@pritcharddesign Lots of things!
- They outnumber us by at least a factor of 10.
- Disturbances in their populations are associated with lots of disorders: inflammation, depression, allergies, immune disorders, food intolerances, obesity…
- The researchers haven’t proved causal links for most of those.
- There are 1,200 - 1,600 ish kinds of bacteria.
- Things that derange them include not being born vaginally; antibiotics (and other drugs that have antibiotic effects, such as statins, metformin & more); spending most of our time inside in relatively sterile environments.
There seems to be pretty good indication that having a depleted or disturbed microbiome is a problem, but we’re not really close to being able to fix it.
Things that might help are:
- not living in too sterile an environment;
- taking probiotics (but they’re not at all any kind of replacement for the range of bacteria we have);
- eating lots and lots of fibre and different kinds of plants — because they’re the food the bacteria like to eat, but that only works if you have at least some of the kinds you want to encourage.
// @matigo @kdfrawg