What is your microbiome & why is it important?

Microbes:

Microbes help you digest food, protect against infection, and even maintain your reproductive health. They live on and inside the body; they are not invaders but beneficial colonizers. We tend to focus on destroying bad microbes. But taking care of good ones may be even more important. Did you know that we, as humans, are composed of 100 trillion microbes? Putting this into perspective, microbes outnumber our human cells 10 to 1, and are mostly found in the large intestine.

The Center for Ecogenetics and Environmental Health, University of Washington

Biome

A biome is a naturally occurring community, essentially an ecosystem with different species of microbes that live in different places. Just like the plants and animals in a forest, the different kinds of microbes in and on your body interact with each other.

American Museum of Natural History

Micro + Biome….and YOU!
Microbes play an important role in our body shape by helping us digest and ferment foods, as well as by producing chemicals that shape our metabolic rates.

The bacteria in the microbiome help:

·      digest our food

·      regulate our immune system

·      protect against other bacteria that cause disease

Although microbes have been around for more than 3.5 billion years, science confirming the validity and influence of the microbiome was not generally recognized until the late 1990s. We are now seeing a tremendous amount of research confirming how many symptoms, conditions and disorders have root cause in the microbiome.

Autoimmune diseases such as diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, muscular dystrophy, multiple sclerosis, and fibromyalgia are associated with dysfunction in the microbiome.

Conditions and symptoms that root in the microbiome:  Diarrhea, Constipation, Inflammatory Bowel Disease, Upper Respiratory infections, Crohn’s disease, Cold and Flu, Yeast Infections High Cholesterol, Urinary Tract Infection, Vaginal Infections, Dental Issues, Lactose Intolerance, Improved Sleep, Eczema, Stress

Passing It On To Your Kids & Epigenetics

Disease-causing microbes accumulate over time, changing gene activity and metabolic processes and resulting in an abnormal immune response against substances and tissues normally present in the body. Autoimmune diseases appear to be passed in families not by DNA inheritance but by inheriting the family’s microbiome.

Epigenetics is the study of how your behaviors and environment can cause changes that affect the way your genes work. Unlike genetic changes, epigenetic changes are reversible and do not change your DNA sequence, but they can change how your body reads a DNA sequence.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Want to balance your microbiome & bring balance to your body? Consider adding a  good quality probiotic and couple a few lifestyle changes, and see what happens!