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It’s time to get to know your microbiome, the community of bacteria hitching a ride with you as you journey through life. These organisms coexist with you with mutual benefits. You provide them with a safe home while they support your health in a myriad of ways.
It’s worth learning about this bacterial community, so you can understand what they need to thrive.
Meet Your Microbiome
Your microbiome consists of billions of bacteria, fungi, yeasts and even viruses living in a complex ecosystem.
Incredibly, you have significantly more bacterial DNA in your body than you have of your own. In other words, you are more bacterial than human. This is despite the microbes living inside you usually going about their life without giving any hint as to their presence.
The formula is simple – you feed them and provide them with a cosy, warm, damp home. In turn, they manufacture substances your body can’t produce itself to keep you, their host, healthy. It’s a match made in heaven.
How Does the Microbiome Benefit Health?
Although the term microbiome is often quoted as having been coined as recently as 2001, research has been examining the microbes inside us for many years. However nowadays, sophisticated scientific techniques are revealing more and more about the importance of these organisms to health.
In the early years, it was assumed the bugs in your gut simply helped with digestion. Although this is one of their roles, science now knows their influence extends well beyond this. As they go about their business, they busily manufacture a huge array of chemicals which then travel all around your body via your bloodstream.
Your Microbiome Supports Gut Health
The microbes in your gut live mainly in your large intestine. They help you digest parts of food your body cannot, as well as producing certain vitamins, including vitamin K and some B vitamins. Finally, they help keep the lining of your gut, where nutrient absorption takes place, in good condition.
Your Microbiome Counteracts Inflammation
Certain types of friendly gut microbes emit chemicals capable of regulating inflammation. Although inflammation is a necessary and protective mechanism to protect your body from potential threats, once the danger is over, it should subside. The problem is, often it doesn’t have a chance to do this. Chronic, low-grade inflammation is at the root of chronic diseases, including cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes and even cancer. This is where the inflammation-regulating chemicals produced by your microbes are so useful.
Bacteria in the microbiome directly impact the immune system, with certain types of beneficial bacteria influencing anti-inflammatory immune cells (1). In fact, most of your immune system resides in your gut, where it has a close relationship with the microbes living there. A healthy microbial population will instruct immune cells to correctly distinguish between friend and foe.
Your Microbiome Boosts Mood
Your gut microbes directly influence your brain, changing how brain cells react. Your gut and brain are intimately connected via pathways of nerves. However, the microbes in your gut also release neurotransmitters, chemicals affecting mood. At the same time, they produce other substances affecting the availability of neurotransmitters like GABA and dopamine.
Certain types of gut bacteria have been found in research to be correlated with mood and quality of life scores (2).
Your Microbiome Helps Balance Hormones
Your gut microbes help balance hormones such as oestrogen and testosterone. They do this by activating the hormones and changing them into different forms that are more or less potent (3).
You Have a Family of Microbiomes
Scientists are now learning that although the main microbiome is located in the gut, you have other microbiomes all around your body. Bacterial communities live in the lungs, vagina, on the skin, and in the mouth and nose. They’re shaped by your gut microbiome, which acts a little like a master controller. However, they do have characteristics of their own and in turn influence your gut microbiome. For example, your oral microbiome is closely linked with heart health.
How Can Dysbiosis Affect Health?
Sadly, often all is not well within the microbial ecosystem. Modern life, with processed foods, sugar consumption, antibiotics, stress, and pollution, adversely impacts the microbiome. Beneficial species become depleted and pathogenic ones take over, releasing inflammation-provoking chemicals. The population may become skewed so those bacteria only meant to be present in small numbers become dominant. In some cases, for example in SIBO, bacteria grow in locations they aren’t supposed to colonise.
Dysbiosis can cause poor digestion, an unhealthy intestinal lining, bloating, and cramping. It can lead to your immune system reacting to innocuous substances, causing allergies or autoimmune issues. An imbalance in microbes frequently provokes chronic inflammation, hormone imbalance and cardiovascular issues, too. Dysbiosis is associated with oxidative stress, ageing and DNA damage.
As in any ecosystem, diversity in your microbiome is best. Studies have consistently found people with a wide range of microbes living in their guts are less likely to suffer from chronic disease, with the reverse also holding true.
Your Unique Microbiome
Incredibly, your microbiome is as unique as you. Because your diet, lifestyle and even your attitude towards stress all influence your microbiome, your ecosystem will be different from everyone else’s. This demonstrates how a one-size-fits-all approach to healthcare and nutrition can never work for everyone. This is where Integrative Medicine comes in.
Help and Support for Your Healthy Microbiome
Because your microbes support so many aspects of your health, when things go wrong, a huge array of adverse symptoms can result. Fortunately, you no longer need to guess what’s happening in your microbiome. We offer functional tests examining the DNA present in a sample of your stool. Results reveal the types of microbes you have living in your gut, whether they are helpful or harmful, and their relative ratios. All your microbes have evolved to coexist alongside one another. Therefore, the activity of the community rather than individual bacteria is most important regarding their impact on health.
Test results highlight the causes of your health issues, enabling our practitioners to recommend targeted interventions to improve the shape of your microbiome. For example, simple strategies like increasing fibre intake from whole plant foods, prioritising sleep, and stress management, while consuming fermented foods or probiotic supplements, can all help nurture your microbes.
Book your 360 Gastro Intestinal Mapping test here, including practitioner interpretation.
Or book your full Integrative Health Assessment to deep dive into your health and access expert-led testing at a discounted rate.
Start nourishing your inner ecosystem today!
