Why is cooking still an effective way of eliminating human pathogens or fermentation or salting? These methods do not eliminate all traces of the bacteria so what is keeping a random mutation from happening that allows, say, e. Coli in beef to become resistant to heat up to 60c or Listeria to resist salt concentrations to the same levels as bacteria which are not infectious and potential beneficial to us that can tolerate?
What is it about antibiotics that makes them so susceptible to creating these random mutations that antibiotics become near obsolete in decades?
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Let’s say you want to kill Mr Bacteria.
There’s a few ways to do this but let’s say you want to get him when he’s in his car.
So antibiotic are sneaking in and cutting the brake lines so when he goes down the big hill he can’t stop and crashed. Now if mr bacteria is suspicious, he might have his car modified with a backup brake.
Cooking him would be like dropping a bomb on the car while he’s driving.
Antibiotics work on bacteria’s existing machinery to prevent them from establishing an infection by inhibiting replication, mobility, release of toxins, etc. Resistance occurs when the genome of the bacteria modifies itself to tweak it’s existing machinery so the antibiotic’s strategy is no longer effective. Resistance to environmental factors like heat and salinity require a series of genetic mutations across generations of bacterial strains i.e. evolution whereby only the bacteria possessing mutations/genes most compatible with the harsh environment will survive. These exist and are called extremophiles. They only exist in biologically extreme environments, however. E coli lives in GI tracts and in the soil, they have no need for becoming resistant to high temps or salinity since the majority of E coli populations will never be exposed to such factors.
In theory, you could take a strain of E coli and gradually expose them to high salinity, select the cells that survive and allow them to replicate while incrementally increasing the salinity to create a high-salinity tolerant strain of E coli.
Think of all those general methods of killing bacteria as killing humans with a fire/explosion or an earthquake. Something major, all encompassing, nonspecific. Some can survive, but not enough to effectively cause a problem.
Think of antibiotics as something extremely specific like a crazed MMA fighter going attacking people by only doing armbars. For a lot of people, they will break their arms, but for others their arms might be too strong, or maybe the person can counter (has a defense mechanism), OR maybe the person has no arms and the MMA fighter can’t arm bar them.
Now this isn’t how reproduction or genetics works, but just imagine all those left over strong upper body dudes and armless dudes being able to clone themselves or reproduce with each other spreading their strong upper body or armless genes. Now the crazed MMA fighter that only does arm bars can’t really attack anybody.
Antibiotics attack specific functional aspects of bacteria. This could include their actual structure, mechanisms for creating toxins, mechanism of reproduction, mechanism for utilizing their environment, etc etc. This specificity is what makes them helpful, because we can easily kill the bacteria by setting the patient on fire… but then the patient would be dead. edit: but that specificity that allows people to survive, can also allow for some random bacteria here or there to be left over, which can become a problem if they are able to reproduce.
Most antibiotics don’t kill the organism directly; they interfere with reproduction by tampering with DNA or the process of mitosis. All it takes is one mutation that overcomes that interference, and you have a new version of the organism that is resistant to the antibiotic.
Cooking, fermentation, salting directly kill the organisms.
technicaly there does exist bacteria that can survive in extreme heat/salt/toxic conditions. They’re called extremophiles. so if you repeatedly attacked a culture of bacteria with heat/ethanol/salt, they eventually would indeed adapt after thousands of generations. This would probably take a very very very very long time because the genetics adaptations neccessary for this are quite large. You’re trying to transform a regular bacteria into an extremophile bacteria. its like trying to evolve a human back into a monkey.
While technically possible, the problem is….you only heat up your food one time. If you reheated your food over and over again for 1000 years (less than 100 degrees celsius), yes we would expect the bacteria to have developed some sort of heat resistance. but thats not how we cook food. We cook food once, then we eat it along with any of the surviving bacteria that may have luckily developed minor heat resistance. Then we poop that bacteria out, and that bacteria is never heated to those temperatures ever again.
however with antibiotics, this is a problem if the disease is contagious. If i get an infection and get antibiotics and spread it to you and you get antibiotics, and so on and so on…..now the same bacterial dynasty has received multiple waves of the same drug. It will eventually adapt to it and become resistant. Furthermore, antibiotics are not as destructive as heat/salt/alcohol. So its way easier to develop resistance to antibiotics because it just requires a slight change in the bacterias internal chemistry. heat/salt/alcohol obliterates bacteria and its much much more difficult to adapt to though not technically impossible. Its like the difference between adapting to being fed snake venom vs adapting to having to fight lions 1v1 (no weapons). If you fed all humans snake venom over and over again, the remaining survining humans will have developed natural anti venom. But if you make all humans fight lions 1v1……….sure theres some guy out there that miracously does it. And if that guy has alot of children, maybe one of his kids might be able to do it too. But its going to take many many generations before all humans are lion resistant and 99.9999999% will die.
Also im pretty sure 100% of bacteria will die at 100 degrees celsius at normal pressures. Theres nothing a bacteria can do to prevent being boiled and exploded.
Think about it this way:
If you train our body you can slowly gain resistance to being punched in the gut. But no matter how much you train you will never ever gin resistance to stabbing with a sword, or being shot by a gun.
Basically, you can’t gain immunity to the laws of nature. There are certain things that life needs in order to function, and no amount of adaptation can fix that.
You can be resistent to whatever antibacterial fungus hunts you down. You can’t be resistent to having the water within you boiled into vapor.
You can be resistent to immune responses by turning them off when you enter a body. You can’t be immune to osmosis while still being able to take in nutrients.
To put it in a more human context, no matter how many martial arts you train in and master, no matter how much you know, a bullet to the heart is gonna kill you because you can’t live if your blood doesn’t get pumped around your body
That said, that’s not the be all end all. Some creatures have actually evolved to deal with these environments. They’re what we call “extremophiles”.
The problem is, they tend to be specifically adapted to live in a specific extreme environment. Have you ever seen a blob fish? The reason they look like that is because they’re specifically made to live at the bottom of the sea. Once at surface pressure, they basically expand until their body is too warped to function; That is, they die in “normal” environments
There are also beings like Tardigrades, which effectively shut down all bodily functions in extreme environments until things get habitable again. But they’re one species, and a very odd one
You can become resistant to sickneses and poisons by exposure or simply by not dying and passing your survival genes to the next generation but you will hardly ever become resistant to falling in a volcano or an acid pool. Same with bacteria, they can survive and mutate to resist basic attacks but nothing can survive chemical or physical destruction.
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