Poop, the Animal Within.

As previously discussed, I started growing all these friendly colonies of bacteria and yeast in my house.  I think real fermenters call them cultures, but I think of them more like neighborhood communities.  This makes me giggle because I imagine all their little community lives. 

This guy lives in a jar in my kitchen.

On Kombucha Circle, Cindy Bacteria is spending a lot of time with Tommy Yeast and her parents don’t know how they feel about it.  In Kefir Town, all the little kefir seeds are mad at the bigger kefir seeds because they throw their milk curds all over the neighborhood, which is against HOA regulations.  If you go down Ginger Bug Lane, everyone gets along fine because they get to be called a “ginger bug,” they have a true community identity and that gives them pride, plus they’re going to turn into ginger beer—doesn’t that make everyone happy?

We have many various friend communities going, and they finally got to the point where I could, like a good friend, eat them.  So with great anticipation I had a cup of kefir milk, and put lactofermented pickles in my salad, and sipped on my grape-infused kombucha….and then had a particularly uncomfortable day, gastrointestinally. 

A true to life representation of my gastrointestinal tract,
which was *not* sorry for Party Rocking.

Pro tip, all these new cultures are v happy to be in your guts…but the existing gut-bugs minding their own inside you have some opinions on that.  I looked it up and baaaasically all these sweet, goofy communities happily raising their families and borrowing sugar from the neighbors on the counter (and the shelves…and under the sink upstairs…and on the top of the refrigerator…sorry, “Andy”…) are very war-like cultures when they get inside you.  They are colonizers, sweeping through your guts like the white man coming to...anywhere, leaving death and disease in their wake. 

Unlike the Europeans and their ancestors, these are the good guys.  They are absolutely reigning hell

Not this guy.

down on the existing, entrenched colonies—but in terms of your body chemistry, that’s probably

This guy.
(Look it up, the history is intoxicating.)

 good, and in fact why you eat them in the first place.  The gut-bugs that happen in modern life in the USA, with our processed foods and our antibiotics, are not ideal.  So these fierce little bastards come in with guns blazing and ruin their world—but it’s less like expansionist, greedy globalization, and more like an avenging, righteous revolution.  Still bloody, still deadly--- but they’re on the right side of history.

Or so the internet says.  Let me just tell you, when I started looking

This is not the right choice.

this up, it was easy to find out what was happening to me (it’s called a Die Off and that is metal af).  Turns out, don’t go hard, to start.  Ease in—your body needs time to adjust, but adjust it will, and actually just carpet bombing your existing biological balance, even with good intentions, is not the best way to reach your goals.  So I know what happened, but trying to figure out why, and what all this was about, was a little harder.

All the websites that are like, “Here’s how to ferment!” are also like, “Because fermenting is awesome!”  Presumably this is because people who are interested in fermenting already know why to do it—I am not that person.  I just wanted to do it, and then was like, umyeahalso I guess it’s good for you or whatever.  Full disclosure and with all due respect to my friends who are all into the fad diets of today, I don’t truck with a lot of that mess.  Sure, your ancient ancestors didn’t harvest

wheat, but they also didn’t live past 30.  You have decided to live on only fats, cool, live your best life, but the reason oranges are bright orange is to catch your eye and make you pick them because we have been eating them long enough that we created the biological trend that they are named for.  When I was young, everything “healthy” was fat free but full of sugar.  That was the number one best health wisdom of the time, and a few years later it is anathema.  Also bottles of water are labeled “gluten free” now and it’s dumb.

You can't really read this but it basically relives the
back and forth of the health benefits of eggs, which
have been alternatively a miracle food, or worse than
cigarettes, since the 80s.
Nutritional science doesn't know beans.

Not that there isn’t real nutritional science out there, but what I am saying is, it is often hard to get to, and I feel like not all the people who buy in know why.  Everyone suddenly has a food intolerance, and I know people with REAL food intolerances, and it’s not always the same thing.  I have friends that are like, all organic everything, I will die on this hill because health!  But then you say, well this isn’t remotely organic but it’s local…and they’re like, great I’ll take two!

I also like to support local farms and businesses, that’s not my point.  My point is, there are a lot of social pressures today to eat healthy or “clean” but, again, not always a lot of science defining the what or why.  Plus there’s a whole army of marketers trying to convince you that their product is the thing that food fashion says you should want, and they bank (literally) on the consumer not really even knowing themselves what they want, or why.   Gluten free water, Reader.

Do not trust this man; this man is not a real doctor.

So I have heard that fermented food is good for you, I am familiar with the term probiotic, I have heard stories of people saying fermented foods cured their cancer, and I’ve always put all that in the same mental compartment as, “No I really DID see a ghost!” and “Elvis was in the CIA!” 

But my guts poop-sploded, so I figured I’d look it up.  When I started Googling (Googleing?  Google-ing?  Sigh…), I was ending up on web pages like hippydippylovemama.com and noreallyimadoctor.happypoops.edu and this was not helping me learn more about anything.

Then I got my keywords right, and omg, Reader, this stuff is so effing cool. 

So, news flash, like 7,000% of your immune system lives in your guts.  So THAT is why healthy guts are important.  Our guts, however, are not our own.  Our poop is alive, but the life it is teeming with is not you.  You walk around, every day, thinking you’re a

Seriously we think we're cool but they are just
waiting for us to take them to Mars.

human being, a self-contained entity, your own person, separate from the beasts and the plants of the field, and the whooooole time your internal community of living creatures that outnumber the cells of your body just laugh, and think it’s cute, in much the same way I think it’s cute when the cats act like they’re in charge here.  This community is your biome, and without it you would die.  

