By Anon
A healthy adult has 3lb (1.3 kg) worth of microbes.
Our bodies need microbes.
Microbes are bacteria and similar tiny things.
When a baby is born to a healthy mother, it is covered in lovely microbes.
There’s the vaginal bacteria from the birth canal.
There are urinary and faecal (poo) microbes.
There are microbes from the mother’s legs.
(Follow Your Gut: The Enormous Impact of Tiny Microbes, by Rob Knight with Brendan Buhler, Simon & Schuster.)
When a baby is born by caesarean section, it may be best to swab the baby with microbes from the mother.
We need the right balance of microbes to help our digestion, immune system, weight and mental health.
The balance can be upset by antibiotics, wrong diet, ingredients in packaged foods such as emulsifiers, and houses that are too clean.
Most of our bacteria live in the gut.
But we also have lovely bacteria in other places such as mouth, genitals and skin.
People living in rural Papua New Guinea have a better collection of lovely microbes than people living in the USA.
American homes are sometime too clean, and Americans tend to eat junk food and tend to use too many antibiotics.
And stress is bad for the guts.
Of course, babies born in certain rural areas of the Third World may die as the result of excessively dirty midwives and excessively dirty doctors.
It’s a question of balance.
Giulia Enders has written: Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body’s Most Underrated Organ, Greystone Books
Enders writes: “Disinfectants have no place in a normal household.
“The aim of cleaning . . . should be to reduce bacteria numbers, but not to eliminate them.
“Even harmful bacteria can be good for us when the immune system uses them for training – a couple of thousand salmonella bacteria in the kitchen sink provide our immune system with the opportunity to do a little sightseeing.
“Salmonella become dangerous only when they turn up in greater numbers.”
How can we have healthy guts?
1. Eat a varied diet with lots of fruit, vegetables and nuts.
2. Eat artichokes, chicory, leeks, celeriac, bananas, honey, garlic and sweet potatoes unless you are allergic to them.
3. For foods that soothe, try: cinnamon, cumin, fennel, ginger, mint, nutmeg, oatmeal, caraway and cardamom. And drink lots of water.
4. Have yoghurt-based foods or drinks.
But, “it is a lottery whether particular yoghurt concoctions will work for you.”
You may have to try lots of different multi-species probiotics.
According to Dr. Mercola on his website, one serving of fermented vegetables (sauerkraut, kim chi etc) has 100 times more beneficial bacteria than an entire bottle of a high potency probiotic product!
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Follow Your Gut: The Enormous Impact of Tiny Microbes, by Rob Knight with Brendan Buhler, Simon & Schuster.
The Diet Myth: The Real Science Behind What We Eat, by Tim Spector,Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body’s Most Underrated Organ, by Giulia Enders, Greystone Books