What a time to be alive! All is on the move and up for grabs. The world has become pliable once more, with old ideas rising again, regenerated.
I’ve just read a book by Dr Michael Moseley which demonstrates the importance the gut microbiome (your particular collection of microbes) has on one’s mood, weight and immune system.
The gut is like a ‘second brain’. We call it the enteric system and it is made up of neurons; The same cells as those in the brain.
There are over 100 million neurons in the gut , which is as many as you would find in the brain of a cat! These neurons are spread out in a thin mesh that extends all the way from the throat to the rectum.
Our gut houses more than 50 trillion microbes and there are at least 1000 different species; A richer diversity of life than you would find in a rainforest!
We are divided beings. only half the cells of our body are human, the rest are not.
Genetically though, we are definitely outgunned.
The human genome — the full set of genetic instructions for a human being, is made up of 20,000 instructions called genes.
But add all the genes in our microbiome together and the figure comes out between two and 20 million microbial genes.
Prof Sarkis Mazmanian, a microbiologist from Caltech, argues:
“We don’t have just one genome, the genes of our microbiome present essentially a second genome which augment the activity of our own.
“What makes us human is, in my opinion, the combination of our own DNA, plus the DNA of our gut microbes.”
Obviously the over-riding factor which dictates the makeup and diversity of our microbiome is the food that we eat.
This can be a vicious circle because the microbes in your gut actually decide how much energy your body extracts from the food eaten; They control the hunger signals you receive and also help decide the foods you crave.
These microbes also ‘teach’ and regulate our entire immune system.
In addition they convert the food that we can’t digest into a wide range of hormones and other chemicals. These, new research is revealing, can control our mood, as well as our appetite and general health.
The message, ‘to eat more fibre’, has been around for quite some time, but primarily in relation to its support in the physical transit of wastes through the system.
Now research is beginning to show just how important ‘insoluble fibre’ is. (ie food that isnt degraded by the small intestine and instead reaches the large colon)
Here it is eaten/fermented by our microbes and transformed into hormones, vitamins and other useful chemicals.
Fibre intake in western society is ridiculously low. One of the last hunter-gatherer societies consuming a wild organic diet, known as the Hadza tribe (Tanzania) take in between 100–150mg of fibre daily. The average daily intake of fibre for a man in the UK is 20mg.
The study of how the creatures in our gut affects our brain has been termed ‘psychobiotics’.
Jeroen Raes, a microbiologist at the University of Leuven in Belgium, and his colleagues reported their findings in the Nature science journal.
From a sample of 1054 subjects, 173 of which had been diagnosed with depression or had done poorly on a quality of life survey, It was found that microbes of the types, Coprococcus and Dialister, were missing from the microbiomes of the depressed subjects, but not from those with a high quality of life.
Prof Rob Knight, from University of California has performed experiments on mice that were born in the most sanitised world imaginable.
Their entire existence is completely free of microbes.
He says: “We were able to show that if you take lean and obese humans and take their faeces and transplant the bacteria into mice you can make the mouse thinner or fatter depending on whose microbiome it got.”
Topping up obese mice with lean bacteria also helped the mice lose weight.
It always seems to take many years for the public consciousness to catch up with and digest the latest ongoing research. We in the western world have had 50 years experimenting with high fat, high sugar and heavily processed foods. It remains to be seen if we can actually figure out why we are amid an unprecedented epidemic of obesity and problems with mental health.
