When it comes to your energy needs, “CALORIE” is the most important word. However it has been interpreted wrongly by all means & used in favor of propagating fad diets & making your energy reservoir deficit in pursuit of weight loss.
What if you had an untapped source of energy at your disposal that could not only improve your day to day life but also help you in weight management? Synthetic biology science has proved that there is a source of vitality that influences every aspect of human health including weight management & metabolic homeostasis- Gut microbiome.
Gut microbiome is a unique collection of microbes that live in your large intestine. These microbes perform critical functions which include digesting food, regulating essential hormones, boosting metabolism, modulating satiety level, providing nutrients- vitamins, minerals & beneficial short chain fatty acids, detoxifying enzymes, neutralising pathogens, making neurotransmitters & energy production. This essentially means our gut microbiome plays an important role in improving our daily performance right from- energy levels, metabolism, motivation & mood.
So you must be wondering how microbes living in your gut drive all decisions related to your health & wellbeing?
Your body is a container for these microorganisms- 40 trillion of them consisting of bacteria, fungi, archaea, algae that have evolved alongside, inside & on us for thousands of years. As mentioned above, they help in digestion, release neurotransmitters, boost metabolism & strengthen our immune system & essentially train our immune system.
When this ecosystem of microbes is disrupted it can change how we harvest energy, leads to weight gain, hormonal imbalances, fatigue, depression, anxiety, stomach issues & can even onset the development & progression of chronic diseases.
By making microbes in your gut work in your favor you can actually maintain a healthy weight, regulate your hormones, boost metabolism & improve your energy production. Let us discuss each of these three factors in detail
- Regulating hormone levels: Our gut microbiome is CEO when it comes to hormone production. It plays an important role in production & regulating of so many hormones, many scientists have referred to the gut as another endocrine system organ. Our gut microbiome also impacts development & regulation of the HPA axis which is our major neuroendocrine system. This system impacts our stress level, mood, emotion & sex drive which essentially means that it is not our mind as we earlier assumed but our gut microbiome that influences our mental health. Our gut microbiome impacts our mental state of mind through production regulation of various hormones & metabolites(1). If you want to feel happier, have better stress resilience & awesome sex drive, you should focus on maintaining & improve health of your gut microbiome. Besides, research has proved that these folks have a role to play in overall weight management & reducing weight.
- Modulating Metabolism: You want to look good. Did you know there are some microbes in your gut that can make your weight loss easier & sustainable? There is no food, supplement or probiotic that can help you fend off weight gain. It is a certain strain of bacteria, which if active, are associated with being lean! In people having obesity or overweight, there is a fall in overall gut microbial diversity. Besides, there is also disruption in gut microbiome composition in obese & overweight people. Overweight &/or obese people have more firmicutes bacteria & around 90% less bacteriodetes. Therefore by looking at your microbiome composition we can predict if you would be obese. Therefore it is important to remember that a calorie deficit has nothing to do with weight loss. Depending upon your gut microbiome composition, energy may be either utilised or stored as fat & hence no two people extract the same amount of calories from the same food. In order words, your dietary choices should focus on modifying your gut microbiome composition so that you have a balance between Firmicutes & Bacteroidetes for maintaining a healthy weight. After all your gut health matters.
- Driving energy production: And the most important aspect is the gut microbiome- it helps in energy production & regulation. This essentially means that you could level up your energy once you improve your gut health. Scientists have discovered that your gut microbiome plays a vital role in determining how much energy we extract from the food we eat which translates into energy production. This energy production ( at cellular level) determines how much energy you have at your disposal on a day to day basis. Microbes in our gut metabolise hard to digest foods such as plant polysaccharides & complex carb & convert them into beneficial short chain fatty acids such as Butyrate. This butyrate is an energy source for colon cells, improves insulin sensitivity & strengthens gut lining( damaged & compromised gut lining can lead to body wide inflammation host of chronic health conditions including endotoxemia, cardiovascular & metabolic diseases). Besides, Butyrate also ramps up your energy production by improving mitochondrial function which improves your satiety level. Optimising gut microbiome for improve energy production & endurance has made sports person & athletes focus on adopting dietary choices that promotes growth of beneficial microbes in the gut.
How can you optimise your gut microbiome? This is where we come in! We sequence your microbial genes & deep dive in your current state of gut microbiome to analyse every single biochemical activity taking place inside the body & provide unique recommendations for food that promotes activities of beneficial microbes. In other words, we can tell you just by looking at your gut microbiome analysis, whether a particular food will give you a nutrient or will be toxin for you.
By adopting specific dietary recommendations you can starve the fad folks living in your gut & feed beneficial bacteria to make your microbes work in favor of your health. For more details, how you can sequence your microbiome & make it work to improve your health outcomes give us a shout at www.genefitletics.com
Sources 1) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4662178/
