We often hear that what you eat is important in keeping you healthy. But do you ever wonder why? Basically, is to get the macros, vitamins, and minerals you need to survive. But is so much more complex than that. In late 1990, we became aware of the human microbiome and its importance for health.
What is The Microbiome?
The Human Microbiome is made of trillions of bacteria, viruses, and fungi. These microbes can be found in your gut. Your gut is everything in between your mouth and your colon. Some bacteria are associated with a disease, others are actually extremely important for your immune system, heart, weight, and many other aspects of health. The Microbes in your microbiome are the good kind that helps you improve your health. There are up to 1,000 species of bacteria in the human gut microbiome, and each of them plays a different role in your body.

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How Does Your Microbiome Help your Health?
As you grow, your gut microbiome begins to diversify, meaning it starts to contain many different types of microbial species. Higher microbiome diversity is considered good for your health.
Immune system: The gut microbiome also controls how your immune system works. By communicating with immune cells, the gut microbiome can control how your body responds to infection.
Brain health: The gut microbiome may also affect the central nervous system, which controls brain function.
Autoimmune diseases such as diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, muscular dystrophy, multiple sclerosis, and fibromyalgia are associated with an abnormality in the microbiome. Disease-causing microbes accumulate, changing gene activity and metabolic processes and resulting in an abnormal immune response against substances and tissues normally present in the body.
We also know that the gut microbiome influences your brain health and therefor has been found to have a role in anxiety and depression.
The Human Microbiome Project
The Human Microbiome Project, which was launched by NIH in 2007, provided the first glimpse of the microbial diversity of healthy humans and is explored the possible relationships between particular human diseases and the microbiome.
A person’s microbiome may influence their susceptibility to infectious diseases and contribute to chronic illnesses of the gastrointestinal system like Crohn’s disease and irritable bowel syndrome. Some collections of microbes determine how a person responds to drug treatment. The microbiome of the mother may affect the health of her children.
Why eating a diverse range of foods is important?
Your mother always told you to eat your vegetables. She told you they are good for you, but you just wouldn’t listen. Your mother was right, by not eating a diverse diet and the right foods you can damage your microbiome and render it unable to digest the foods you eat. You will also be unable to create the necessary nutrients you need to function.
Tryptophan or L-tryptophan is an amino acid. Amino acids are protein building blocks. L-tryptophan is called an “essential” amino acid because the body can’t make it on its own. You have to get tryptophan from your diet, from turkey, eggs and chia seeds. Your microbiome helps convert L-Tryptophan into serotonin a neurotransmiter associated with happiness. And it is also a key component to make melatonin another hormone that regulates sleep.
Tyrosine is an amino acid. The body makes tyrosine from another amino acid called phenylalanine. Tyrosine can also be found in dairy products, meats, fish, eggs, nuts, beans, oats, and wheat. It is converted into dopamine a neurotransmitter that motivates you to act. It is also converted to epinephrine, the fight or flight hormone.
These are just two examples of the importance of eating a variety of food to get all the components our body needs for good nutrition. If we decide only to eat certain foods and not others, then we favor certain gut microbes over others creating an imbalanced in favor of the microbes that benefit from the foods you prefer. This can create dysfunction in the gut microbiome leading to decrease digestion and lack of certain nutritional components needed by our bodies.
Most of the time we can reverse these changes, it may take a long time to bring back the microbes that were lost and sometimes we can’t bring them back.
Other things that can affect the gut microbiome
Antibiotics- antibiotics will kill bacteria, it doesn’t differentiate between beneficial bacteria versus disease-causing bacteria. Minimize the use of antibiotics to only when is absolutely necessary.
Stress- there is direct communication between your brain and your gut. Many times, when we are stressed, we can feel it in our gut with symptoms like increase acid or even diarrhea. Stress can harm beneficial microbes in the microbiome in the same way antibiotics can.

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Limit your intake of artificial sweeteners. Some evidence has shown that artificial sweeteners like aspartame increase blood sugar by stimulating the growth of unhealthy bacteria like Enterobacteriaceae in the gut microbiome.
USE OF PREBIOTICS AND PROBIOTICS
Some smaller human studies have investigated the effect of prebiotic and probiotic interventions on stress-related conditions and found some benefit. However, a 2019 meta-analysis of 34 controlled clinical trials that evaluated the effects of prebiotics and probiotics on depression and anxiety found that prebiotic interventions did not differ from placebo, yet probiotic interventions yielded small but significant beneficial effects on anxiety and depression.
In addition, a 2019 systematic review found that more than half of 21 studies (1,503 individuals) concluded that regulating the intestinal microbiota is an effective treatment for anxiety symptoms. The review focused on two kinds of interventions: probiotic and non-probiotic interventions, and interestingly, it found that the non-probiotic interventions (such as adjusting daily diets) were more effective than the probiotic interventions.
Take home message:
The bacteria in the microbiome help digest our food, regulate our immune system, protect against other bacteria that cause disease, and produce vitamins including B vitamins B12, thiamine and riboflavin, and Vitamin K, which is needed for blood coagulation.
Eat a variety of foods, think rainbow diet. Make it whole grain and eat prebiotics like fiber and fruits. Eat fermented foods like sauerkraut and kimchi. When possible, favor eating the rights foods over taking supplements.