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Three Ways to Change Your Microbiome Today
You get one at birth, but you can improve it! Here’s how.
We all have a gut microbiome, a collection of trillions of bacteria living inside our intestines that interacts constantly with systems of our body. It feeds off of what we eat (and, when it doesn’t like that food, it may eat us!), and it helps us by producing nutrients, training our immune system, protecting us from disease, and more.
But are we stuck with a preset microbiome, determined at birth? Or can we change it? And if we can change it, how do we do so? And why would we?
We can’t change many traits about ourselves, like our height or our blood type. But we do have control over our microbiome. A better microbiome could help us be more regular in the bathroom, reduce gut inflammation and pain, or even help add healthy years to our lifespan by reducing rates of chronic diseases.
Here are three reasonable, low-risk ways that we can alter our microbiome, changing the populations growing inside of us.
Our microbiome is a fish tank
We are what we eat, and that extends to our microbiome as well. The bacteria living in our intestinal tract have two main sources of food:
- The food that we eat.
