Bathroom Slime May Be Icky, But It Operates In Ways Similar With Other Parts Of Our Body.

It’s the same principle at work, really.

One of the most annoying household chores that I didn’t really like to do was to clean the bathroom.

Unfortunately, of course, that responsibility does come along with adulting — unless I did have the money to pay someone to clean my bathrooms regularly for me.

As a poor university student on a tight budget, you know that paying someone else to do the dirty work for you is never an option.

The thing that irked me the most was having to deal with all the slime on the walls and in the toilet bowl.

But unfortunately, as this slime is related to bacterial growth, and our intestines do contain a whole ton of bacteria as well, we’d expect their growth and behaviours to be remarkably similar. We’d also expect to see them in our mouths, for sure.

First up, what on earth is that slime?

That slimy, slippery mess is a composition of extracellular polymeric substances (EPS) that are secreted by live bacterial cells. These EPS are produced by the cells in response to whatever nutrients they are being fed with.

These EPS comprise “highly hydrated polymers that are mainly composed of polysaccharides, proteins, and DNA”.

Polysaccharides can also be found in food products such as starch, for instance. In fact, starch can be used to make glue, which is a sticky, slimy, messy thing to fool around with too.

See the similarities there?

So the thing is that bacterial cells are capable of producing these EPS materials, which are slimy in nature because of all the polysaccharides that are in there.

The polysaccharides in the EPS provide a stable biofilm, which provides stability and “housing” for a wide variety of bacterial cells.

It’s so easy to spot it on our own bodies, you know?

We can look inside our mouths after a long period of improper cleaning.

We’d feel that our teeth are coated with something slimy — that’s the biofilm in action right there. We could develop dental health and inflammatory health issues down the line from all those uncleared biofilms:

And we’d also know that this biofilm isn’t the easiest thing to eliminate. Not just with a simple brushing of our teeth. It isn’t gonna go away that easily.

Same thing with the bathroom biofilms. They aren’t that easy to clean and sometimes may require the use of harsh chemicals to eliminate - but they will grow back on their own.

Unfortunately, we can’t use those harsh chemicals in our mouths without getting poisoned, eh?

So, given that the bathroom contains all these bacterial cells (no, we can never completely sterilise the bathroom to get rid of all the bacterial cells), we’d be feeding them a constant stream of dead skin cells, soap and shampoo.

The bacterial populations that can adapt to the feed and thrive the best will be the most persistent populations, and over time, we can see the constant, periodic growth of biofilms.

And we have to keep cleaning up that mess. Annoying, isn’t it?

So, if we were to think about it:

What we feed ourselves the most consistently will also influence the microbial communities within our guts.

It’s a very basic idea of Darwinian selection.

In cold climates, the better-adapting animals are those with thick fur… those with thin fur would not be able to cope with those temperatures.

In hot climates, those with thick fur are in for a world of trouble…

So now, what we eat enters our intestines and feeds the gut microbiota (or the gut bacteria) populations that live in the gut - and that affects our gut health. As well as a whole load of other biochemical pathways in our bodies:

If we eat more of the unhealthy foods consistently, our gut microbiota can get affected, such as what a pure McDonald’s diet for 10 days can do.

That also includes the consumption of antibiotics, which wipe out most (but not all) of the gut microbiota.

What food we consume after the course of antibiotics will determine what species will repopulate the gut most quickly. The consumption of different probiotics supplements can also affect the gut microbiota species populations.

All because the most persistent populations are able to produce biofilms and other biochemicals that support the re-population of the different types of gut bacteria! Not to mention that some of these other produced biochemicals will have a cascading signal effect on other biochemical pathways within our body.

And that may also explain why some people go on a course of antibiotics and develop new problems with their immune system.

Because when we’re getting rid of bacterial cells in our guts, what we are allowing to grow back in our guts is dependent on what we’re feeding our bodies with.

Though unfortunately, as we excrete them out into the toilet bowl, they too can stick to the walls of the toilet bowl and create a new community that we have to consistently keep cleaning off.

It’s all about maintaining the right cell populations in the biofilms.

The tricky issue is to be able to regulate our gut health in a way such that the persistent populations in there are what we want for good health.

Consuming too much of those refined carbohydrates can affect the population balance, even as we’re being flooded by cheap processed carbohydrates these days:

It’s just that all these sugars are very easily used by microbial cells as an energy source, so we’d be encouraging the growth of so many cells in our mouths. They would form stable biofilms over time that are difficult to eliminate - which then promote inflammation and tooth decay eventually.

If that could happen in our mouths to cause oral dysbiosis, then what would happen in our guts? Would there not be a higher chance of gut dysbiosis occurring?

Studies show that it would happen!

Do feel free to check out What Nutrients Support Digestion And Detox In Our Body? to see what can help to support a healthy gut balance!

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