A gut feeling…
The microbiome of the gut offers a ton of insight into different aspects of health. Analyzing the information is always just the first step, but from cleaving this data what can we find out about the ecosystems living inside us? There are a variety of factors that influence our gut from personal to environmental. Age, diet, antibiotic use, physiology, and where you’re living all play a role in morphing the microfauna that helps (and hurt) us in our daily lives.
Age plays a constantly changing role in our microbiome. We start by entering the world relatively fresh — collecting our starting biome from delivery on. As we age, our microbiome grows in diversity and stability. As we age on — our diversity remains high but the stability decreases as we enter into our later stage life cycles.
Diet too plays an obvious role as the food we eat directly enters the gut microbiome. It’s interesting to note that long and short-term changes occur in the gut microbiome due to diet. You can look at the differences between someone eating a rich Western diet and that of someone with less processed foods — They have a pretty clear separation on the types of microbes living in the gut. Changing diet does impact the microbes that are present during a sampling. This contributes to the idea that rapid changes do occur in response to diet.
Antibiotics are an obvious altering variable to the gut microbiome. They indiscriminately target microbial, regardless of if they’re pathogenic. Microbes are also starting to develop antibiotic resistance, which can play a role in how they maintain stature inside the microbiome. The changes in response to antibiotics are variable amongst people, sometimes the biome returns quickly, and in others it can take months or a year.
One of the most interesting applications to studying the microbiome I’ve seen is in the study of obesity in mice. In simple terms, they found that obese mice were absorbing energy at a more efficient rate. Which would be great if food wasn’t as abundant as it is today. To continue adding evidence to this hypothesis, they performed fecal transplants from obese mice into germ-free mice and found they still gained weight at a faster rate than compared to the lean mice population. It gives credit to the idea that we can alter diet as a therapy once more studies have been completed and we further our understanding of the physiological impact the microbiome has.
Join me in learning about the microbiome!