When we talk about the microbiome we’re essentially talking about the trillions of bacteria, yeast, mold, archaea that are all growing inside your body. Most of them live in the gut but they are in fact spread out throughout your whole entire body, so all of your organs for example your eyes, your lungs to your feet, everything has a microbiome, your skin that covers every surface of your body has its own microbiome. All of these microbiomes are connected to each other for example if you have a problem with your gut microbiome, you might have vaginal infections like thrush or UTI so if you experience antibiotics for gastroenteritis or get food poisoning you may indeed get a UTI after it. That is because the antibiotics have affected the whole entire microbiome of both the gut and the vagina. Every surface of your body is covered with bacteria. These bacteria are doing a really good job for you and they need to be respected. We don’t need to be sterilizing them or washing them away. The COVID-19 pandemic has been an expression of what is actually going on in our world, that we are trying to over sterilize, eat the wrong foods, live too hygienically, live a stressful life, use too many toxins on our skins and in our bodies.
We need to respect that the microbiome is doing a really good job for us but most of us don’t even know what the microbiome is or what it does. The microbiome or lets call these bacteria, for the sake of simplicity today. They digest food, they produce certain chemicals, vitamins, minerals, hormones, neurochemicals etc that your body needs and they prevent bad bacteria from gaining ground. These beneficial microbes live in symbiosis with you and they actually account for 100 cells of bacteria for every one human cell. In fact we are much more bacteria than we are human cells! In fact we are 1 billion human cells to 100 billion bacterial cells. Your bacteria contain all of your DNA, your bacteria make those hormones and transmit messages all over your body to carry out all the bodily functions. The bacteria in our microbiome has an enormous impact on our health and whether we get sick or not or how fast we recover. Our individual microbiomes are as unique as our fingerprints. Your microbiome was shaped at birth when you come down your mother’s birth canal (if she had a normal vaginal delivery that is). I was very lucky to be breastfed by my mother until I was nine months old. So I got the best start in life. Babies under the age of 1 years of age should not be having formula milk as their main source of food. Many bacteria live in our gut even pathogenic microbes like clostridia, but as long as they are not over 2% they generally don’t cause any illness. It’s only when it goes beyond this that it becomes a problem. Increasing our bodies quantity of faecalibacterium praunutzi. This is an excellent microbe to help rebuild the immune system. So where do we get this microbe from? This is a probiotic that grows when we eat a lot of the alium family, foods like garlic, onions, cauliflower, asparagus, leeks, spring onions etc. If we have content of at least 10% of praunutzi bacteria in our microbiome we usually see a powerful immune system at play for that individual. For more tips follow @gowithyourgutclinic on facebook and Instagram or email my secretary info@gowithyourgutclinic for appointments.
