How to Improve Your Microbiome Health Naturally

Kiran Krishnan:

Here are the things you need to do and can do to improve your microbiome with respect to immune response.

Number one, you have to diversify your diet because a diversified diet provides diversity in the microbiome and all of the studies on this topic point to the more diverse your microbiome is, the more effective your immune response is going to be. That diversity is critically important. Diversifying your diet creates that. Reducing stress, stress induces the overgrowth of opportunistic and pathogenic organisms. Stress also can create leaky gut, which creates chronic low grade inflammation, which creates that issue of loss signaling that I talked about. Managing stress, as you’re looking at improving your immune response is going to be critically important.

Getting outdoors because getting outdoors improves the diversity of your microbiome, gets you more exposure to microbes in the outside world, trains your immune system, keeps your immune system functioning at a state of functional readiness. Using spore based probiotics, like a research probiotic like MegaSpore becomes extremely important to stop that leaky gut, reduce that chronic low grade inflammation. And then like we showed, bacillus species have all of these direct effects against pathogens to support the system. Of course, we also have published studies showing that the spores increases diversity within the microbiome, dramatically increases the production of short chain fatty acids, which you remember are really important for anti-inflammatory and repair and also facilitates the growth of keystone species like faecalibacteria and akkermansia and so on.

Focusing on leaky gut is going to be critical. You have to improve that barrier function. You have to have a good, thick, healthy mucosa. You have to have good diversity within the microbiome and bringing down inflammation in general is going to be important for your immune system to function because remember all of the signaling between your immune system and the microbiome is done through inflammatory cytokines. Having that systemic inflammation is only going to disrupt all those signals. Working on bringing down inflammation using things like prebiotics can have a major impact on that. Polyphenols and omega fatty acids also can be very powerful, supportive tools, especially when we talk about systemic inflammation that should be coming down as well.