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You are made up of about 30 trillion human cells and 39 trillion microbial cells (bacteria, fungi, viruses, and protozoa), which makes you 43% human.
It would be less if we looked at genes. A human has 20,000 human genes and 2-20 million bacterial genes. When the human genome was sequenced, we thought it would solve the world’s disease problems. The problem was that we “forgot” about the 99% microbial genes.
I have been watching a great You Tube clip by Rob Knight (PhD), a kiwi computational microbiologist based at the University of California (here is the clip if you want to watch it).
The microbes we carry are super important for our health. The problem is that we are trying to kill them all with ultra-processed foods, poor sleep, sedentary lifestyles, alcohol, and medicines—particularly antibiotics.
It’s like Joni Mitchell’s song “You pave paradise and put up a parking lot.”
Antibiotics are excellent when you have an infection, but unfortunately, they kill the good guys too – more appropriately known as your “commensal bacteria.”
Killing off the commensal bacteria allows the bad guys to bloom into what might become a “super-infection.” This leads to inflammation, poor immunity, autoimmune diseases and chronic disease. By trying to control one microbe or infection, we have gone too far in altering our whole microbiome and reducing its diversity (a dull parking lot instead of a rich rainforest).
Allow me one more stolen metaphor, this time from Jeff Bland, The Personalised Medicine Institute:
“Food is the language that speaks to our genes” – and I would add our microbes' genes. To improve your gut microbiome, eat the most comprehensive array of plant species you can. A diverse microbiome outcompetes the bad guys for nutrients (Spragge et al., Science 2023).
Okay, one more metaphor. It’s like the school bully who has power when they only have one or two people to pick on. Then suddenly, they are surrounded by a whole school of commensal bacteria and are starved into oblivion—“a ha haaa, no nutrients for you.”
What do all these metaphors mean? By the way, there is a book called I Never Metaphor I Didn’t Like—what a title, I must buy it!
If you have to take a course of antibiotics, pre-seed and post-seed your stomach with a diet rich in prebiotic fibres found in fruit and vegetables (for the good bacteria to prosper); also, eat lots of probiotic cheeses, yoghurts and fermented foods with minimal additives.
Our Zestt Gut+ Lozenges are worth a spin, too (two prebiotics and three probiotics).
Bring back those rainforests, people!
All the best, Anna and Darcy.
If you would like to discuss any of this further, please contact Darcy or Anna (who can be reached at +64 27 599 2255 or +64 27 4861418, respectively) or via info@zesttwellness.com.