Chapter 4. Dysbacteriosis

“There are over 400 species of bacteria in the colon; bacteria make up 30–50% of the total dry matter in the feces, or even 75% according to other calculation.”
R.F. Schmidt, G. Thews; Human Physiology, 2nd edition

How do you debunk popular ideas about fiber’s role in digestion and elimination without being accused of committing a sacrilege, when it has already become a gold-standard treatment for “regu­la­rity,” a miracle laxative, and a concept so embedded in the minds of doctors and patients alike that it’s no longer even questioned by anyone?
Well, there are “sacred truths,” and then there are long-established, indisputable facts of human physiology:

• Breast milk has zero fiber, yet healthy babies produce abundant (relative to their weight and size) stools several times daily.
• People who fast for weeks at a time have regular stools, even though they consume nothing but water.
• Some people (the lucky ones) who attempted the Atkins Diet, had no problem with constipation, even though their diet contained zero or minor amounts of fiber.
• Indigenous Inuit (Eskimo) people, who inhabit the Arctic coast of North America, some parts of Greenland, and northern Siberia, consume a fiber-free diet, and aren’t affected by constipation.

None of the above makes any sense, conventionally speaking. People can’t have regular stools without consuming any fiber, right?

Wrong! The reason you’re stumped is simple: you’ve been conditioned to believe that normal stools are made mainly from food, and that fiber is required to make them. Inevitably, the next logical inference forms a familiar logic:

If Fiber Makes Good Stools,
Let’s Fix Bad Ones With More Fiber

It seems perfectly logical, right?

Wrong again! Actually, normal stools shouldn’t contain any remnants of undigested food. Dietary proteins, fats, carbohydrates, and even fiber must digest completely. If something you ate exits your body as is, it means it wasn’t digested or couldn’t get digested to begin with, such as denaturated protein (burnt meat). Technically, even indigestible fiber should be fermented by intestinal bacteria.

That’s why a stool exam that shows any visible remnants of undigested fats, proteins, or carbohydrates, or even specks of undigested fiber (any at all), points to impaired digestion, and one disease or another that affects the organ(s) responsible for digestion and the absorption of a specific nutrient. That much is written in any medical reference book, and the observation of stools is widely used as an effective diagnostic tool for disorders of digestion and the digestive organs.

So what, then, are stools made from, if not food and fiber? Primarily water, intestinal bacteria (single cell, free-living microorganisms), dead bacteria and cells shed by the body, mineral salts, coloring pigments, and traces of fat. Intestinal bacteria are by far the largest component of stools. Let’s repeat again the quotation that opens this chapter:

Besides other important tasks, these abundant bacteria make normal stools, unless they are completely or partially decimated by the vestiges of civilized living, or even—harder to believe—by dietary fiber.

When babies are born, their digestive organs are sterile. Their large intestines get “cultured” after the first few sips of colostrum, a thin yellowish fluid “infested” with the mother’s bacteria and rich in essential nutrients. Colostrum precedes the flow of fat- and protein-rich breast milk. The process continues with breast milk, and the intestinal flora of newborns matures to “adult” status by the sixth month.