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Asked by to Rebecca, Heather, Ditte, Dave, Ben on 17 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
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Ben White answered on 17 Jun 2014:
There are many different bacteria in our gut that help us to breakdown food into it’s nutrients; these live with us as part of our microbiome.
A lot of exciting research is being done to discover what bacteria are best for us to have, and there are several products you can find in the supermarket already that aim to improve the number of useful/friendly bacteria inside us, e.g. Lactobacillus casei in Yakult.
What’s interesting also, is that our microbiomes all vary as much as we do as people, so it’s very exciting to study what impact this may be and how it could help present diseases in some people or make them healthier.
Fun fact, if you own a dog you’ll be sharing bacteria with it too!
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Rebecca Gladstone answered on 17 Jun 2014:
There are over 100 trillion bacteria in the intestines that help to break down our food. Different types of bacteria inside us help break down different types of food. There may be as many as 500 different types of bacteria in the gut and we are still discovering what they are!
There are some well known bacteria that help digestion. One bacteria called Lactobacillus acidophilus helps us to break down lactose, lactose is a major component of milk, yoghurts and cheese. Two types of bacteria called Bacteroides that also live in the gut help to break down complex carbohydrates. Complex carbohydrates are lots of sugars joined together that are more difficult to get into our system than a simple sugar like glucose.
Lots of different bacteria will be working together to help break down our food each in their own way. There will be many bacteria that we havent discovered yet and other that we know but don’t know yet what they do or how they do it. There is lots more research that needs to be done to help answer your great question, it is a very intersting subject thinking about how bacteria help us!
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