Eli5: if Lactic acid bacteria are good for health, why can’t they create a permanent colony and settle in our body?
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I don’t know specifically about those pacterias, but this is a pattern happening in all living things. there are no such thing as good or bad bacterias. That’s just an oversimplification. Our antibodies are good bacteria-like organisms… until they start targeting ourselves in what is called auto-immune diseases. Bacterias beneficial in one organ can kill us in another organ, trying to do the same thing. Even if that bacteria isn’t hurting us outside of the organ it thrives in, it’ll get out-competed for food elsewhere in our body.
In fact, many beneficial bacterias (like probiotics in yogourt) have to be taken regularly to have any efect because they starve really quickly in our gut, with the resident bacterias winning the race for feeding. It might be a bad example, as probiotics have been proven to have no more than a placebo effect, but hopefully it’s good for illustrating the problem.
Then, there’s the offals problem. Bacterias eating lactic acid will “deffecate” another byproduct. That byproduct might actually make the environment tocxic, or alert antibodies of an intruder. they could starve quickly once out of lactic acid to eat.
The list of things that could explain why those specific bacterias cannot colonize our bodies is very long, because microbiology is incredibly complex, and isn’t as simple as whether some bacterias are good or bad. I strongly recommend reading the book “I Contain Multitudes” by ed young. short, well explained in layman terms.
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