Welcome to another edition of Cool Facts. This cool fact is about a new way that

your gut bacteria change your health. By now you've probably heard a lot about

your gut microbiome. In fact you might even be tired of hearing about it, but

that's because we keep learning new things that gut bacteria can do. Like change

the gut brain access, change your immune system, and since we're always figuring

out this new stuff, here's something new from the University of Washington in

Seattle and Brown University in Rhode Island. They figured out that your gut

bacteria convert vitamin A to retinoic acid, and retinoic acid is the first

metabolite of vitamin A that's required for your body to grow and develop

properly. And we used to think that conversion only happened in your human

cells, but this new research shows actually you need your gut bacteria to do

that for you. We have this sort of bioscentrism where we think, oh, our cells do

everything, but these other cells that we carry around in our body all of the

time that are symbiotic with us are somehow not us, so therefore we'd like to

take credit for stuff. And we're finding out that your gut bacteria does more and

more, and those good commensal bacteria in your gut do convert vitamin A into the

active retinoids that you need. The researchers found that when they fed lactobacillus

intestinalis probiotics to mice who had depleted microbiome, that those mice

could suddenly once again make retinoic acid in their guts. And they found

that several different strains of bacteria could do that. What does that mean for

you? Well, it means you might not want to take antibiotics and you definitely

want to take preformed animal source vitamin A because it's not the same as

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