Can you breathe through your BUM?!
Video Transcript:
Now, this may come as a surprise to you, but researchers have found that pigs can breathe through their butthole and it's possible, you can too. So you may be thinking "What"?
What is happening? What's going on?
This sounds ridiculous.
Who does this even benefit and how does it work?
Hi, my name is Marcie Vaske. I'm a functional medicine nutritionist. I specialize in gut health. So I help people who struggle with diarrhea, constipation, bloating, and gas.
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Can you breathe through your BUM?!
So, first, for today's topic, we need to get comfortable with your butthole, not something we usually talk about on a daily basis, a weekly basis, or heck even a monthly basis. But today it's gonna be all about breathing in your butthole or bum.
What does the Research say?
So this new study comes from a team of researchers from Japan, and they found that pigs can absorb oxygen through their anus. The pink fleshy round anus is actually very similar to the mouth and research found it every bit as important.
So the study came out of exploring treatment for people with respiratory conditions, with inspiration, actually coming from unconventional breathing that is done by a fish called Loaches and it's a freshwater fish, and they actually use their intestines to breathe.
The way they do this and the way that it can, how we're finding it can help through pigs and maybe even in a human study, is that the rectum actually has a mesh of fine blood vessels, right beneath the tissue. So when we administer medications, it's easily absorbed into the bloodstream.
Researchers conducted the trials numerous times to see if mammals can actually breathe through their anus. And in oxygen-deprived conditions, the team began by studying mice and then moved into rats and then moved into pigs due to their similar human physiology and genetic makeup to find that their findings time and time again showed up. Yes, we can breathe through our anus.
Now, what is the significance of this study?
Well, this study came in and may be helpful in treating patients with respiratory or acute respiratory distress. For example, a ventilator is oftentimes used when in times of that extreme respiratory failure or distress. And we learned that through COVID we were having a shortage of ventilators. So this highlighted the need to maybe expand our thoughts and try to look into different avenues of how we could support good respiratory health.
So in the situation that we might have a shortage of ventilators again, and people who are in acute respiratory distress, we may be able to use your butthole as the avenue to help you continue breathing. So not only could this be in a clinical setting or a hospital setting, but also thinking of having it on standby.
Like we have the defibrillators at different events, schools, and colleges where we could actually use this automated similar to the defibrillator in the event of using sudden respiratory failure, we could actually have these on-site to give that time to increase respiratory health.
Takanori Takebe the author of the study and a doctor at the Tokyo Medical and dental university thought, why not try the back door?
He wanted to see if his theory was correct when they added oxygen to the anus to see that it would improve respiratory health.
So what he did was they added oxygen to Perfluorodecalin, a chemical that can dissolve large amounts of oxygen and is in the past a substance that has been used to treat infants with severe respiratory distress and has artificial blood to improve tissue oxygenation.
So after shooting the liquid, the oxygenated liquid up the mice's rectum, the scientists found that the oxygen levels further improved and what they did on the pigs was they researched and used the same oxygenated liquid on a pig.
And they found that they could survive up to 30 minutes after inoculation with oxygen enough time to get adequate emergency care if needed and then hence saving a life.
So the question is, what about humans?
Can we really use this on humans? And Takebe is making plans now to begin clinical trials as early as this year, maybe into next year, but all indications are looking really promising.
So it just goes to show the body is amazing, right?
And the gut can do amazing and miraculous things. I know that thinking about using your butthole as a way to breathe is not something we typically have thought about before.
But I think what they have shown is very promising and even keeping life going for an extra 30 minutes before you can get that good care in an emergency situation.
Hope you had fun about our topic for today! Have a great day and see you at the next one!
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