The Hindu Newspaper recently reproduced a science-news item from the New York Times Service, which stated that Western Scientists in their Research Laboratories, have discovered that MICROBES affect Human behavior . Follow these links (1) http://www.thehindu.com/…/bacteria-our-p…/article6335974.ece (2)http://www.thehindu.com/…/you-are-what-y…/article6335336.ece (3) http://www.thehindu.com/…/the-human-body…/article6410997.ece.
Now this valuable knowledge credited to WESTERN SCIENCE, were known already to ancient Indians. Kindly watch the video, undated BUT PRE-DATED to these news reports. In this discourse (part) in Malayalam, Swami Nirmalananda Giri Maharaj, talks about how seen & unseen organisms affect human brain & behavior.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tcVzhlsnqg&feature=youtu.be
The language spoken in the above video is MALAYALAM.
http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-in-school/bacteria-our-puppet-masters/article6335974.ece
(1) BACTERIA our puppet masters
In the past few years we’ve come to appreciate how microbes in our body help us break down food and fight infection, but they may be doing more…
Your body is home to about 100 trillion bacteria and
other microbes, collectively known as your microbiome. Naturalists first
became aware of our invisible
lodgers
in the 1600s, but it wasn’t until the past few years that we’ve become really familiar with them.
We’ve
come to appreciate how beneficial our microbes are, breaking down our
food, fighting off infections and nurturing our immune system. It’s a
lovely, invisible garden we should be tending for our own well-being.
But
now, a team of scientists has raised a creepier possibility. Perhaps
our menagerie of germs is also influencing our behaviour in order to
advance its own evolutionary success giving us cravings for certain
foods, for example.
The idea that a simple organism
could control a complex animal may sound like science fiction. In fact,
there are many well-documented examples of parasites controlling their
hosts.
Some species of fungi, for example,
infiltrate
the brains of ants and
coax
them to climb plants and clamp onto the underside of leaves. The fungi
then sprout out of the ants and send spores showering onto uninfected
ants below.
How parasites control their hosts remains
mysterious. But it looks as if they release molecules that can directly
or indirectly influence their hosts’ brain.
Our
microbiome has the biochemical potential to do the same thing. In our
guts, bacteria make some of the same chemicals that our neurons use to
communicate with one another, such as dopamine and serotonin.
The microbes can deliver these neurological molecules to the dense web of nerve endings that line the gastrointestinal tract.
Some experiments suggest that bacteria also can influence the way their hosts eat.
Germ-free
mice develop more receptors for sweet flavours in their intestines, for
example. They also prefer to drink sweeter fluids than normal mice do.
Scientists have also found that bacteria can alter levels of hormones that govern appetite in mice.
Different species of microbes thrive on different kinds of food. If they can
prompt
us to eat more of the food they depend on, they can multiply.
“Microbial
manipulations might fill in some of the puzzling holes in our
understanding of food cravings,” said Carlo C. Maley, an evolutionary
biologist and co-author of the new study.
“Perhaps,” he suggests, “the certain kinds of bacteria that thrive on chocolate are coaxing us to feed them.”
Research
suggests that a healthy microbiome helps mammals develop socially.
Germ-free mice, for example, tend to avoid contact with other mice.
That social bonding, good for the mammals, may also be good for the bacteria.
“When
mammals are in social groups, they’re more likely to pass on microbes
from one to the other,” said John F. Cryan, a neuroscientist not
involved in the new study.
“I think it’s a very interesting and
compelling
idea,” said Rob Knight, a microbiologist, who was also not involved in the new study.
“If microbes do in fact manipulate us, we might be able to manipulate them for our own benefit for example, by eating
yogurt
laced with bacteria that would make us crave healthy foods.”
But he warned that research on the microbiomes effects on behaviour was still in its early stages.
— New York Times News Service
Microbial manipulations might fill in some of the puzzling holes in our understanding of food cravings
http://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/health/diet-and-nutrition/you-are-what-you-eat-are-you/article6335336.ece
August 21, 2014
Updated: August 21, 2014 01:54 IST
(2) “You are what you eat” — are you?
The Hindu
Children raised on
sorghum have different
gut microbes. Photo: T. Vijaya Kumar
About 70 years ago when the biologist J.B.S. Haldane was asked which
would be God’s favourite life form, he said “beetles,” since there are
far more beetles in the world than people. Were he alive today, Haldane
would likely change his mind and answer that it would be microbes. Just
the number of microbes — bacteria, virus, archae, and other single-cell
organisms in human guts (intestine) alone is 100 trillion, tenfold more
than the total number of cells in the entire human body. And as a
scientist wag remarked, “I was born with my genome, but when I depart,
it will be with 100 other genomes.”
Where do we pick up all theses bugs? The baby in the womb is bug-free
but exiting through the birth canal, the baby picks up a complex set of
microbial populations. Babies born through caesarean section have
different microbial composition then those through vaginal delivery.
These two are of maternal inheritance, and they largely collect in the
intestines of the baby — hence the term gut microbiome.
What do these bugs do? Help, harm or happily coexist — all of these. I
remember when our first child Katyayani was born, she fell very sick
within a day, dehydrating through loose motions and weakening by hours.
