The Microbes in Your body That You Couldn’t Live Without

Microbial Life – Inside the Bowels

When Adam Rutherford took an uncomfortable test he discovered that for a healthy body full of good bacteria, one would need to do much more than consume probiotic yoghurt. It started off with what could be defined as an creative invention with a fold-out sheet having sticky tabs towards the front and back just like a flattened starfish. The tabs stick tend to stick to the seat of the loo and when it is in place, it is said to form a kind of hammock on which the specimen is offered, set for sampling.

He had slipped on the rubber gloves in preparation for the process. When he had left the deposit on the hammock a sample of the stuff with a small spoon attached to the inside of a blue lid of a test tube and wrapped in an icepack which was frozen earlier was dispatched - `Map My Gut which revealed what microbial life seemed to be inside the bowels.

Recently, numerous findings have indicated that the microbes in the digestive system seem to be more significant to our health and well-being than earlier presumed. On an average, we tend to have around one thousand different species of bacteria in our guts and in total though difficult to count could be around trillions. Most of it has been doing beneficial for us.

Microbes Help to Build Our Bodies

It is said that our genomes comprises of about 20,000 genes though our microbes tend to carry about 500 times more. This enables them to perform some tricks, they help to digest food, produce vitamins and minerals and even prevent us from suffering from some disorder by crowding and killing infectious bacteria. Moreover, they have also shaped who we are on the inside as well as the outside.

 Ed Yong, author of I Contain Multitude informs that our microbes help to build our bodies; they tend to sculpt and renew our organs as we tend to age. Besides, they may also influence our behaviour and the way we think. There have been several studies in animals portraying that microbes in the guts could influence their mood, personality and resilience to anxiety and stress.

But how much of these effects would carry in humans is still to be understood. However, we do tend to be aware that there is a much larger variation between people in our microbiome than there is in our genome.

Fermented Food – Healthy Microbiome

Makeup of our microbial is based on our medical history, our diet and our location. It is said to be a signature which could be very different to even our nearest relatives. Less than 100 species of bacteria tend to cause infectious disorder and the thousands of kinds of microbes located in our guts are according to author Douglas Adam, `mostly harmless’.

Top of the list of the most desirable are microbes such as Akkermansia and the Christensenellaceae which have been linked with protection against weight gain. Methanobrevibacter is said to be helpful in squeezing more calories from food which means that one could eat less while Oxalobacter tends to be helpful in the prevention of formation of kidney stones. For a healthy microbiome, fermented food is said to be especially good.