Why humans need to brush their teeth

[Ygggdrasil]

What treatments work the best in most cases?. Yogurt - the kind with live cultures is often very preventive, and curative as well.

I'm always skeptical about claims regarding probiotics—while it is certainly a hot topic for research, there is also a lot of bad science promulgated by the unregulated dietary supplement industry. From the NIH:

There’s preliminary evidence that some probiotics are helpful in preventing diarrhea caused by infections and antibiotics and in improving symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome, but more needs to be learned. We still don’t know which probiotics are helpful and which are not. We also don’t know how much of the probiotic people would have to take or who would most likely benefit from taking probiotics. Even for the conditions that have been studied the most, researchers are still working toward finding the answers to these questions.

https://nccih.nih.gov/health/probiotics/introduction.htm

That's a very far cry from the claim that yogurt is the best treatment for preventing and curing diarrhea.

 

[jim mcnamara]

@Ygggdrasil - you are 100% correct - if it seems that implied that to be true, then I am sorry. I was trying to convey that restoring gut flora may be important to getting completely over diarrheic episodes. This is from two GI docs I play tennis with. They often treat patients with chronic diarrhea and part of their post treatment regimen is to suggest yogurt-like things for the diet. This is clinical procedure, which is as we both know not the same thing as hard science. They base this on the well-known fact that long antibiotic regimes often result in colonic problems in patients.

Nutritionists take: http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/73/6/1124S.full - note that it is not a definite statement.

You are aware of one function (of several) of the appendix: restoration of gut flora after severe diarrhea.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23322636 - gut microbial reservoir.

And your well-taken comment on all of the hoo-ha and huckstering around the subject does tend to lend less credence to it.

 

[BillTre]

Probiotics has been used in aquaculture for a while and has more than one definition and presumed functional mechanism.
1) fighting: probiotic organisms produce toxins or in some other way directly antagonize "bad" bacteria.
2) niche exclusion: if the "good" bacteria are already living in the house (occupying all the sites in a particular micro-environment) than it is much more difficult for the new, incoming "bad" bacteria to move in a establish themselves there.
3) r vs. K selection: (r is an exponent: fast exponential growth, K is a constant: linear growth) fast growing opportunistic vs. slower growing bacteria highly evolved to extract its living from a smaller, more refined part of the environment. The r type bacteria can move in fast and take advantage of a disrupted environment (say after antibiotics, with reduced competition from the depleted K bacteria) and make a relatively easy living off of the easy to extract resources. This works until things get more crowded and the greater extraction efficiency of the K selected bacteria can change the balance back toward a more diverse population.