our immune systems expect to be present in the environment. The newly sneezing upper classes in the 19th century may have been the first to find themselves without these old friends. Now most of the developed world has lost them. The task at hand is to figure out how to get them back.

 in fact, that the mammalian innovations of birthing live young and feeding them milk secreted from what was, millions of years ago, a sweat gland (the proto breast) helped us gain tighter control over the microbes we pass from one generation to the next — to our benefit. And because oxytocin, the “love” hormone in mammals, underlies so much of this behavior, and because microbes affect oxytocin levels, scientists likes to say that “microbes invented mammals.”

So love, desire, the cheesy rom-coms, the sappy ballads, the Shakespearean sonnets — all of them may depend on that teeming ecosystem of microbes within.

Thanks to Moises Velasquez-Manoff , of The NewYork Times.