Your colon is a habitat of trillions of microorganisms! Discover how these little tiny creatures affect your day-to-day life and health.
You might have come across the word Microbiome or Microbiota without understanding what it really means! You've repeatedly been told to "trust your gut!"
What is there in your gut that you should lay all your trust in? "Just intestines?" Keep reading to learn more.
You have grown up knowing that microbes cause diseases. That's why we disinfect our homes and bodies to kill these microorganisms! The myth of germ-free!
In this article, I will do my best to explain to you what a microbiome is and why your gut microbiome is the key to your health.
I'll be using the terms microorganisms and microbes interchangeably.
What's a microbiome?
The term microbiome sounds too complex to understand, and it's a field that's quite complicated and keeps evolving.
In simple words, a microbiome is a collection of small living things (micro-organisms) living together in a given environment. These micro-organisms constitute different species, such as bacteria, viruses, protozoa, archaea, fungi, and their metabolites (by-products).
While the microbiome consists of the microorganisms, their by-products, structure, and environments, the microbiota only stands for living microorganisms!
Microorganisms are everywhere in our environment and constantly interact with humans, other animals, and plants.
You'll be surprised to learn that these micro-organisms live on you (on your skin, hair, nails) and inside you (mouth, intestines, lungs, uterus). The more surprising is that they are, in most cases, beneficial to you.
From a scientific perspective, we humans count about 43% of human cells, and the rest of us is made up of microorganism colonies that came up together and made us their host. In other words, we have fewer human cells than microorganisms living in us!
Microbes interact among themselves, and it can be either an interaction from the same or different species. These interactions create balance within a microbiome, and as you'll learn later in this article, an imbalance of a given microbiome can negatively affect your health.
In humans, we have different microbiomes colonizing different parts of the human body. We've, among others;
- Skin microbiome
- Oral microbiome
- Lung microbiome
- Liver microbiome
- Vagina microbiome (for ladies)
- Gut (colon) microbiome
- Uterine microbiome
- Ocular (eye) microbiome
The gut microbiome
The most studied microbiome is that of the colon, and your large intestines are home to trillions of microbes. Beneficial and harmful microorganisms live together, positively impacting your health but can, under some conditions, cause diseases.
The gut microbiome comprises microbes, including bacteria, viruses, and yeast. Bacteria can be further classified into phyla, classes, orders, families, genera, and species.
Every human is provided with a unique microbiome profile that was shaped at an early age.
How do you acquire your gut microbiome?
Depending on how you were born, whether you were breastfed or not, the weaning period, where you grew up, where you live, what you eat, or your lifestyle, all these factors affect the number and the types of microbes you host in your colon also known as the gut microbiome.
Even though a fetus has a primitive gut microbiome, most essential microbes are acquired during birth. A baby born naturally through the birth canal will get the vaginal microbiome from her mother.
The other microbiome is attained through skin contact, breastfeeding, and the environment.
However, a child born through the C-section is devoid of vaginal microbes and will acquire its microbiome from nurses, doctors, or the mom's hands (the first people who will hold the baby). Consequently, these babies will likely fall sick as they grow up easily!
The baby's earliest micro-organisms establish the composition of the gut microbiome that will thrive in adulthood, and any disruption can cause serious long-term health challenges in the future.
As the baby grows, it acquires more microbes from the environment and food. About 30 and more trillion microbes live in your large intestines, most of which are bacterial.
We are constantly exposed to environmental micro-organisms.
"Breastmilk’s ability to increase IgA and Bifidobacterium species and to decrease IL-6 levels, and subsequently inflammation reduce the risk of age-related gastroenteritis." NCBI
What role does the gut microbiome play in your health?
As mentioned earlier, different types of microorganisms live inside us.
Inside our colon, we offer them hospitality and nutrients.
In exchange, they shape and influence the development and function of our immune system. The gut microbiome continuously interacts with the microbiome within the other parts of the body
The gut microbiome is involved in;
- breaking down undigested foods
- producing essential compounds like SCFA (short-chain fatty acids) and vitamins
- protecting your small intestinal barrier,
- maintaining the function of your central nervous system (CNS),
- regulating hormones,
- producing neurotransmitters like serotonin, GABA, and dopamine
- protecting you from harmful pathogens
- recycling and producing some hormones
- managing weight and inflammation
Your gut microbiome is intrinsically connected to your brain through the vagus nerve, and it affects your moods, how you respond to stress, and your cognition function.
