If you want to be healthy inside and out, you need to get cuddly with your native bacteria, writes JOHN McKENNA
THERE ARE a whole lot of new terms relating to your health and your diet that are going to become extremely important over the next couple of years.
So, as there is no time to lose with these urgent matters, let’s get started on the new lexicon for health and eating.
Heard about your microbiome? How do you intend to look after your gut microbiota? How well up are you on your medical ecology? Can a pregnant mother shape her baby’s biome? If so, should she paint it pink or blue?
How many species of bacteria can you find in mother’s milk? And how many bacteria would I find in your mouth? Skin bacteria are good for you: true or false?
If you meet a tea-and-toaster, should you make them a nice cup of tea and a slice of toast? And, just how do you feel about your extra organ?
Finally, just how dirty is your inner ecosystem? Really dirty? Good.
That’s an awful lot of questions for a Tuesday morning but, in my opinion, they are the questions that will come to dominate our view of eating and health over the next decade, so we need to learn the lingo.
Before we get to the answers, however, we can probably summarise the state of play like this: in a hyper-hygenic world, such as the one we live in in the developed West, it is a very, very good thing to have a very dirty gut.
Your gut houses countless bacteria and, contrary to what you might think, these bacteria keep us healthy. They are your friends, not your foes. You need to think of your body not as a temple of purity, but as a wild, colourful jungle that is home to a delicate ecosystem of 100 trillion microbes: the microbiome.
And in this microbiome, you need to let it get down low and dirty in your microbiota.
This is because your microbiota has 10 times more bacterial cells than the number of human cells in your entire body, according to Dr Paul O’Toole of University College Cork (UCC).
O’Toole presented the findings of his team, which included Prof Fergus Shanahan and Dr Ian Jeffery of UCC, and Prof Paul Ross of Teagasc, at the recent Euroscience Open Forum. And you have to hand it to the Irish: what other scientists could come up with an unforgettable expression like “tea-and-toaster”, to describe the situation whereby elderly people have a diet severely lacking in diversity, which limits their gut biota and compromises their health?
So, the answer to our tea-and-toaster question is: don’t make them tea and toast. They need diversity, not more of the same. And so do all of us.
We need to make our microbiome a home to happy bacteria. We need to see our bodies as an ecology zone that needs tending with wild foods, fruits, grains, nuts, pulses, pastured meats, everything. If everything you eat comes out of a plastic bag, your gut microbiota will not be happy.
So, some answers. Believe it or not, a pregnant mother can shape her child’s biome. It happens in the first trimester, when vaginal bacteria alter, and include lactobacillus johnsonii. The baby ingests some of this during birth, which prepares them to digest breast milk. And that mother’s milk has maybe 600 species of bacteria. Huh, that’s nothing. In your mouth you have – count ’em – 5,000 species of bacteria.
Oh, and skin bacteria shouldn’t be scrubbed away with baby wipes: they feed on waxy secretions from your body and produce a film which keeps your skin supple. That’s right: nice bacteria equals beautiful skin.
Again, hand it to the Irish: the “extra organ” analogy belongs to O’Toole and his team, and it’s another unforgettable image – one that helps us to value our gut biota. How would you feel if you lost a kidney? How would you feel if, by eating a diet of processed food, you let your extra organ wither, so that it couldn’t do the job it wants to do?
And so, have you got the diet that feeds your ecosystem? Are your foods nourishing all those happy, healthy bacteria in diverse and different ways? If the answer if yes, then well done: your extra organ loves you.
John McKenna is author of the Bridgestone Guides