Let me be clear how much we rely on out biome for life.  Human mothers produce breast milk.  Biologically speaking, this is an expensive process.  It takes a lot of energy, requires a lot of resources (food) to do, and btw new mothers are already weakened significantly with the whole building-a-baby-and-pushing-it-out process, so they need all the energy and nutrients they can get. 

In that breast milk is an enzyme that babies cannot digest.  It is totally useless to the babies themselves.  But millions of years of evolution has had us make it—even though it is expensive—because bacteria in baby’s gut eats it.  If that bacterial colony is thriving, babies do better—so mothers make it.

How do clean new fresh babies get that bacteria?  WELL.  When mom poops the baby out, the baby gets covered-in-and-a-mouthful-of all the va-goo in the vagina, plus some poop probably (because OF COURSE there is an evolutionary reason you poop during birth), and it immediately sets up shop.  You got bacterial colonies all through you (for funsies, look up what lives in people’s belly buttons, it’s awesome) but the most concentrated and important ones are on your skin and in your mouth—but mostly in your guts.  So vaginal births give little Mini-Bean a healthy dose of all of those, and mother’s milk keeps the party rolling. 

(Side note, C-section babies do fine but they start at a disadvantage that medical science has proven.  C-sections are sometimes the best and only solution for keeping mama and baby alive, so def do that if you need to, or want to!  And maybe then just rub some va-goo on the lil’ princess and everyone lives their lives, right?  But modern doctors are like, nooooooo, va-goo is all gross and stuff, that’s crazy talk, we’re much better at giving birth than your body, meanwhile let me cut this baby out of your stomach, that’s totally safe and convenient and expensive and on the rise in America.  To be clear, my beef is not with C-section-choosing mothers.  It is with a medical system that didn’t figure this crap out already because, meh, American medical science doesn’t care very much about mothers, and that’s a rant for another day.)

That was all one sentence.
I am a very good writer.

That is how much we rely on our biome- we have been symbiotically cohabiting for long enough that the most dangerous thing in our evolution, birth, was made more dangerous to the new mom, which means more dangerous to the new baby and the continuation of the species, because it was biologically worth it to feed a foreign gut bacteria. 

Holy crap.  

Also—ALSO, READER—now they’re studying this (for real science, not Dr. Give Me Your Money, I Am A Hippy Too) and guess what?  Lab mice in ridiculously clean sterile environments where the makeup of their gut biomes can be closely monitored can change their personality based on their biomes.  Skittish, anxious mice get a poop-transfer from chill or adventurous mice…and they become more chill or adventurous.  What kind of witchcraft is that.

I know, I know, I hear you Reader.  “Poop transfer”?  But it’s totally a thing.  See, once your biome is up and running, it’s hard to turn the boat.  (See my above gastrointestinal distress, taken to a much more extreme level.)  You can change your diet or eat more yogurt, but the reality is, all the things

That is what you think it is.

already living inside you—they want to keep living there, they are dug in, and they are a war culture too.  Much of the bacteria and yeast you ingest passes through until some gut-fermenting tipping point.  All the real estate is already spoken for, and there’s a hell of an old-boys club.  So it’s hard for new agents to break through.  Possible, but you gotta commit.  For people (and mice) who seriously need an internal culture shift, one of the best ways to do it is by poop-transfer.  I guess it puts enough ready-to-go bacteria in the works that you quickly go from “dissent” to “out and out revolution.”  It crosses the threshold, creates a leverage point, and also other phrases that make this sound like a business market and not a fecal indoctrination thing.

I...What?

People with serious health situations already know this, it’s not actually a super huge deal (except sourcing the poop can be awkward), but can we go back to THE MICE CHANGE THEIR PERSONALITY AND ANXIETY LEVEL WHEN THEY GET HEALTHIER BIOMES.  That. That right there.  What the ever-loving mystical ridonkulousness is that. 

If ever you felt less like you were at the wheel in your own life, you still get to decide what to feed your buggers.  Having said that, they will, in addition to apparently affecting how happy you are about being alive, give you cravings when the little freeloaders get hungry.  They are basically the ghost in our machine.  The good ones like vegetables, and I always thought the veggies had all this good stuff in them like the B Vitamins, which sure, they do, but also good gut bacteria eat veggies and then they poop out the B Vitamins. 

WHAT KIND OF CRAZY MICROBIOME VOODOO IS THIS?!

Mind.  Blown.

In summary, nature is smarter than us.  Not always; medical science is a blessing; take your pills.  But also—give the body the ingredients it needs, and it will body better than you can body for it.  The actual science that I could find on this is relatively new, so no one had a definitive “def eat this and

To contribute your own poop to science,
go to humanfoodproject.com!
Seriously they could use some more poop.

not that,” or “this is for sure the thing you need alive inside you”.  However, common wisdom seems to be, a more diverse gut-ecology is better than a less diverse one.  You’re aiming for a rainforest, not a lawn. 

Other things, just anecdotally: I was bloated and gaseous when I started eating all my friends too exuberantly, then I slowed down but didn’t stop, and the discomfort quickly went away but I have almost instantly gotten thinner?  Not like I am thinner—not like there is less body there.  But the body is, I guess, deflated?  I mean I wasn’t walking around feeling like I had massive gas inside me just waiting to burst free, but suddenly I have less belly-that-looks-pregnant and just regular jiggly-belly-that-looks-like-I-eat-too-much-and-don’t-exercise-cuz-that’s-true. 

Also I make *perfect* poops now.

Also also, I am less hungry all day.  There are reasons for this that go back to, which bacteria are you feeding and what are they releasing, and what does that mean for your body, but if you want scientific detail, you’re going to have to look it up.  Use keywords like “biome” and not keywords like “healthy fermentation.”

My poops are perfect.