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Are Human Beings Organisms Or Living Ecosystems?
Hugh Pickens writes "Every human body harbors about 100 trillion bacterial cells, outnumbering human cells 10 to one. There's been a growing consensus among scientists that bacteria are not simply random squatters, but organized communities that evolve with us and are passed down from generation to generation. 'Human beings are not really individuals; they're communities of organisms,' says microbiologist Margaret McFall-Ngai. 'This could be the basis of a whole new way of looking at disease.' Recently, for example, evidence has surfaced that obesity may well include a microbial component. Jeffrey Gordon's lab at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis published findings that lean and obese twins — whether identical or fraternal — harbor strikingly different bacterial communities that are not just helping to process food directly; they actually influence whether that energy is ultimately stored as fat in the body. Last year, the National Institutes of Health launched the Human Microbiome Project to characterize the role of microbes in the human body, a formal recognition of bacteria's far-reaching influence, including their contributions to human health and certain illnesses. William Karasov, a physiologist and ecologist at University of Wisconsin-Madison, believes that the consequences of this new approach will be profound. 'We've all been trained to think of ourselves as human,' says Karasov, adding that bacteria have usually been considered only as the source of infections, or as something benign living in the body. Now, Karasov says, it appears 'we are so interconnected with our microbes that anything studied before could have a microbial component that we hadn't thought about.'"
Both, of course. Why can't we be an eco system that is also a self-contained individual? Arguably, we could say the same thing about Earth itself (guess who's cancer?)
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While the study of our relationship with the bacteria and other microbes that live inside us is interesting and valid its kinda dumb to talk about ourselves as ecosystems. We are another life form, that has a symbiotic relationship with those microbes in a larger ecosystem.
We don't need words like symbiotic if we are going to think of ourselves as an ecosystem. Also just about any animal or plant made of more than a few cells is going to be an ecosystem under this implied definition. I am not sure how exactly we want to define ecosystem but something a little more complex than "any thing which something lives inside" seems appropriate.
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I'm not an obesity apologist (or at least, I don't think I am), but I think it's important to recognize that not everyone who is obese just eats cheeseburgers all day. In fact, my diet is pretty piss poor, but I'm thin. Similarly, I know obese vegetarians.
Alternative medicine has been aware of this fact (that the microorganisms that live in our bodies are a normal part of our physiology) for ages.
First, modern medicine has been "aware" that they were there and had beneficial effects for decades also. There are two things you're missing:
1. The discovery is not that they help digest food and nutrients, but they might help determine how your body uses it
2. The difference between "aware of this fact" and actually doing a reproducible study to help determine whether this "fact" is true.
My only real problem with alternative medicine is that it doesn't care what is true, just what we believe to be true.
Newton's laws of gravity are not really right either. They didn't know about relativity back then. But Newton's laws are are good enough approximations for things ordinary people are doing in their day.
Same thing goes for how to lose weight or avoid being fat. Eating fewer calories and burning more calories by exercising isn't the complete picture. Some folks have genetic predispositions for either high or low metabolisms. Some build muscle easier than others. And now we find out that some folks have different microbial components that can influence this.
But none of that changes the basic advice you should give people, which is if you want to be fit (or at least not fat), then eat right and exercise regularly.
This isn't "hating on the fatties". If you let people incorrectly believe that "my genes made me fat", while it may make some folks feel less guilty, it also undermines their confidence in their own ability to get healthy. It's in nobody's interest to make fat people feel like being fat is just their lot in life, rather than an obstacle they could overcome with hard work and persistence.