At birth, you had less brain functions and less gut microbes, as your diet evolved, so are your brain and the gut microbiome. As you age, your brain function declines just as your gut microbiome.
Having more beneficial micro-organisms is what keeps us healthy. But things don't stop there! You need a diversity of beneficial species.
Any unfavorable change that reduces the balance between health-promoting and gram-negative microbes is related to heart failure and cardiovascular disease. This gut imbalance is also associated with liver disease, neurogenerative diseases, auto-immune diseases, and others.
Therefore, it's crucial to maintain a healthy gut microbiome throughout our lifetime.
What factors affect the gut microbiome?
There are some factors that can negatively affect the integrity of the gut microbiome.
- Your diet: The food you eat also feeds your gut microbes. Plant foods provide fiber for the keystone bacteria (these are the ones that maintain the balance and mostly promote health). Highly processed foods, sugar, and high-fat diets will promote the growth of gram-negative microbes, leading to diseases and inflammation.
- Stress: When under stress, you've high cortisol levels. Elevated cortisol can alter the composition of the microbes by promoting the bad guys. Some of these microbes can only be active when your immune system is suppressed, and they can produce neurotransmitters that will force you to stay in stressful moods.
- Antibiotics and some medications: Each time you take oral antibiotics, you kill most of the microbes in your gut! The longer you take the antibiotics, the more bacteria are killed. While you can regain new microbes, or revive those that resisted the antibiotics, some of the microbes can take up to 2 years before they repopulate your gut.
- Sleep: Insufficient sleep will keep cortisol levels up! Your sleep cycle (circadian rhythm) influences the genes involved in various biological functions, including those of your gut microbiome. Lack of sleep also alters gut motility, eating habits, and hormones, all of which can disrupt the microbes in your colon.
- Relationships: What's even more interesting is that the gut microbiome of another person can positively or negatively influence your gut microbiome!
- Toxins: Environmental toxins, like air pollution, heavy metals, chemicals, or pesticides, can interfere with and cause harm to your gut microbiome, leaving you vulnerable and prone to diseases.
How do you improve your gut microbiome?
Your gut microbiome can't survive without food.
As we've seen earlier, these are living organisms, and like every other organism, they need good healthy food.
A healthy person has about 500 different microbial species living together in the gut.
Don't imagine them setting a table with folks and knives waiting for your food. No, they feast on what you can't digest.
You see, when you eat food, part of it is absorbed in the bloodstream, while the indigestible food is pushed into your colon.
As we saw above, it's in the colon that your gut microbiome has found residence. So when the indigestible food material gets here, the bacteria ferment and feed on it.
Something of interest to note here is that not all microbes feed on your indigested food. Some microbes can't feed on it directly. They have to wait for the waste to be broken down by the first digesters, then they can feed on the by-product produced by those first digesters.
There's a caveat! The more often you eat, the less some microbes will feed because they can not eat if the first digesters are constantly working on your indigestible food!
Additionally, you need to have a variety of foods because different species feed on different types of food!
Consider adding fermented foods and probiotics to your diet so that you can get new microbes in your gut.
Going beyond diet
What else can you do to improve your gut microbiome other than food?
- Nature: Going into nature quite often will expose you to microbes in the environment. Forest, woods, beaches, mountains, river banks, and green parc are all places that will help you acquire a new microbiome. If you've got a garden, work while barefoot, and do not wear gloves.
- Pets: Those who have pets have a diverse gut microbiome, especially if the pets go out, roll on grass, or walk in nature.
- Open your house to let in new microbes.
- Do not overly sterilize your house: Constantly disinfecting your hands, your house, or your environment and avoiding dirt at all costs is not good. Because you'll be less exposed to new microbes, and your body will be less challenged, leaving you even more prone to catching diseases.
To sum up
You have more micro-organisms than human cells, and these micro-organisms affect your health and well-being.
Only a small proportion of microorganisms are associated with diseases. The overwhelming majority of microbes are essential for a good ecosystem. Otherwise, believe it or not, if all microbes were harmful to us, then there wouldn't be any human living today since, as you've read above, these guys outnumber and colonized us.
Loss of diversity can result in “dysbiosis” (which means the altered composition of microbes), tremendously impacting the immune system and leading to illness.
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