You are what you eat.
Our gut is fascinating. It has a surface area 40 times larger than our skin and 2/3’s of our immune system is in gut. Our gut produces more than 20 different hormones and has numerous nerve endings, making it one of our largest sensory organs. 90% of the nerve fibers connecting the brain and gut provide feedback from gut to brain…not the other way around! Wow!
Our GI Tract is a rich and diverse ecosystem of microbes. The microorganisms living here are called your gut microbiota or gut flora. Your body has a whole microbiome of organisms existing together in communities (your skin, you GI, your mouth, etc ).
There are at least 1000 species of bacteria living in our gut, weighing about 2-6 pounds in adults. We have 10x more bacteria cells in and on our body than our own cells! Most of these bacteria are good for us and/or harmless and others are not. It’s important for the body to have some bad bacteria so it knows what to look out for.
In a healthy person, these communities of microbes compete for ‘food’ (their nutrients) but since it’s scarce (because a healthy person can digest and absorb their food fully), there is a state of balance. Unfortunately in IBD, the food (certain carbs, sugars and grains) is not fully digested and it’s not scare, allowing microbes to feed and multiply, create imbalance.
Microbes are sparse in the stomach and small intestine because of the high acid and peristalsis. The large intestine has many communities of microbes that keep each other in check.
If this balance gets disturbed, an overgrowth or imbalance of the gut flora can result. When there’s an overgrowth, microbes migrate to the small intestine and stomach inhibiting digestion and absorption.
Overgrowth or imbalance can be caused by:
- overuse of antacids
- decreased stomach acidity due to aging
- poor diet
- antibiotic therapy
It’s amazing how closely the study of the gut microbiota is tied to IBD but also the Standard American Diet. We need to re-think what we are all eating for the sake of our gut health.