HOW TO BE A HEALTHY HOLOBIONT
BEING A GENEROUS HOST TO THE MICROORGANISMS WITHIN YOU HAS A WEALTH OF BENEFITS.
AS WITH VIRTUALLY ANY ECOSYSTEM, MORE DIVERSITY IS BETTER THAN LESS.
I’m a great fan of unusual words, and one of my favorites is holobiont — from holo, whole; and biont, a discrete unit of living matter.
It describes an entity consisting of a host and the microorganisms that live on and within it, in a relationship that benefits both.
I like the term because I am a holobiont. And so are you.
On our skin, within our mouth, but mostly inside our digestive tract, are a total of roughly five pounds of microbes — in total, they outnumber our own human cells. In the late 1980s, researchers dubbed this collective “the microbiome.”
The microbiome is passed from mother to child during childbirth. Those trillions of microbes in our gut are a complex, dynamic ecosystem, changing day by day, even hour by hour. And they matter immensely. Studies are finding that these microorganisms — most are bacteria, but we also host fungi, viruses and protozoa — influence every aspect of our health. That includes the risk of diseases, including metabolic disorders such as diabetes as well as heart disease, inflammatory bowel disease, mental illnesses and many forms of cancer.
So how do we keep our microbiome optimal? Science is still sorting that out — as you might expect, the relationship between 100 trillion living microorganisms and the roughly 30 trillion cells of the human body is complex.
Some researchers believe that it’s important to have a higher ratio of socalled “good” microorganisms, but that’s tricky, as “good” and “bad” are tough to distinguish. As one researcher put it, “… it is still very difficult to fully decipher the role of any microorganism in a complex community such as the gut microbiota.”
Most researchers seem to agree that the best rough guide we can have is that, as with virtually any ecosystem, more diversity is better than less. Just as a potato-blight fungus wiped out Ireland’s single-crop-intensive fields and brought about mass starvation, so a relatively mono-cultured microbiome is highly susceptible to disruption by a single agent or invader.
So how do we optimize the diversity of our microbiome — and consequently, our health as holobionts?
These are not easy questions to answer — again, the complexity of the microbiome makes experimentation difficult. But the advice I give below has been linked to good health outcomes. I don’t think it’s too much of a leap to suggest that at least part of the reason these are “good for us” is that they optimize microbiome diversity:
GO EASY ON FAT:
Excessive fat in the diet can drive excessive, whole-body inflammation, and this seems to relate to dysregulation of the microbiome. It is especially important to minimize intake of polyunsaturated seed oils that have been repeatedly heated, such as the refined soybean commonly used for deep-frying in restaurants.
AVOID PROCESSED CARBS:
Carbohydrates, especially highly processed ones such as those in cakes, cookies and snack foods, tend to drive inflammation.
FIBER UP:
Dietary fiber appears to help regulate blood sugar levels by encouraging the microbiome to produce short-chain fatty acids that keep glucose in a tight range.
EMBRACE OMEGA-3:
Getting an adequate supply of omega-3 fatty acids, abundant in wild-caught cold-water fish such as salmon and sardines, is associated with brain and cardiovascular health.
EAT “PREBIOTIC” FOODS:
Foods that feed an appropriate, healthful mix of gut microbes should be a regular part of the diet. Examples include acacia powder (available online) mixed with water, chicory root, Jerusalem artichoke, dandelion greens, garlic, onion, leek and asparagus.
EAT FERMENTED FOODS:
Examples include sauerkraut, kimchi, fresh pickles, miso, yogurt and kefir to replenish microbial populations.
GET HUNGRY NOW AND THEN:
Fasting intermittently — for example, eating only in a “window” from noon to 6 p.m. and consuming only liquids otherwise several days of the week — has been shown to lower inflammation.
DON’T TAKE ANTIBIOTICS UNLESS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY: They wreak havoc on the microbiome. If you must be on antibiotics, take a probiotic throughout the course of therapy to help repopulate the gut with a healthy microbial ecosystem.