Microbiome and Your Health A Primer

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An Introduction

“The states of health or disease are the expressions of the success or failure experienced by the organism in its efforts to respond adaptively to environmental challenges.”

 --Rene Dubos, 1965

A delightful little video to get you started: “The Hidden Universe of the Human Microbiome.”

There are 100 trillion microbes in our gut.

  • There are only 10 trillion “you” cells. This means you are out-numbered by the microbes in your gut by 10:1. It also means that there is about 100 times the amount of microbe DNA than human DNA in your body.

  • Microbes: mostly bacteria, but also fungi, parasites, viruses, retroviruses and now we also know about bacteriophages that infect our gut microbes and influence their behavior and our body’s response to our microbes.

  • There are ~1050 different species of microbes and counting.

We are only just beginning to investigate and understand how gut microbes work together and with our body’s immune system.

  • Our body and the microbe ecosystem are completely dependent on each other for life. Microbes produce vitamins and other nutrients we need for survival and program our immune system, metabolism and behavior to a significant degree. They rely on us for food and a habitable environment that tolerates their existence.

  • Altogether, the human-microbe ecosystem is considered a completely interdependent superorganism.

We are just beginning to study these interactions/affects:

No 2 people’s microbiome is the same.

  • However, members of groups that live together, such as families, have similar microbial ecosystems.

  • There are likely vastly different microbiomes from one culture to the next. What is the ‘healthy’ microbiome for people who grew up in one culture may not be the same for another. And again, what may be more important than what microbes is what metabolites are being created by our microbe-human superorganism.

Why Do We Care?

The gut microbiome is part of the “main frame” of your health. The microbiome has a major impact on human metabolism, the immune system, our brain, behavior and disease development.

~75-80% of our immune system is in our gut!

Our microbiome-immune system is programmed early in life and has significant impacts on health throughout our life.

  • The microbiome is impacted throughout life, but key immune-microbiome programming occurs early, within the first 3 years of life. 

  • While there is likely some microbial transfer to a baby as a fetus, the main starter for our microbiome starts at our birth -either from our mother’s vaginal canal or through the hands that deliver us through c-section. 

  • Other significant influencers of the development of our gut microbiome include diet, whether a baby was breast or formula fed, infections, antibiotic use, other medications, our exposure to pets and the environment, sanitation and exercise. 

  • Also, the immune, nervous (brain) and endocrine (hormone) systems are not separate, but communicate and coordinate as one system. Imbalances or disturbances in any part of these systems will create imbalances in the others if not rectified.  

  • This early programming of our microbe-immune superorganism sets up our predisposition to many health conditions later in life including  IBS, IBD, mood, cognition, autoimmunity, Type II diabetes, metabolism, and influences conditions such as autism.

Since so much of the immune system (75-80%) is in our gut, addressing diet, digestion, and the gut microbiome is foundational to treating inflammation anywhere in our body. In recent years, we are learning that the metabolomics of the gut may be more important than the types of species in our gut.

  • The metabolome is the sum total of products produced from all the activity cells do to sustain life.  

  • So it’s not just “who” is part of our microbe-human body superorganism, but what jobs they are doing.

Dysbiosis

  • “Dys-” meaning imbalanced

  • “-bio” meaning life, or microbes in this case

  • Dysbiosis is a general term for a sub-ideal microbiome ecosystem.

  • Dysbiosis can trigger our immune system and lead to inflammation in the body. Inflammation is the heart of most disease processes.

  • Poor diet, stress, frequent antibiotic use and other medications, toxicants, lack of exercise, can all allow the growth of undesirable levels of microbes and not support the good microbes. This establishes ‘dysbiosis.”

What Can We Do About It?

Your gut microbiome is like a rainforest. Similarly, once this ecosystem is out of balance, it is not as simple as eradicating invasive species (antibiotics) or putting in ‘good’ species (probiotics) to get a functioning, integrated gut microbiome-immune system back again. The following steps will help you cultivate a good ‘rainforest.’

1) Elimination

Our food and our environment are the two major influencers of our gut microbiome. Cleaning these areas up is the foundational first step to a healthy gut microbiome. The other steps of the process will not be able to succeed if the sources of dysregulation are not removed.

