Warwick Busby 
An optimal gut microbiome produces beneficial metabolites that provide numerous health advantages, from improving immune and digestive tract function, to helping protect against diseases. These metabolites also play an integral part in disease prevention.
The gut microbiota extract nutrition from food sources that escape digestion at an early stage and indigestible oligosaccharides through fermentation to produce short chain fatty acids like butyrate and propionate.
1. Diet
An optimal gut microbiome contains many kinds of bacteria, viruses and fungi essential to supporting your body’s immune system, heart, weight and other functions. An imbalance in this ecosystem may result in autoimmune and other diseases as well.
Motility of your bowels, otherwise known as motility, regularly changes up the “crop” of microbes living in your colon. Beneficial microbes compete directly against unhelpful ones for space in your GI tract and essential nutrients they require for survival, breaking down undigested food into short-chain fatty acids and producing other compounds that benefit your body in return.
Some gut bacteria have an array of glycoside hydrolases and polysaccharide lyases encoded into their genome, while others specialize more. This diversity allows different microbes to exploit various carb sources more effectively – shaping overall community composition. Recent research also indicates that certain gut bacteria’s metabolites may influence blood pressure by modulating G-protein coupled receptors linked to renin secretion and blood pressure regulation.
2. Stress
Microorganisms in your gut play an essential role in digestion and supporting immune, heart, weight and brain health. Furthermore, they have been found to significantly impact psychological disorders while producing serotonin as an important neurotransmitter to maintain balance in mood and emotion.
Gut microbes play an invaluable role in keeping our body running at peak performance, from freeing or synthesizing essential nutrients like polyphenols to producing thousands of useful chemicals such as metabolites to producing short-chain fatty acids involved with immunity, colon health and modulating inflammation responses. But these benefits depend on having an ideal balance of bacteria within our microbiome; when out-of-balance occurs it can lead to serious disease.
Studies have demonstrated that dysbiosis early in life can contribute to asthma by altering the composition of microbes in the colon, while diets low in fibre have been linked with cardiovascular and gut diseases through histamine-secreting bacteria that increase inflammation and blood pressure. You can help promote diversity of gut microbes by eating a diverse diet, exercising regularly, and getting enough restful sleep.
3. Exercise
The gut microbiome, often referred to as the “forgotten organ,” plays an essential role in your health. Relying on different kinds of bacteria to provide services we humans cannot manage on our own, it can be affected by various factors and when certain types are missing or overabundant they can lead to various health complications.
Researchers are still uncovering how the gut microbiome interacts with other body systems, but we know that certain bacteria produce short-chain fatty acids to suppress inflammation while other bacteria aid digestion by breaking down complex carbs and fibers that cannot be processed on their own.
Diet is one of the key contributors to altering your gut microbiome, with research showing it affects both its composition and function. For example, eating a diet rich in healthy plant-based foods increases both butyrate-producing bacteria as well as production of SCFAs by these bacteria.
4. Sleep
Your gut microbiome consists of trillions of bacteria and other microorganisms living within your digestive tract, helping with digestion, absorption, synthesis, as well as brain function and mood regulation.
Your intestinal microbiome contains more bacterial cells than human cells and their genes outnumber yours 100 to 1. As such, this organism forms an integral part of your body.
Studies have revealed the significance of our gut microbiome to human metabolism, nutrition, physiology and immune system health. Dysbiosis – or an imbalance of your gut microbiome – can contribute to Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) and Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD), two conditions with common digestive symptoms.
Researchers are increasingly acknowledging the impact of various factors on gut bacteria composition and function, including diet, stress levels and sleep quality. Therefore it’s crucial that these variables be managed effectively through eating well, exercising regularly, socialising with peers, using relaxation techniques when necessary and getting enough restorative restful sleep.
