By Sarah Buck, ND I
t seems that the microbiome is a term that has been on many health professional’s lips in the past few years. This is not without good reason. The microbiome is composed of bacteria, fungi, and viruses that live within our digestive tract. The gut hosts over 100 trillion microbes in the micro- biota. That’s about 10 times as many cells as there are in our entire bodies! We are basically under the control of what lives within us, though we do have the power to make choices about how we feed our microbiome and this, in turn, alters the composition of it. The microbiome needs to eat, it makes waste products, as well neurotransmitters (chemical signals that act on our nervous system), vitamins, and hormones. So, the microbiome eats what we eat, it excretes waste, and also interacts with our waste. The microbiome can even transform the waste ready to leave our body into waste that is absorbed all over again, sometimes in a more toxic form. The micro- biota, in releasing neurotransmitters, can cause our moods to change, make us anxious, or depressed. And maybe most importantly of all, our microbiome trains our immune system.
The Microbiome and What We Ingest The microbiome and a nice thick layer of mucus are
what protect the one-cell-thick lining of our intestines from damage and foreign invasion (viruses, bacteria, large proteins and antigens). Changes in the microbiome occur quickly and are always changing based on what we ingest and what hormones are released in response to stress, sleep, and exercise. Perhaps the most direct control we have over our microbiome is what we ingest. The microbiota that make up the microbiome will turn dietary fiber, for example, into short chain fatty acids that are ideal food for maintaining the health of our intestinal cells. The composition of our diets, how much and what kind of fat, fiber, protein, and carbohy- drates all impact the composition of our microbiome.
Medications also have the ability to change the micro-
biome. The most well understood is antibiotics. Antibiotics are fairly non-specific and kill many of the bacteria that they come in contact with, and therefore are implicated in deci- mating the amount and diversity of the bacteria in the gut and the microbiome, often permanently. When the microbi- ome composition changes and becomes unbalanced it can lead to changes in the lining of the gut, the immune system,
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