What you eat is also what your gut microbes eat.

  • What is good food for our microbes? Plants. Fiber. Fermented foods. 

  • What is bad for our microbes? Basically anything invented after about 1920. (As a general rule of health, if you couldn’t eat it before 1900, you probably shouldn’t.)

  • I recommend a diverse and broad Paleo-type diet.

Environmental factors also affect our gut microbiome. Medications, frequent antibiotic use, chemicals and heavy metals, stress and exercise (or lack of).

  • Lab testing or elimination protocols can help determine your specific triggers.

2) Microbiome management.

For a lot of people, simply removing dysregulating elements will allow their gut microbime-human superorganism to heal. If you have gut issues or any other established health dysrgegulation or disease, you may need more advanced gut microbiome testing and treatment. Also, you should not have to increasingly eliminate foods or be sensitive to a lot of other environmental triggers. If this continues to be the case, then you definitely need to start step 2.

Identifying and killing off pathogenic microbes, or microbes that our body may be reacting to unduly.

Re-inoculating with beneficial microbes (ie: fermented food and/or probiotics) and feeding those microbes what they need to survive (fiber and/or prebiotics) are key steps to cultivating a good rainforest.

3) Immune system management

The first step of treating inflammation is to figure out and address whatever the immune system is creating inflammation in response to (eg: gut microbiome dysbiosis).

Even when we remove the triggers that caused immune system imbalances and inflammation, it may not completely go away. Calming down inflammation or supporting the restoration of immune system balance may also be necessary.

Natural immune calming or anti-inflammatory treatments such as herbs and supplements (curcumin, Boswellia, fish oil, SPM’s) or therapies (acupuncture, hyperthermia) or even pharmaceutical agents (steroids, NSAID’s) may be necessary.

For some, certain genetics play a role in determining our response to our gut microbiome and environmental triggers. Certain combinations of genetic variants may contribute to a failure to have a proper immune response to microbes, improper communication of that response or failure to resolve the immune response. This can lead to longer term inflammatory consequences and autoimmune disease.

In these cases, longer term immune-balancing therapies may be necessary, even when the original immune-triggers have been resolved.

4) Detoxification

Having dysbiosis and/or inflammation creates a greater than normal metabolic load as the body is working harder than normally. Supporting detoxification will help you feel better as the gut microbiome is treated, reduce the the impact of ‘backed-up’ metabolic load and impact to your body.

5) Repair

Once the fires are put out, you can start to rebuild the house. This may include intestinal permeability agents such as L-glutamine, replacing nutrients that have become deficient and reprogramming the nervous system from stress.

Note: this is where a lot of people start, and hence do not succeed in using “natural” therapies to address their illnesses. We need to start with steps 1 and 2, eliminate the underlying drivers, to be able to succeed in repairing and restoring the rest of the body.

A Final Word

Symptoms and inflammation are our call to action. Symptoms are not the cause, but the alert that something is awry. When you notice intestinal or digestive ailments, or inflammation in your body, it is trying to get your attention that something is not working properly in the body. The processes that create the symptoms are working to try and correct that imbalance.

Healing takes time, In Oriental medicine, we say it takes at least half as much time to repair the dysregulation as it has taken to create it. Cultivating and rebuilding your gut microbiome-human “superorganism,” Is not as simple as taking a round of antibiotics or some probiotics (though that may be a good start.).

Also, research on the gut microbiome is only about 20 years old. We have a ton more to learn about it, and even more to learn about how to use this information to help make us healthier and heal disease. No two people’s health issues are exactly the same, so expect some variation and trial and error in treatment processes and time.

The process of healing can be a transformative journey, where we get to attune to our needs, recognize how we may not be living true to ourselves, and develop resilience. Working with an adept practitioner(s) who can help you interpret, navigate and diagnose the process is instrumental, but in the end, the course of treatment is up to you. Take this as an opportunity to gain a more authentic and vital life.

Ready to experience total health through Integrative and Functional Medicine? Contact us by calling 804-288-1111 or click the button below to send a message.

Functional Medicine, Digestive HealthTressa Breindel