Microbiome

Note: Many pages still need to be moved from Antibiotics, probiotics

Unlocking the ‘gut microbiome’ – and its massive significance to our health The Guardian - July 2021

Scientists are only just discovering the enormous impact of our gut health – and how it could hold the key to everything from tackling obesity to overcoming anxiety and boosting immunity

A few snips from their excellent overview

• "Your gut microbiome weighs about 2kg and is bigger than the average human brain. It’s a bustling community of trillions of bacteria, archaea, fungi and viruses, containing at least 150 times more genes than the human genome. We are filled to the brim with microbes, which form microbiomes on our skin, in our mouths, lungs, eyes, and reproductive systems. These have co-evolved alongside us since the beginning of human history. But the gut’s is the largest and most significant for our short- and long-term health. It is massively complex and its residents vary enormously from person to person. According to a study in 2020 by the European Bioinformatics Institute, which pooled more than 200,000 gut genomes to create a genetic database of human gut microbes, 70% of the microbial populations it listed – 2,000 species – hadn’t yet been cultured in a lab and were previously unknown."
• “Over the past 80 years and since the dawn of antibiotics, there has been multi-generational loss of microbes that appear to be important for human health,” he says. “They’re passed from mother to child [during birth, via breastmilk and skin contact] throughout the generations, but at some point in the last three or four generations, we lost some. We’re not entirely sure if the cause was our lifestyle, our diet, cleanliness in our homes or the use of antibiotics. We’re also missing certain immune stimulants that people in the developing world have plenty of.”
• To do this, microbes need about 30g of fibre a day, but the average intake in the UK is just 10-15g. Is this why modern, low fibre, ultra-processed, high-sugar diets seem so problematic for human gut health?
• The great opportunity – but also the great difficulty – of gut microbiome science is that poor gut health is associated with such a vast range of conditions, from obesity and degenerative brain diseases to depression, inflammatory bowel disease and chronic inflammation. “The microbiome is associated with everything,”
• "Spector’s 30-year-long study of 15,000 twins, TwinsUK, and his PREDICT studies have shown that even genetically identical people respond to the same foods very differently (our microbiomes are so variable that twins share only 30% of the same gut microbes)."
• "A very small Italian study using a similar commercial probiotic, Sivomixx, piqued his interest after it suggested acute Covid patients treated with it might be less likely to end up in ICU or to die, and eight times less likely to suffer respiratory failure. Bjarnason is hoping to start a larger study in the next few months."

How Your Microbiome Affects Your Emotions and Wellbeing - GrassrootsHealth Sept 2021

Short article and 7 min. video

A few related items in VitaminDWiki that you might find interesting

• Healthy microbiota might reduce COVID-19 – multiple studies
• Poor absorption of Vitamin D is strongly related to type of gut bacteria – Dec 2020
• Vitamin D and the Host-Gut Microbiome: A Brief Overview– June 2020

The articles in both of the categories Microbiome and Gut are:

Here are all of the Microbiome articles

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