YOU ARE AN ECOSYSTEM
Like any healthy ecosystem, your body is teeming with life. Trillions of microorganisms call you home. The vast majority of those organisms reside inside your gut, where 100 trillion individual bacteria cells, made up of over 160 different species in a balance unique to you, work to create and maintain balance.
The bacteria in your gut outnumber the cells in your body by ten times, and the genes of those microbes outnumber your own genes by 100 times! Numerically speaking, you are more microbe than you are a separate body. Just think about that for a minute.
You Need Them and They Need You
Your gut microbes exist in symbiosis with you—you give your microbes a place to live and provide food for them to eat, and they produce nutrients for you, help crowd out potential pathogens, and help to keep your immune system healthy.
Your lifestyle—what you eat, your stress level, your activity level, how you sleep, and even the medications you take—affects your gut microbes. In turn, the composition and diversity of those microbes, and how they ferment the food that passes through your gut, affects you.
Loss of Microbial Diversity
Some researchers believe, that the increase in certain illnesses is due to the loss of ancestral microorganisms within and on the body. Loss of microbial diversity (LOMD) is the most common finding in people with gut imbalance.3*
Recent studies have shown that the gut microbial diversity found in primitive hunter-gatherer cultures is much greater than that of traditional farming or fishing cultures, which is still much greater than that of Westernized urban populations. 4* The high gut microbial diversity of more primitive populations is thought to allow them to better withstand the perpetual presence of pathogens or parasites, and to better respond to seasonal dietary changes. 6*
Healthy diet and lifestyle play a big role on gut microbial diversity, but diet alone is not enough to restore lost microbes, especially over generations of poor eating habits. A recent important study demonstrated that microbial diversity is lost after four generations of consuming a low-fiber diet. 9*
Strain Diversity Is Key
Just like in the rainforest where biodiversity is high, a diverse variety of organisms in your gut is what helps maintain the health of the ecosystem— which in this case is you! Over 1000 different bacterial species are known to be found in the guts of humans, but only about 160 are found in any one person.10*
Just like in a rainforest, where different organisms in different habitats can perform many of the same functions a rainforest requires, the microbes in your gut also share the workload, so to speak.
Many microbes perform similar functions, so while one person may have a higher amount of one bacterial species or strain, another person will have a higher number of a different strain but will still experience the same health benefits.
That’s why gut microbial diversity is so crucial. In a healthy gut, when one important microbe is diminished, another is available to step in and do the work.
Taking all of these factors into consideration, Vital Planet has formulated a complete line of probiotic supplements to support optimal gut health. We invite you to stop by Marlene's to explore your options, and start building a better body ecosystem today!
*These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.
3 Mosca A, Leclerc M, Hugot JP. Gut Microbiota Diversity and Human Diseases: Should We Reintroduce Key Predators in Our Ecosystem?” Front Microbiol. 2016 Mar 31;7:455. doi: 10.3389/fmicb.2016.00455
4 Gupta VK, Paul S, Dutta C. “Geography, ethnicity or subsistence-specific variations in human microbiome composition and diversity.” Front Microbiol. 2017 Jun 23:8:1162. doi: 10.3389/fmicb.2017.01162 Sci Adv. 2015 Apr; 1(3): e1500183. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.1500183
6 Morton ER, Lynch J, Froment A, et al. “Variation in rural African gut microbiota is strongly correlated with colonization by Entamoeba and subsistence.” PLoS Genet. 2015 Nov 30;11(11):e1005658. doi: 10.1371/journal. pgen.1005658
9 Sonnenburg ED, Smits SA, Tikhonov M, et al. “Diet-induced extinctions in the gut microbiota compound over generations.” Nature. 2016 Jan 14;529(7585):212-5. doi: 10.1038/nature16504
10 Qin J, Raes J, Arumugam M, et al. “A human gut microbial gene catalog established by metagenomic sequencing.” Nature. 2010 Mar 4; 464(7285): 59–65. doi: 10.1038/nature08821
