Picture a lush jungle in the Amazon rainforest. The plants and the animals are in competition for resources, but everywhere you look is beautiful and vibrant. Our bodies also house a similar ecosystem, made up of microorganisms that are more important than we've ever known. Not only are these bacteria, viruses, and fungi in competition for resources, but the balance of this beautiful ecosystem can change our health!
Check out these stats from Stanford Medicine (link below):
Our guts are home to 600-1,000 strains of different microorganisms!
Several diseases have already been shown to be associated with shifts in the microbiome, such as obesity, Type 2 diabetes, Inflammatory Bowel Diseases, and liver disease.
Dr. Aashish Jha, a Stanford researcher, after studying several Himalayan cultures' diets and microbiomes, says "that human microbiomes may have changed gradually as human lifestyle changed, and those changes can happen within a human’s lifetime."
So how is your microbiome doing? What are you feeding it? For most Americans, the answer is stress and sugar. We'll need to do better, for our health now and to prevent chronic diseases and early death. Comment below with ways that you are caring for your microbiome or if you want to know what that might look like.
Stanford News
July 12, 2019 Exploring the Microbiome Frontier
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