Prompt: Brainstorm a list of behaviors that an individual could engage in that could cause changes to their gut microbial community. Pick 3 specific behaviors from your list. For each, discuss how that behavior could change the microbial community and the potential health impacts (beneficial, detrimental, neutral) that could result for the individual’s health.
Many factors can affect one’s gut microbial some include, probiotics, Diet (sugars), stress, sleep, and exercise.
Probiotics:
Probiotics can affect one’s microbial activity because they are made of good bacteria. Good bacteria is important to have in your stomach because it helps eliminate the bad bacteria and creates a good balance between good and bad bacteria. Everyone has a different microbial community but probiotics will help everyone keep a solid balance of good and bad bacteria.
Diet:
Everything you put in your body affects your body and overall health. Eating foods with high probiotics can positively impact your gut microbial community such as yogurt, kombucha, and pickled vegetables. A highly processed diet can negatively affect your microbial community because it will decrease the amount of good bacteria in your gut. Food with high amounts of sugars has a very bad effect on your microbiome by decreasing the diversity of bacteria in your gut.
Stress:
Stress has an impact on gut microbial activity because stress affects the body as a whole. Stress affects digestion and triggers your flight or fight response with decreased digestive activity. When digestive activity is decreased your body does not absorb nutrients as well as it normally does. Stress causes inflammation in your body and overall has negative effects not only in your gut microbiome.
