Fisherman's Guide To The Microbiome

Congratulations!!! The fact that you are reading this webpage means you have made enough of a connection between your health and your microbiome to be here. Making that connection is a great place to start and hopefully the information in this wiki will help you further understand that relationship.

I am not a fisherman but I do have a useful understanding of how my microbiome works that I equate with fishing. Fishing techniques range from science based as commercial fishing operations are likely to utilize to the fuzzy logic traditional, low-tech artisanal fisherman use based on observations in the field.

This Fisherman's Guide To The Microbiome is at the low-tech end of the scale. It is something anyone with a microbiome can read and using just common sense can understand and use.

The Ecosystem

Science can be useful but doesn't need to be burdensome. First a factual description of the ecosystem our microbiome is...

According to Harvard Health Online:

About 100 trillion bacteria, both good and bad, live inside your digestive system. Collectively, they're known as the gut microbiota.

In the Encyclopedia of Cell Biology:

The gut microbiome is the collection of microorganisms including bacteria, archaea, viruses, and fungi found within the gut and their overall genetic information. Our gut microbiota has been shown to have broad effects on our health and well-being, impacting our immune system and metabolism, detoxifying various ingested components, and even affecting behavior.

Well put! The Fisherman says that sounds right.

In terms of numbers of bacterial species I have read estimates ranging from 400 to a few thousand. My guess it's in the 1000s but science so far only understands a few and are therefore recognizing a few hundred as consequential.

Mixed in with our bacterial microbiome is our virome, a collection of viruses that also inhabit our gut. It is estimated there are 140,000 different viruses living there. Unfortunately even less is known about our virome than our microbiome.

For our purposes it is adequate to understand that at our level of operation we are talking about species and strains of bacteria. For an in depth explanation of bacterial taxonomy please check out:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacterial_taxonomy

Further research:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_microbiome

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virome

Enough numbers and science, suffice to say there are a lot of microbes in us and they have a consequential impact on our health.