Modern Life Has Eroded Our Health

Modern lifestyles seem to be the whipping boy for most ailments, such as asthma, diabetes and obesity. Still, the hypothesis that our forefathers didn't suffer from them wasn't proved till recently.

It was in 2008 that an ancient tribe of 15,000 Yanomamis was chanced upon by a military helicopter in a far-off Amazonas region in southern Venezuela, according to bbc.

The tribe migrated to South America after the last ice age, so the semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers never got exposed to modern civilisation. They hunt for small birds and mammals, frogs and fish and sometimes the tapir. They also subsist on wild bananas, plantain and cassava. They can walk some distance from home and collect water near the village.

One global scientists' team researched the tribe to check out micro-organisms that lived on and in them.

We are born with some microbes that we inherit from our mother's birth canal, forming the basis of our lifelong microbiome. But due to the use of antibiotics, processed foods and soap, there is less diversity in our microbes, according to Dr Gautam Dantas from the Washington University School of Medicine, who is among the researchers who has probed the Yanomamis.

Hence, it was from the isolated tribe of the Yanomami Indians in the jungles of southern Venezuela, Amazon, that diverse microbes have been found. The microbiome of people in industrialized countries is 40 percent less diverse, say the United States and Venezuelan scientists who studied them, according to medicaldaily.

Dr Dantas, whose work is published in Microbial Ecology, explains that it is fairly reasonable to suppose that this is the reason for the "newer" diseases like asthma, inflammatory bowel disease and diabetes.

However, "Despite their isolation, presumably for >11,000 years since their ancestors arrived in South America, and no known exposure to antibiotics, they harbor bacteria that carry functional antibiotic resistance (AR) genes, including those that confer resistance to synthetic antibiotics," the paper reads, according to thewashingtonpost

Maria-Gloria Dominguez-Bello from the New York University School of Medicine has taken microbes from this group and compared them with Western residents'. She points out that American infants take two courses of antibiotics in the first year of life. She says: "If you upset the good bacteria, it might well be that the immune system of that baby will be ill-educated and respond wrongly to other agents and bacteria."

The microbes from the skin and gut of the Yanomamis were 40% more diverse than modern people's.

"In the intestine they have a diversity that really shocked us, which we think are providing a lot of important roles in digestion and in communicating with our immune system. We want to understand what are the bacteria that we have lost and what were their functions - and can we restore them eventually?"

Their microbes also have antibiotic resistance genes even though they have never encountered modern antibiotics. Dr Dantas said: "Antibiotic resistance is a natural feature of bacteria in the human body. It's not something created by antibiotic use. But it does get amplified when antibiotics are used."

Even as more research is needed to realize the role of resistance genes, could we simply "top up" our microbes to reduce the impact of such developments?

He feels that it is important for us to reduce our obsession with cleanliness.

"I found my two-year-old tucking into some hay and manure which my parents have delivered to my home for the garden. I'm hoping the bacterial load had dropped as it dried out."