It has been 101 years since a Russian biologist noted that many Bulgarian peasants lived a long time. He put it down to the bacteria in their yogurt, which prevented "putrefaction" of the intestines.
Elie Metchnikoff was no kook. He succeeded Louis Pasteur himself as head of the Pasteur Institute. Yet the modern world didn't want to learn its medicine via heartwarming tales of backward peasants. It wanted to go high-tech: X-rays, DDT, antibiotics, statins. For most of a century, Metchnikoff's "good" bacteria sat unnoticed.
Today that is changing.
The U.S. National Institutes of Health is pumping $115 million over five years into the Human Microbiome Project -- an attempt to identify the microbes that live full-time in the human body, largely in the intestinal tract. Canada is contributing $10 million to its own Canadian Microbiome Initiative.
Surgeons, meanwhile, are experimenting with transplanting entire sections of intestine, to build a balance of healthy bacteria in patients who lack them. And if all this seems remote from everyday living, turn on your TV. You can't miss the wave of advertising for probiotic pills and especially probiotic yogurts. Yogurt brands such as Activia and Bio-Best all claim to do something good for your health. They are all intended to promote the healthy mix of bacteria in your gut. But Health Canada restricts making health claims about food -- hence the vague ads.
Your gut, scientists say, is a whole ecosystem by itself, a world in which trillions of bacteria live, as complex as any ecosystem in a lake or forest. When the various bacteria-hunting projects are done, "we'll know much more about the potential of these organisms to change human health," said Gregor Reid, who teaches microbiology and immunology at the University of Western Ontario.
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