Macrobiota - mucus and milk fermentation

The food that you consume is the one feeding your microbiome. Everything that cannot be digested by yourself it is used by your microbiome, which will transform all these indigestible components into energy that it is used by you.

Some beneficial microbes nibble on you eating the mucus produced by your body, as the human body will produce around 10 liters of mucus every day. The mucus is made of a protein backbone with chains of sugar molecules attached to it, known as mucus glycans. Some microbes adapted to eat these glycan structures produced by our body. These microbes are specialized in the consumption of the host-produced glycans, such as in mucus. Another type of glycans produced by the human body are the human milk oligosaccharides. The glycans in mucus and human milk are structurally alike, they are awkward sugars, rarely found in plants. This is why not many microbes can degrade these glycans.

The dietary glycan starch is a sugar chain of only glucose molecules, while primary sugars of mucus and milk glycans are n-acetilglucosamine, fucose, manose and sialic acid. Because these can be used by the microbiota, they are considered pre-biotic substances to nurture specific microorganisms (who serve a beneficial and protective role for the most).

The group of bacteria specialized in the degradation of the human milk oligosaccharides are known as bifidobacteria. In early life , bifidobacteria plays a role in energy harvest for the infant, they also play a crucial role in the immune and metabolic imprinting. Later in life, permanent colonization of the mucosal layer also leads to immune and metabolic regulation contributing to the host health. Because many pathogens use mucus as a signal to attack, the beneficial mucus colonizing microbiota members will protect against such pathogens. The host tolerates microbes in the mucosal layer and even produce extra mucus when sensing their presence. Another reason of existence of awkward sugars is that, if all bacteria will degrade the mucosal layer, this could be problematic.

In conclusion, some microbiota members like eating the glycans from mucus and milk. Early life, they release energy from human milk, later in life they serve as a line of defense against pathogens. They also stimulate a healthy host immune and metabolic response. Our body will nurture specific members of the microbiota by producing special sugars.

Next post will be about long versus short dietary habits.

See you soon!
G.

Microbiota diet and disease

Probably everyone knows that our microbiota is an anaerobic chamber with trillions of bacteria which work together and their combined efforts help us break down food and harvest as much energy as possible from the food we eat. Our microbiota depends a lot on the food we consume. In return, it will help us to digest the food we consume. Without the bacteria from our gut, the nutritional value of our food would be a lot lower (we would probably eat 5 times as much food to reach the same energy levels).

When microbes start to degrade the fibers from our food, this process is called fermentation. Microbial fermentation is a common process used to produce food (cheese, beer, bread etc.). All these foods have microorganisms added to them during the making process, leading to special taste or alcohol. Our microbiota also carries out a wide range of fermentation processes, using anaerobic fermentation in order to sustain the inner environment. The bacteria ca ferment both sugar and protein from our food, leading to the production of many chemicals with energetic value, essential vitamins and health stimulating products that are released in our guts by the microbiota. Many compounds are short chain fatty acids such as lactic acid, acetate, butyrate and propionate. All these short chain fatty acids are a major source of energy for our intestinal cells. Almost 10% of the energy used by our intestinal cells comes from the microbial produced butyrate. The butyrate and the propionate have several health benefits (pain reduction and inflammation response reduction).

The microbiota is actually a microbial ecologic network, so, for optimal functionality, we need to have a microbial diverse microbiota. Our gut is an anaerobic chamber with trillions of bacteria working together and their combined effort helps us to break down food and to harvest as much energy as possible from the food we eat.

I will post next about mucus and milk fermentation.
See you soon!
G.

Microbiota cycle - reloaded

I have a new series of articles about the microbiota, all of them fascinating from some point of view. i will start soon with  microbiota diet and disease.

See you soon
G.