Research on the human microbiome has only been developing within the past 15 years, which shows that western medicine is still going to great lengths to understand how much of a connection there is between overall health and the microbes in our stomach. My goal is to teach people how to balance the chemicals in your stomach/gut/microbiome so you can feel better, live stronger, and be happier. The first part is understanding that our stomach is an incredibly important and very complicated organ in the first place.
Have you heard of the gut-brain axis? New scientific evidence is suggesting that there’s a definite link between the human microbiome (gut health) and mood disorders.
Imbalances in gut microbiota are found to be associated with more bodily disorders including: inflammatory diseases (Clemente et al., 2018), metabolic diseases (Bouter et al., 2017), irritable bowel syndrome (Mayer et al., 2014), and most importantly of all neuropsychiatric disorders (Sharon et al., 2016).
Have you ever noticed how people with a stomach ache are always irritable? Nobody with an upset stomach is ever in a good mood. When our stomachs hurt, everything hurts, and everything feels wrong and nothing feels right. Think back to a time in your life when you got a stomach flu, or food poisoning, it can sometimes feel like you’re dying.
This is how I felt when I was training for Rio 2016, I had stomach pains around the clock and my mood suffered immensely. And when I did more research into how many micro-organisms live inside our gut, it all started to make more sense, and I recognized that there’s a serious relationship between the gut and brain, called The Gut-Brain Axis.
Research has shown that the human intestinal tract contains between 10 to 100 trillion microbes. That’s roughly 10 times greater than the amount of human cells (Bäckhed et al., 2005), which means there’s a lot going on in our stomachs at the biochemical level than we ever realized before. We’re all just walking chemical equations, and inside our stomach houses more microbes than what make up our entire body, by roughly 10 times in fact.
The human microbiota - which means all the micro-organisms living inside your stomach - contain 100 times the number of genes than that of the human genome (Bäckhed et al., 2005; Grice and Segre, 2012). So, my dear, there’s are a lot going on between the entrance of your mouth, all the way to your bootyhole. Or if you want to keep it classy like Miss Frazzle from The Magic School bus: your “valve”:
The microbiota make-up in our stomach changes a lot during during the process of mitosis and growth (Clemente et al., 2012), and gut microbiota can be influenced by so many variables such as: genes (Kurilshikov et al., 2017), environment (Chen et al., 2018b), diet (Patman, 2015), antibiotics (Bokulich et al., 2016), prebiotics (Preidis and Versalovic, 2009), and mode of delivery (Dominguez-Bello et al., 2010).
Reducing certain microbes producing short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs) was observed in inflammatory bowel disease and autoimmune diseases, and an imbalance in gut microbiota was associated with higher levels of inflammation (Clemente et al., 2018). Furthermore, it has been proven that obesity is associated with a low ratio of Bacteroidetes to Firmicutes bacteria in the stomach specifically, which are 2 out of the 5 predominant bacterial phyla in the human intestinal tract; interestingly enough, a higher ratio of Bacteriodetes to Firmicutes was seen after weight loss (Ley et al., 2006).
Like I said, we’re all walking chemical equations and depending on what’s happening inside your stomach will determine the quality of life you have. I often wonder if there’s a relationship between gut bacteria diversity and the speed of one’s metabolism. Is there a probiotic make-up that will allow people to be more susceptible to maintaining a speedy metabolism rather than a slow one? Research is starting to suggest this and I believe I have the secret to this.
My next blog post will be about my favorite probiotic products, and how I regrew my gut flora to change my entire gastrointestinal tract on the cellular level. It took me 3 months, but I finally regained my everyday optimal health, kept the chemicals in my stomach in check and balanced, all achieved through all natural nutritional supplementation, and changing my relationship with food to that of viewing meals as medicine.