Feces of healthy people can save lives (HumanMicrobes)
How was life created?
Are we alone in the universe or are there other intelligent beings around us?
Why does some poop float and roll around in the toilet, while other poop sinks easily?
These are just some of the questions that come to mind, and finally there is an answer to one of them.
even if it is not full.
The IFL website states that for years, we didn't really know exactly why some poo floats and others sink easily to the bottom of the toilet.
Theories have suggested that increased fat content in stool can cause poop to float.
However, when one 1972 study—published in The New England Journal of Medicine—examined the stools of 33 healthy subjects (nine with floating stools, 24 with sinking stools, and six patients with fatty stools), they found that all of the floaters sank when gas Inside their stool is "compressed by positive pressure".
"After degassing, floating and sinking feces had similar specific gravities, indicating that the tendency of such feces to float or sink depends on differences in gas rather than fat content," the team wrote, adding that the fatty poop was less dense than the others, although this was due to an increase in water content And not fat.
"Therefore, floating stools are due to increased gas or water content (or both); floating stools should not be considered a sign of steaturia (increased fat content in poop)."
All of this, while interesting, doesn't really explain the reason behind the difference in gas and water content.
But recently, a team studying mice noticed something unusual in their poop.
While 10 percent of healthy people consistently produce floaters, this percentage is much higher in mice—around 50 percent.
The team, who published their work in Scientific Reports, noticed that the poop of mice devoid of gut bacteria tended to sink.
Scrub or not float?
Illustration of poop (Photo: ShutterStock)
"Our finding of "sinking" and "floating" feces in bacteria-free mice and mice whose intestines were measured for bacterial content, respectively, led to the question of whether intestinal bacteria are fundamentally related to the creation of the phenomenon of floating feces," the team writes in their study.
In another test, the team took gut bacteria from healthy mice and put them into the stomachs of bacteria-free mice.
They discovered that their poop also started to float.
"By introducing microorganisms into the gut of germ-free mice, we have conclusively demonstrated that the colonization of the gut by microbiota is a necessary condition for floating stool."
Although the researchers stress that more research is needed to determine which gut bacteria cause flotation—by introducing them separately into germ-free mice—and analysis of human poop is also needed, they identified several species of bacteria that were associated with floating poop in the microbiome. "We identified Bacteroides ovatus as the species the most enriched in our analysis that is positively correlated with gas and anal gas evacuation in human patients. Moreover, we also identified Bacteroides fragilis which is known to produce hydrogen gas in the gut."
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