After reading many articles, it seems as if the microbiome can be heavily influenced by external factors in our daily lives. However, certain factors can have either positive or negative impacts on the microbiome and lead to disease-developing cases.
Behaviors that could cause positive changes in one’s microbiome could be consuming a probiotic drink such as kombucha or taking a probiotic pill. This would have beneficial health impacts as probiotics could increase the person’s microbiome diversity. Exercising regularly could also have beneficial health impacts as this would avoid too much fat build up in the gut and encourage an overall healthier body and proper food intake. If a person exercises more, they will likely feel like they need to consume more protein to sustain their bodily functions which is also something that would have a beneficial health impact on their gut microbiome. Additionally, eating antioxidant rich foods could be beneficial, as they have been linked to reduce cancer rates and ultimately prevent inflammation for tumors development.
However, there are also many activities an individual could engage in that would be detrimental to their gut microbiome. Frequently having unprotected sex could be one of these activities, as it could heighten the risk of bacterial STIs which would then cause the person to receive antibiotics which is detrimental to the gut microbiome. Perhaps even smoking marijuana could be another detrimental factor towards bacteria diversification because this has typically been associated with consuming higher fat foods which would not aid the body’s microbiome.
I am not sure what could be an activity that would ultimately have neutral health consequences, as it seems like everything we do can affect us one way or another. Perhaps these activities would be something along the lines of often being exposed to a lot of people, as this would likely generate more exposure to their microbiomes and the positive and negative aspects of this would be neutral.
