When our ancestors lived on farms and worked the soil they were exposed to a wide variety of bacteria every day. Many of those bacteria joined their Micro Biome where they thrived on the relatively high fiber diets that were common at the time. While we still encounter millions of bacteria every day we do our best to avoid them through the use of anti-microbial soaps and cleaners and hand sanitizers. When we come across a bacteria that our Micro Biome can’t deal with quickly we “help it our” with a broad spectrum anti-biotic that kills both the good and the bad bacteria. As a result we tend to have Micro Biomes that are much less diverse weaker that our ancestors. On top of this we have moved away from diets rich in the dietary fiber that support a healthy Micro Biome.
Originally, probiotics were an attempt to compensate for these lifestyle impacts on our gut bacteria by introducing “good” bacteria into our gut to enrich our Micro Biome and keep it stimulated. As our understanding of the diverse impacts of our Micro Biome on our overall health has grown a new generation of probiotics has emerged that are designed to boost specific Micro Biome functions. These include bacteria aimed at weight control, asthma, Irritable Bowel Syndrome, etc. Evidence that supplementing our Micro Biome can have a dramatic impact on our health comes in the growing use of direct fecal transplants of gut bacteria from a healthy donor to treat the sometimes fatal Clostridium Difficile Colitis.
Although many of the bacteria available in commercial probiotics cannot live in the anerobic (oxygen free) environment in our large intestine they can still act as stimulants to our Micro Biome because every new arrival in our gut is scrutinized and either accommodated or destroyed and discarded. This process helps to keep our Micro Biome active and healthy. Those bacteria that can live in the gut enrich our Micro Biome and supplement its beneficial activities.
Stimulating and supplementing our Micro Biome with probiotics has demonstrated health benefits. This is particularly important following a course of antibiotics when our Micro Biome has been under unusual stress. However, taking probiotics without also making sure that our Micro Biome is being well nourished with sufficient dietary fiber seems like a bad game plan.
My research indicates that the most important strategy for building a healthy Micro Biome is to settle into a diet that consistently supplies enough dietary fiber to support a healthy colony of gut bacteria. With that as a baseline, using probiotics to supplement and tune a healthy Micro Biome seems like a good way to deal with the limits and stress that our modern lifestyle has put on our Micro Biome. With the extensive Micro Biome research that is going on around the world our understanding of which bacteria to supplement and how to best introduce them is likely to grow dramatically over the next several years.