The Microbiome

These days we keep hearing different opinions about this elusive thing called microbiome. What is that and how it can help us? You are in the right place to find out, through my next series of blog posts about it.

Every human microbiome is different and it is continuously changing during the course of one's life. Many factors play a role in the development of the human microbiome. Even early life events, like mode of delivery and gestational age at birth can play a role in seeding and shaping the microbes that colonize the gastro-intestinal tract. Later in life there are also changes in the macrobiome, correlated with the ageing process. Dietary habits impact on the microbiome, and diet related diseases such as obesity and metabolic syndrome will influence it. Effects of the short term dietary changes will be analyzed too.

There are many benefits coming from our microbiome, as microbes digest food components, produce some of the vitamins ( K, B12 ) and stimulate our immune system. Our entire body is colonized by microbes, and those microbes are actually keeping us healthy. They protect against pathogens (microbes that make us ill), by simply taking up the space, preventing colonization by other microbes. A system without microbes is very vulnerable to infectious microorganisms (we are talking here about newborns and germ-free pets). Having a healthy microbiome will stimulate our immune system, as a healthy immune system needs to be exposed to different microbes and compounds and find out what is harmless and what can cause a disease, other way it cannot maturate. If the immune system is not mature, it can turn its attention to non-pathogenic substances, attacking them. Turning against food particles, it can cause allergies. Turning against own body, it can cause auto-immune diseases like multiple sclerosis or diabetes type 1. Working in the right way, the immune system will be on symbiosis with the macrobiota, a mutual helping alliance that helps the immune system to figure out which microbes and particles are trustworthy and which are not. The microbiota also produces some substances that can influence our metabolism, our feeling of hunger and our weight gain or weight loss. The digestion of fiber by our microbes leads to secondary products that our body can use as an energy source (they increase the energy yield from our food, so we need to eat less). The microbiome can produce vitamins that we absorb and use (vitamin B complex and vitamin K).

At the moment we wash our hands a lot, sometime using soap that kill 99.99% of bacteria, we eat meat that was previously treated with potent antibiotics or we use antibiotics directly, and in doing this, we kill the pathogens, but we also kill a part of our "friendly" microbes. We strongly suggest to check the products you use to see if they contain any antibiotics, as excessive and unnecessary use of it, especially at young age, can lead to obesity risk, diabetes type 2 and auto-immune diseases. There are many other diseases linked to the macrobiome disruption. There is a hygiene hypothesis  stating that lack of early childhood exposure to all kind of microbes, infectious agents and parasites will suppres the natural development of our immune system.

Next post: Microbiome study