The brilliant paediatrician, Dr. Chikarmane, checked the mother Shakti
and found that she carried remnants of the pathogen E. histolytica
from an earlier infection, which was passed on to Katya. He then
cleared Katya of infection using antibiotics, and fed her another set of
microbes, Lactobacillus (which help in digesting milk, but which
too were lost in the treatment) and restored her health, the ability to
digest milk and gain strength. Over time, the newborn acquires microbes
in the gut (and elsewhere) through environmental and other sources as
well. The composition evolves continuously, but the numbers are
maintained. In effect then the human gut is an ecosystem, with microbial
genes outnumbering human genes by 100 to 1.
Given this ecosystem, there is a steady give and take between the host
and the guests in the stomach. As we eat, so our microbiome and they
produce metabolites and waste molecules that affect our metabolism as
well. You are not what you eat, you are what your gut bugs eat and
generate as products!
Immigrants manipulate the host?
This interaction between the host and the guest goes to such an extent
that the guest can “manipulate” the diet of the host. A recent paper
with the provocative title: “Is eating behaviour manipulated by the
gastrointestinal microbiota? Evolutionary pressure and potential
mechanism” has been published in the journal Bio essays (36: DOI 10.1002/ bies. 2014.0071)
by a multi-centre group led by Dr Carlo Maley of UCSF, Califonia. They
show how our bodies are composed of a diversity of organisms competing
for nutritional resources.
Some of them (e.g., prevotella) grow best on carbohydrates and
when they do so, they release some chemicals that induce the human host
to crave for starchy food. Others such as bacteroidetes grow well
with certain fats and in turn induce the host to go for fatty food. How
do they do it? The signal molecules they release act not just on the
digestive system of the body but also on the pain perception system and
the nervous system. They alter the receptors that respond to taste,
mood, pain and pleasure. In essence, you are not necessarily the master
but are influenced by what your gut microbiome tells you through the
signals they release, affecting your behaviour! This guest-influenced
host reaction has been suggested to be associated with conditions like
obesity, diabetes, allergy (to certain microbial metabolic toxins) and
even mood swings and autism.
In an extreme case with rats, studied by House, Vyas and Sapolsky (PLoS ONE 2011, 6: e23277, free on the web), the researchers found that the microbe Toxoplasma gondii
infecting rat guts suppressed the rat’s normal fear of cat smells,
thereby making the rat a prey for the cat. The microbes, now housed in
the cat’s belly, found it more hospitable! Occasionally we see the
reverse, the host reorganizing the composition of the gut micro biome
through diet. Japanese people love to eat seaweed, and now one sees
specialist microbes that digest seaweeds in Japanese tummies. Likewise,
unique microbes that can digest cellulose are found in the guts of
African children raised on sorghum in their food.
We thus see how microbes within us tend to dictate terms and affect not
only our digestive system and health, but also our moods, feelings and
preferences.
“You are what you eat” is a phrase that became a buzz word in a variety
of contexts, after Gillian Mckeith ran a BBC TV series with that name,
in which she advised people on how to eat appropriate healthy diets. It
now appears we need to modify it to “You are what your gut’s bugs tell
you to eat.”
D. BALASUBRAMANIAN
dbala@lvpei.org
The human body can be mined for antibiotics, shows latest research
“Microorganisms are the best chemists on the planet,”
declared Michael A. Fischbach, a chemist at the University of
California, San Francisco.
For evidence, Fischbach
points to the many lifesaving drugs that microorganisms produce. In
1928, for example, Alexander Fleming discovered that mould wafting into
his lab produced a bacteria-killing chemical that he dubbed penicillin.
Later generations of scientists found drug making microorganisms in more
exotic locales. In 1951, a missionary in Borneo named William Bouw
shipped a box of jungle dirt to Edmund C. Kornfield, a chemist at Eli
Lilly. In that soil, Kornfield discovered a species of bacteria that
made a potent antibiotic, later named vancomycin.
Scientists
today are still searching jungles, oceans and other corners of the
world for microorganisms that make medicines. But in a new study
published on Thursday in the journal
Cell
, Fischbach and his colleagues suggest that we should also be looking inward.
Analysing
the bacteria that live in our bodies, the scientists identified genes
for making over 3,000 previously unknown molecules that may prove to be
useful drugs. “Nobody had thought to look that close to home,” said
Fischbach.
Finding the molecules
Finding
these small molecules — known as natural products — has traditionally
been a slow affair. Fischbach and his colleagues set out five years ago
to speed up the search. They wrote a software program that learns how to
recognise the genes for natural products.
Their
study suggests that the human microbiome is a rich source of previously
unknown natural products. “That wasn’t where I expected to find
interesting drug-producing genes,” said Fischbach. “I was really taken
aback.”
The idea that our own bacteria are making
potent antibiotics may seem strange. If the microbiome is churning out
poison, how does it avoid killing itself?
Fischbach
suspects that bacteria only use antibiotics sparingly against their
competition. “You don’t wipe the slate clean of bacteria around you,” he
said. “This could be something that a hundred thousand microbes use to
guard the border of their colony.”
Shaun Lee, a
microbiologist at University of Notre Dame who was not involved in the
study, said that the fierce competition going on inside our bodies makes
it a good place to look for antibiotics.
“The human
body is the Manhattan of microbial living - a great place to live with
plenty of resources,” he said. “But real estate is at a premium.”
— New York Times News Service
Analysing
bacteria living in our body, scientists identified genes for making over
3,000 previously unknown molecules that may prove to be useful drugs
