by Mike Geary
As you’ve probably noticed, I’ve been researching quite a bit lately about all of the various functions of our gut flora (good bugs and bad bugs in our guts), and all of the dramatic effects to our health, including our weight, skin conditions, brain health, asthma, allergies, digestion issues, and frequent sickness.
Today, I found a few more nuggets that I wanted to share with you that are really interesting… It’s a couple more excerpts from the super-interesting new book I’ve been reading by Michael Pollan called Cooked, and it tells a lot about the importance of our “microbiome” in our guts:
First, Pollan talks about how the diversity and health of our gut flora starts all the way back to birth… He talks about how natural child birth exposes the baby to it’s first blast of beneficial bacteria that immediately begin to colonize the baby’s body (an important part of building their immune system from day 1) …
He continues, “Children born by Cesarian Section, a far more hygienic process, take much longer to populate their intestinal tract, and never acquire quite the same assortment of bugs. Some researchers believe this could help explain the higher rates of allergies, asthma, and obesity observed in children born by Cesarian“.
He then goes on to explain the results of a study of 15,000 children in 5 European countries, which basically concluded that children who grew up on farms and were exposed to more microorganisms from dirt, livestock, etc had more robust immune systems and had lower rates of allergic diseases. The study also mentioned that children in Waldorf schools who ate more fermented vegetables and received fewer antibiotics and fever-reducing drugs also had better immune systems and lower rates of disease.
And it gets even MORE interesting, as Pollan continues:
“The average child in the developed world has also received between ten and twenty courses of antiobiotics before his or her 18th birthday, an assault on the microflora the implications of which researchers are just beginning to reckon.
Consider the saga of the once-common stomach bacteria Helicobacter pylori. Long considered the pathogen responsible for causing peptic ulcers, the bacterium was routinely attacked with antibiotics, and as a result has become rare — today, less than 10% of American children test positive for H. pylori. Only recently have researchers discovered it also plays a positive role in our health: H. pylori helps regulate both stomach acid and ghrelin, one of the key hormones involved in appetite. People who have been treated with antibiotics to eradicate the bacterium gain weight, possibly because the H. pylori is not acting to regulate their appetite.”
Once again, this is yet more evidence that our health is being harmed by our overly sanitized modern world with hand sanitizers every where you look, a constant “war on bacteria” and a sterilized food supply that lacks the natural microbes food was meant to contain, and over-prescription of antibiotics by just about every single doctor for common colds and many other minor sicknesses that don’t need antibiotics.
And as you can see, the dramatic reduction or eradication of H pylori in the guts of most people in the developed world these days is now being shown to be disrupting the hormones that regulate our appetite!