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chunseye t1_it6bm6o wrote

Reply to comment by regular_modern_girl in Why does alcohol kill bacteria, but not the cells that our bodies are composed of? by Chairman_Mittens

"We not only have way more cells in our body"; this is incorrect, there are more bacteria in/on our bodies than human cells... it's just that our cells are larger.

Edit, source: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27541692/

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regular_modern_girl t1_it73cp2 wrote

> Our analysis also updates the widely-cited 10:1 ratio, showing that the number of bacteria in the body is actually of the same order as the number of human cells, and their total mass is about 0.2 kg.

Did you not actually read the abstract on the paper you posted? This literally says the exact same thing as the link I posted, that there’s basically a 1:1 ratio (“on the same order as the number of human cells”), not that there are more. Considering these are both from the same year, I’m assuming they’re maybe actually referencing the same study.

Once again, this isn’t actually relevant because OP clearly wants to know the effects of alcohol on individual bacteria versus human cells (which as I note, are not really going to be very different), as they state at the end of the post, not on the generalized effect of alcohol on the entire bacterial human microbiome.

But, if they did want to know the latter, everything I said still 100% holds anyway (if you were to take just the entire 0.2 kg mass of bacteria from an average human body and expose it to high concentrations of ethanol, it would still pretty definitely die???), and even as a pedantic nitpick your comment states something blatantly incorrect, and the study you posted to supposedly back it up actually contradicts your claim pretty clearly.

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chunseye t1_it77srx wrote

Of the same order is not the same as "equal number"... 3.8x10^13 is still 26% more than 3.0x10^13. If a football match is 4-3, would you call it a draw? They mean it's not a factor 10 more...

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regular_modern_girl t1_it78zd4 wrote

https://www.sciencealert.com/how-many-bacteria-cells-outnumber-human-cells-microbiome-science/amp

It’s about 1.3:1 at most, so very slightly more, but definitely not vastly more, and again (as I’ve said three times now) irrelevant to anything I said. This article includes links to two other sources, including one noting how it’s actually nearly impossible to give a completely accurate general human number on this due to the variance between individuals. In any event, the common citation that there’s 10:1 or some other huge number (which you strongly imply in your comment) is derived from a single discredited study, and the actual number is far less impressive.

But yet again, a bacterium is a single-celled organism, a human is multicellular one. It’s pretty obvious which is going to more vulnerable to being killed by alcohol. Exactly how many individual bacteria are inside a given human body has little to nothing to do with anything I said.

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chunseye t1_it79lzn wrote

I never meant to answer OP's question, I just meant to correct your incorrect statement. Hence the quotes, then the correction. Why are you treating all this as a personal attack?

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regular_modern_girl t1_it7aj91 wrote

Where did I say anything about a personal attack? I never once said “stop personally attacking me”, or even mentioned myself at all.

I am kind of confused which “incorrect statement” you think you’re correcting, though, because I never said “there are more human cells than bacterial cells in a human body”, I never even said “bacteria make up but a small fraction of the mass or volume of the human body” (although the latter statement would be inarguably correct), I merely said that a human (as in our own cells) has a lot more cells than a single bacterium (one cell). Hundreds of trillions is clearly more than one. So I don’t entirely understand what exactly you thought you were “correcting”, because you were essentially addressing a claim that wasn’t even made (regardless of how accurate it is).

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orbital_narwhal t1_it6jhqa wrote

Depends on what your metric for “more” is.

  • Number of individual cells? Bacteria win.
  • Combined mass? Human body wins.
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regular_modern_girl t1_it744li wrote

The very paper they posted a link to above (as well as the one mentioned in the Nature article I posted, because they both say the same thing) makes it pretty clear that bacteria wins neither. There are about the same number of bacterial cells as human cells in an average human body, and they make up only around 0.2 kg of a human body’s mass.

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chunseye t1_it6op3b wrote

If you say "more cells" you're implying number of cells. If you say "more cell mass", then you're implying mass.

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