I love doing gut microbiome testing for my clients. There usually are clear patterns within someone’s gut microbiome composition that explain their symptoms and give us a clear strategy for nurturing their inner ecosystem and their body back to health.
Often test results show a lack of beneficial bacteria, reduced diversity and an overgrowth of potentially pathogenic micro-organisms.
An overgrowth of potentially pathogenic microbes is problematic as it can cause high levels of bacterial toxins, toxic gas, inflammation and a body-wide ripple effect.
A key part of any gut microbiome restoration strategy is nourishing beneficial bacteria back to health by feeding them, which we can do through diet and the use of certain prebiotics, carefully selected based on the microbes that need a boost.
Selective herbal antimicrobials may be required as well to drive down the pathogens.
Probiotics play a key role too: they have many benefits, including their ability to battle pathogenic microorganisms by way of:
- Crowding out potentially harmful micro-organisms. There is limited space in the GI tract and while probiotics don’t take up permanent residence, as they are traveling through they occupy space that is then no longer available to pathogenic bacteria and fungi.
- Reducing the impact of pathogenic microorganisms. The right probiotic strains can suppress the effect of bacterial toxins, generate anti-microbial substances, attach to viruses and reduce the expression of pathogen virulence factors through the inhibition of gene encoding.
Choosing the right probiotics strains is important: you want to select the strains that compete effectively with pathogens, produce antimicrobial compounds, and target specific virulence factors.
Microbiome restoration is a powerful way to deal with symptoms and boost your overall health and probiotic therapy is an important part of a comprehensive strategy.
Watch this space to learn more about how probiotics work and what you can do to ensure you’re choosing the right strains for the specific health condition you’d like to address.
Be well.
