so, how was your bowel movement?

[brightpearl]

Oooookay.
To continue the probiotic conversation from the qotd thread, and the lovely F wanting the scoop on poopy bacteria....

Probiotic microbes are (and I am so sorry to have to say this) often fecal bacteria. That's why they so often have names like faecalis that the food companies change to avoid telling you that. It's not as bad as it sounds...they're found in poop because they're supposed to be in there, you know? And the actual individual microbes that are in your yogurt container are not culled from manure or anything...they're just cultured from strains that were originally isolated from stool samples. Sorry. I know this sounds like very bad news. Just try to think of it as natural.

You know, babies often have digestive discomfort because their little guts aren't properly colonized by good bugs yet. It happens over a few months as they come in contact with, you know, boobs and stuff. There's a school of thought that this is one of the reasons why breastfed babies have a lowered risk of obesity...they demonstrably end up with a different gut bacteria profile.

It all goes in a big circle, so try to focus on the other direction...These are bacteria that need to go IN at some point. Just try not to think about how they come out.

The confusion over things like E. coli, as you mentioned, is that there are lots of different strains of many species. Some of them are harmless or even beneficial, and may be commonly found in most peoples' digestive tracts, where they help you by assisting in the manufacture of Vitamin K and by outcompeting harmful bacteria. Other strains of the same species may have traded genes with other pathogens and become virulent --- E. coli O157:H7 apparently got cozy with Shigella (?? if I remember correctly) at some beef ranch a while back, and now when people eat it in poorly cooked meat, they can get really sick or even die, despite the fact that they have a different strain of the same species already in their systems.