HH378: The Microbiome & It's Role In Health

Welcome back to another episode of health hacks as I continue this series on gut health. And this is episode three of the series. It started at Episode 484, so if you haven't heard the previous two, you might want to go back and listen in. And today I'm talking about the microbiome and its role in health. The gut microbiome is the largest microbiome we have in our body. The skin is a microbiome in and of its own, and we have different microbiomes. However, the gut microbiome, it starts at our mouth and it goes all the way through our digestive tract, and it ends at our anus, and it obviously plays a critical role in digestion, breaking down your food and getting the nutrients from that food into your cells for energy. It also plays a critical role in immunity, because 70% of our immune system is housed in our microbiome, and so if it isn't healthy, our immune system isn't going to be able to function at its best and keep us healthy, so we need both together. And then, of course, as I mentioned in the last episode, the gut microbiome is critical in our mental health as well. So we want to have a balanced microbiome. And unfortunately, antibiotics create imbalance in the microbiome, because antibiotics literally kill all bacteria in our gut. In fact, one dose, not one series of antibiotics, one dose, will wipe out the balance in our microbiome, and so it's really important that if you are taking antibiotics, that you also take probiotics in order to put back the back good bacteria that we need in our gut that's being killed off by the antibiotics. It doesn't just kill the one bacteria that's causing us illness. It kills everything. Now you don't want to take your probiotics and your antibiotics at the same time, because then they cancel each other out, and that isn't effective. You want to be taking them, ideally, at least an hour apart, so that you get the benefit of the antibiotics and then you get the benefit of the probiotics as well. Poor diet can also impact the health of our microbiome. A diet high in processed foods and as well as stress, is also killing off the nice balance in our gut, and so does poor sleep. So these are all factors that I'm going to dive into more as we move through this series. I just want to highlight the incredible sensitivity that our microbiome has in staying in balance, and we can do it when we choose to limit our antibiotic use, focus on a healthy whole food diet rather than processed food diet and choose to prioritize our sleep and manage our stress as best we can. We're always going to have stress however we can manage it better and not feel like we're rushing around with our heads chopped off, which many people do feel like that, rushing around like chickens with their head chopped off, chopped off. So we will come back to talking in more detail about probiotics, prebiotics and fermented foods. However, these are all great tools in helping to support a healthy microbiome. If you feel that your gut is unhealthy and you'd like to know what's going on, we can also run lab tests. A simple urine sample will show us if you have yeast overgrowth, bacterial overgrowth, mold in your gut, if you're in the US, there's a stool lab that you can do that will also show if there's h pylori in the gut, if there's parasites, all of these things negatively impact the health of our gut, and they're very hard to diagnose just through regular medical blood work that your doctor can do. So anytime you have gut discomfort, it's a sign that something might be off. And if you'd like to know more, if you want to just have a conversation around what your symptoms are like and get an idea of what your next steps might be, please reach out to me, at Melissa, at your guided health journey.com.