I learned new stuff today...There are about 100 trillion living cells in the human body.
90% of them are NOT human.
Those cells belong to all of the symbiotic or parasitic organisms that live in/on us.
For instance, there's a little critter who lives on the edge of your eyelid. That's his world, and his job is to keep the the base of your eyelashes clean. No-one has the slightest clue how he got there, but there he is.
There's another one, a bacteria, that lives inside your mitochondria. That's the little battery inside every (human) cell in your body. His job is to repair your DNA when it gets broken by free radicals.
Your gut hosts 490 known species of "good bacteria", which makes the one or two they stick in yoghurt look a bit lame. Their job is to help you break down your food. The problem is, they're at war with the "bad bacteria" who just want to come along for the ride, and in most of us, it's a war the good guys always lose.
One of those good guys is responsible for the production of lactase. That's an enzyme the body needs to break down lactose. Without those particular good guys, you'll be lactose intolerant.
There's another couple implicated in your propensity to get fat or stay thin. A coroner somewhere in the Excited States spent 20 years taking samples from the guts of each autopsy he did, and he correlated species with the weight of the individual. He found that naturally thin people have lots of one kind, while obese people have lots of another kind.
Another of those bad gut guys secretes an enzyme that some scientists think is a neurotoxin, and if you have enough of them, that toxin starts making symptoms that look remarkable like MS.
And if there aren't enough good guys in your small intestine, it can get overgrown with Candida, and THAT's bad, because the shape of the intestine wall means the fungus makes holes allowing partly digested food to leak into your bloodstream.
One parasite has been shown to make girls promiscuous, and men stupid. I thought that was what beer was for.
Personally, I find the whole idea a bit icky, and it makes me ask... if 90% of me is not really me, then who am I? Ugh! It makes my head spin!
4 comments:
Wow! That's interesting. Especially about the parasite that makes girls more promiscuous. I wonder if you can give that to a girl somehow without her knowing.
But why did you put up a picture of Tic-Tacs?
So...it makes your head spin? Are you sure it's yours at all? Cos it sounds like it's all the bugs and stuff that are shaking their heads, not so much you.
Wow, it's like we're little planets with all the little species living on us, and they too wage wars on each other.
Mediocre, you could, but the minute she got more promiscuous on you, you become stupid. Stick to beer. At least it wears off in the morning.
And e, or all of the entities posing as e, you're right. Maybe our conscious is the collective conscious of the little critters, and this body is just a vehicle.
I think it was the late great Douglas Adams who theorised that the human body was actually designed by water, to carry it from place to place. So perhaps we are just vehicles for all those germs. At least most of them seem to be paying for the ride.
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