Mastering Your Microbiome
Here at Fire and Ice Wellness we try to be well rounded in all thing’s health and longevity. In topics of wellness, food choices and diets are often at the center. This will be a four-part blog series about what key pillars we focus on when it comes to food choices and diets. Mastering your microbiome, eating intuitively, using food as medicine, and monitoring your body with integrative technology to see how you respond to your food choices, diet, and possibly your environment.
This week’s post is about mastering your microbiome. Your microbiome is a complicated organism which operates independent of you. Only with a strict philosophy of discipline and personalized programs can anyone begin to understand the mysterious labyrinth, that is our gut!
I often contemplate whether its my own desire or something inside me which wants that extra beer or cookie. Today’s culture is heavily invested in the idea that we are influenced by more than our own simple impulses. While the human mind has an enormous capacity to sustain its will, it is challenged constantly by its environment, both external and internal. A major internal community that influences our biology is something called the microbiome or microbiota. The microbiome is not simply bacteria, but also archaea, eukaryotes, and viruses.
How did we get our microbiome? I read a book, many years ago, called, “I contain multitudes”. This was a great refresher for me on the many different aspects of microorganism and their hosts. If you’re interested in learning how microbes affect their host, I highly recommend purchasing it. In addition, to this book I would watch or listen to a ted talk with Bonnie Bassler who educated the listen on the fringe of microbial communication called quorum sensing. Your body is a chapel of communication for the microbe world! Spend some time looking into these and really digesting what they have to say! (Pun intended.)
Another paradigm shift in thinking is the same microbe that is making you sick can also produce vitamins if in the proper location of your body. It is debated that H. Pylori can be potentially neutral if not beneficial if in the right environment or with the correct host, conversely it can be deadly for the opposite. The microbiome predominately picks their community/homes based on pH or various gases present in that location. If your pH is off in any part of your digestion some of these guys have been known to move around to find a sweet spot again. When they move around, they become foreign to the that site and often cause inflammation. In theory, this is reason enough to look into this idea further that managing our microbiome can lead quick gains of reduced inflammation.
Our guts are as complicated as the soil of our planet. Farmers have identify three really important nutrients that go into the soil called NPK; nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium. Without these nutrients the plants cannot thrive in the soil. While that may be true its an oversimplification. Its equivalent to saying, in order for our bodies to grow we need fats, carbs and proteins. Yes, we do need those macronutrients, but there are other metabolites and minerals that are used to create a homeostatic environment. For example, iodine is an essential nutrient, but it’s not considered a fat, carb or protein. Sometimes this nutrient can be found in fats or carbs or proteins, but if all our fats carbs and proteins are synthetically generated they will be void of that essential nutrient. Zach Bush had a great talk with Dave Asprey on the podcast episode titled eat dirt. This discussion highlights Zach’s realization that the medicine he was making in the lab could be found in the soil and that the medicinal part (“a carbon snowflake”) of the plant is transferred from the soil to the plant. So it all starts with the soil.
To Conclude, if you find this topic interesting and want to learn how to apply it to yourself talk with your doctor or any applicable professional (registered dietitian or a nutritionist) in your area to get you started. Secondly, we use VIOME which helps track which foods our good microbes like to eat and which ones your bad microbes like to eat. This is a great way to help narrow food choices down and really look at what’s going on in your gut. Finally, I would make it a habit to know where your food comes from. Organic products are good in general, but sometimes it’s not great for the environment. Start searching for farms that are using regenerative agriculture and support their efforts. I came across Gabe Brown’s website and it really opened my eyes. Knowledge is wasted unless its applied.
