Role in Disease
Bacteria in the digestive tract have pathogenic properties in addition to their health-inducing ones: they can produce toxins and carcinogens and have been implicated in such conditions as multisystem organ failure, sepsis, colon cancer, and inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). A major factor in health is the balance of bacterial numbers; if the numbers grow too high or low, it will result in harm to the host. The host has enzymes to regulate this balance.
Read more about this topic: Gut Flora
Famous quotes containing the words role in, role and/or disease:
“If women’s role in life is limited solely to housewife/mother, it clearly ends when she can no longer bear more children and the children she has borne leave home.”
—Betty Friedan (20th century)
“The role of the intelligence—that part of us which affirms and denies and formulates opinions—is merely to submit.”
—Simone Weil (1909–1943)
“The artistic temperament is a disease that affects amateurs.... Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily or perspire easily. But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)