Eight wonderful facts about your gut

You might think that bowels are not immediately the best topic to bring up over a dinner or on a cozy family evening. However, expect that conversations about the gut often change status from cross-border to "breaking news", once you realize how amazing an organ your gut is and how much its well-being is crucial to your health and mental state. Here are a number facts that will at least either amaze or delight most.

The bacteria in your gut should be as varied and diverse as the climate in a rainforest

When you think of the rainforest, most people will probably get pictures of a wealth of exotic plants and a whole Noah's ark of animal species with everything from insects and reptiles to beautiful birds and mammals. A healthy gut has as much variety of microorganisms as, for example, bacteria and fungal species and in abundant amounts as a healthy rainforest has animals and plants. In order to feed and cultivate an ecosystem as complex as your gut, variation in diet is essential. Therefore, it should like plenty of fruits and vegetables, good fats like oils and nuts and protein sources like legumes, fish or poultry. A varied diet will first and foremost ensure a good supply of carbohydrate, fat, protein, vitamins and minerals, but also important dietary fiber, which largely acts as nutrition for your intestinal bacteria.

2. Your gut protects you from diseases

Your gut does much more than just digest the food you eat (which in itself is a pretty wild task!). The many trillions of bacteria in the intestinal system act as a defense against harmful bacteria from food or the surrounding environment. Therefore, the gut is a vital part of your immune system. The good bacteria in your gut neutralize potentially dangerous bacteria by lowering the acidity of the gut. The acidic environment creates poor conditions for the invading bacteria, which thus have difficulty surviving. Therefore, your gut makes up the bulk of your immune system because it hosts most of the body's bacteria(1).

3. Your gut bacteria can reveal how you spent your first years of life

Our bacteria in the gut are affected by the environment we are in. Already at birth, you form the basis of your future intestinal flora, but there is a big difference between whether you were born vaginally or by caesarean section. If you were born by caesarean section, you do not receive a starter culture of microorganisms from the birth canal and thus have a less varied starting point to work on. The consequence of this may be an increased risk of developing i.a. allergies and intolerances.

Our intestinal flora is built up especially in the first three years of our life and therefore your intestinal flora will be marked by your birth, whether you were born in the city or in the country and what your first meals consisted of, for example whether you were breastfed or bottled. The strains of bacteria found in and on your body will be very different depending on whether you have had contact with topsoil and lots of animals rather than growing up in the city with less soil under your nails. The more your intestinal system has been exposed to, the better your immune system is likely to be. So if you have been breastfed, have eaten some sand in the sandbox, got soil on your knees in the backyard, hugged dogs and cats, not lived completely sterile and had a large family around you from birth, then your gut flora will probably have had the best conceivable growth conditions.

4. Your gut bacteria can affect the psyche

Although your composition of the many millions of intestinal bacteria you have is as unique as your fingerprint, “intestinal profiles” can still be drawn, where you can generally see a trend of types and amounts of specific bacteria in the human gut. Therefore, one can deduce that the composition of bacteria in an intestine often looks different in people with depression compared to people who do not suffer from depression. Based on these studies, one can start adjusting to, for example, the diet to feed on the good bacteria that are outnumbered in the depressed person's gut. In depression, one can especially see the lack of a number of Bifido bacteria as well as a large group of Lactobacillus bacteria (2). If you want to fertilize these bacteria in the gut with food, then they like inulin, for example, which is found in Jerusalem artichokes, lentils, onions, garlic, asparagus, beans, broccoli and bananas. In the gut, it works exactly as with the rainforest from the first facts - what you fertilize grows, so you can change your bacterial composition in the gut with what you eat and probably also affect your psyche positively.

5. Your weight can be affected by intestinal bacteria

As just mentioned, your intestinal bacteria are unique to you, but you can still collect them in different "types" called enterotypes. An enterotype is a characteristic system by which the bacteria in the human gut are composed and your enterotype is thought to have a great influence on how you absorb food and medicine. (3). Therefore, in studies, a connection can be seen between your enterotype and your effect of different diets. Several Danish studies have, for example, shown that you have a good probability of a greater weight loss on a given diet if you belong to the enterotype Prevotella rather than the enterotype Bacteroides. All diets had roughly the same diet composition with i.a. a high fiber content, but did not give the same result in the study participants (4).

6. Your gut bacteria can be adversely affected by a sterile environment

Taking care of your gut bacteria can be the perfect excuse to just leave the vacuum cleaner for an extra day or reconsider using disinfectant. At a time when a worldwide epidemic is still threatening, it may seem quite provocative to call for being less bactericidal, but there are basically very few bacteria in our daily lives that are disease-causing. Of course, you need to maintain good hand hygiene, kitchen hygiene and toilet hygiene, but a little dust in the hooks and natural bacteria from your pets, a little sand from the shoes and other natural contributions to your home ecosystem are beneficial to your immune system. Especially in children, an immune system needs to be trained in knowing harmless bacteria from potentially harmful bacteria, so if you live as cleanly as in an operating room, then it can affect your gut bacteria and thus your immune system negatively.

7. Diseases can be fought with bacteria

As mentioned earlier, the vast majority of the bacteria we encounter in our daily lives are quite peaceful, but of course there are bacteria we know are the pathogens. It is, for example, Clostridium difficile (C. difficile). This is a bacterium that causes diarrhea and intestinal inflammation, especially affecting debilitated elderly and chronically ill patients treated with antibiotics. C. difficile therefore poses a great challenge for the hospitals, but fortunately it has been found that this particular bacterium can be fought with other, benign bacteria. So by adding certain lactic acid bacteria, one can fight C. difficile partly by supplementing probiotics as dietary supplements, but the condition can also be improved in mild cases by eating yogurt and other fermented dairy products (5).

8. Your gut bacteria make up only a small part of your body weight

The human body contains trillions of microorganisms and so you could expect them to make up a large part of our body weight. You just have to remember how small a bacterium is and therefore microorganisms like gut bacteria only make up about 1 to 3 percent of your body's weight. An adult male of 90 kg will therefore have from 900 g to barely 3 kg of microorganisms in his body, while a woman of 65 kg will contain from 650 g to barely 2 kg. Whether your gut bacteria weigh a lot or little, they play a huge role in your health – both physically and mentally. Therefore, you should appreciate that they are part of you and ensure them varied and delicious food and thus good growing conditions.

References

1. Kau one. Al (2011). Human nutrition, the gut microbiome, and immune system: envisioning the future. Nature. ; 474(7351): 327–336
2. Anderson, Scott C., Cryan, John F. & Dinan, Ted (2017): The Psychobiotic Revolution: Mood, Food, and the New Science of the Gut-Brain Connection. Washington: National Geographic
3. https://nyheder.ku.dk/alle_nyheder/2011/2011.4/hvilken-mavetype-er-du/
4. https://medium.com/microbial-instincts/baseline-gut-microbes-can-predict-diet-outcomes-d8e98760cabd
5. https://www.sundhed.dk/borger/patienthaandbogen/mave-og-tarm/sygdomme/tarminfektioner/diar-foraarsaget-af-antibiotikabrug/