The following is the script to the podcast :
https://anchor.fm/e/d38bdc?at=1358881
Young lady suffering a slow tract for 5
yrs…holddd up! what’s a slow tract i hear
you say!
it’s when you cant shit! A simple test: what
you eat generally exits within 2 days..if it
takes 3 or more days to pass..you’ve got a
slow gut. Caveat…must be ongoing for
6months+ your norm will be different to my
norm….some go three times a day…others
go every THREE days..
who cares i hear you shout! You’re right!
you’re more concerned about the blating, the
nausea, the stomach pain!
but plz, let me drop some knowledge:
technical term for it is when your colonic
transit time (CTT) is >48hrs, as measured by
swallowing a radioactive dye and seeing how
long it passes through.
For px with STC, laxatives dont work well
and neither does more fibre in the diet.
About 1 in 10 poeple with constpiatoin will
suffer the type known as a slow tract. The
other kind of constipatoin is where there
are obstructions. i shouldnt laugh here but
that sounds kinda funky…rectal
obstructions
Why does this even happen? is it cos you eat
a shit diet? I went in hunt of the answers
Reasons..
1) obstructions….maybe the theres a
prolapse of the rectum,
2) slow colon (colonic inertia)
3) IBS
4) psychological stress
5) nerves being numb
STC confirmed by nuclear transit
study..basically u swallow some radioactive
barium and monitor its progress from mouth
to anus…fun days
Another method is the popular Wexman
Questinnaires which asks: how often u go,
pain level when you shit,
did you go fully or half way,
pain in stomach,
time to shit, how much help did u need to
shit-im talking laxatives,
how long uve been constipated, how many
unsuccesful attempts at pooping.
//////////////////// clinical trials///////
lets move onto the clinical trials. Now be
forewarned that some of these experiments
will sound very wacky….like real wacked.
eating poop kind of wacked. But im getting a
head of myself…lets start with the more
acceptable studies done.
three entrepreneurials scientists stuck
electrodes to childrens belly buttons and
found that after six months, with one hr of
stimulation daily…that the kids started
pooping more…gosh hardly exciting to be
hooked up to some electrodes when u just
wanna go play in the sandpit.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/n
er.12734/full
Another group in Britain did a similar thing
but found no benefit…mind you they were
sticking the electrode to the soles of the
feet….kind of sounds farfetched, we’re
trying to fix something at the buttocks not
the feet…but if you look at the nerve path
it does seem to converge at the spinal cord
level.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/c
odi.13388/full
An australian bunch did a similar thing but
placed the electrode pads on the tail bone
area and found this to be somewhat
effective. The real issue is the effect
didnt last too long after stopping therapty.
http://www.nobleresearch.org/Content/PDF/16/
2399-8199.2017-1/2399-8199.2017-1.pdf
By now you’re probably thinking, gosh
scientists sure like to zap things…first
Pavlov’s dogs and now kids…rest assured,
things get real wacked now…
///////wacked up research/////
FMT? Fecal microbiota transplantation. The
process of donating someone elses poop and
putting it into your stomach. WTF?! Yep
there woudl be a donor who would rock up on
the day of the experiment, dump a shit, then
scientists would whizz it up in a blender
and pump it via a nose tube into actual
patients.Bat shit crazy!
And if u were wondering, the amount of shit
used was 100g blended in 500mL of saline.
that’s half a litre of brown stuff.
Not surpringly, side effects included:
venting, nausea, abdominal pain and
diarrhoea. what’s venting? i had to look it
up. it says here: a vent is an opening such
as one that discharges pus like the anus.
hmmmm
an opening permitting the escape of fumes,
liquid, gas or steam
So the verdicT? about a 30% improvement…an
increase in number 2s, softer shit, faster
transit times (this is the bus timetable but
the time it takes to pass out some feces
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?
id=10.1371/journal.pone.0171308
//////////////////////average Joe and
probiotics//////
OKAY so whats the average Joe do when he
listens to all this…well basically if you
wanna avoid constipation…ensure you
actually drink water each day, have fibre in
ur diet from food sources like fruits and
vegetables and add a yoghurt to your routine
as this has been shown to help gut motility.
Now on the topic of yogurt, we all know that
yoghurt contains beneficial bacteria called
probiotics…well
China scientists are pumping real
interesting research on this area. In
fact…at the time of writing my notes…I
had a Eureka moment! Lots of laxatives are
exported to china each day…if you work in
pharmacy you’ll notice this too…things
like Nulax sell like hot cakes! Could it be
something in the water?…a topic of another
podcast no doubt!
///////////////HOW do these critters affect
us?///////////
One example are:
methanogens..these methanogens are elevated
in harder stools and correlated with
farting…true enough we all learned in
science lab that methane gas is that partly
the gas found in fart.
another example are the byproducts of
probiotics….
SCFAs and Bile acids….these were shown to
stimulate serotonin receptors in the gut
producin muscle contractions! so how do we
get more of these two acids? more fibre! and
for the case of Bile acids….healthy fats!
hohoho sounds like a healthy balanced diet
to me!
A fun point of this research was that the
poop belonging to a group of chemicially-
induced constipated rats were pumped into
stomachs of healthy rats….in turn causing
the healthy rats to be constpiated!
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PM
C5428802/
now……Taking a slight tangent in our
thought processes
Perhaps its the degeneration of nerves in
the gut that is responsible for slow tract
constipation! kinda like neurodegenerative
disease like Alzheimers and Parkinsons?!
Again a third group of Chinese researchers
took biopsies of peoples lower guts and
examined it under powerful electron
miscroscopes.
They found that in one 69yo woman..that her
nerves had shrivelled up into whats known as
a vacuole and is possibly why she has taken
laxatives for the last 6 yrs!! They rkn that
the same nerves that can be damaged during
child birth are the ones damanged in this
69yo.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PM
C5369939/
///////// in closing////////
To close of this podcast…i’d like to
return to our original customer’s anxieties
and would just like to say that her
condition is a rare one, and isn’t something
to laugh about….its quite
debilitating….it affects one’s social
life, causings much psychological and
physical distress…..To this friend, I
would say that getting a good doctor on your
side who is willing to try different
approaches to this riddle is key. Very key.
as there are alot of doctors who will just
shrug this into the “too hard basket”.
for the average person, the key take aways
are to eat a diet filled with fibre and
healthy fats along with fermented foods that
are high in probiotics like yoghurt kimchi,
pickles, kombucha etc…
As I mentioned earlier, the probiotics eat
the fibre to product beneficial SCFAs and
bile acids which promote a regular bowel
movement.
Now how many times have you heard this said?
HEAPPPS….well now you have the science to
back it up. Enjoy..
Now before you all head off…if you enjoyed
this podcast, please leave a commment, pass
it onto a friend who may benefit, show us
some love!
Wexman scale:
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/9c30/96521a
00e759a1cd345b6aec3ee88a9fc9e2.pdf
phyla Bacteroidetes, Firmicutes, and
Actinobacteria. Bacteroidetes:Firmicutes
ratio, and negatively related to Akkermansia
and Methanobrevibacter abundance.
unclassified_Ruminococcaceae, Alistipes,
and Oscillibacter were negatively correlated
with the mean stool frequency3
