The spelling of that word even looks weird. Microorganisms. These are all the tiny little creatures living on and inside of us. There are ten times as many microorganism cells as there are human cells in our body. Pretty amazing if you ask me.
The real question is how all these little guys affect us. And the answer is in more ways then we can imagine!
The next few articles will talk about how microorganisms affect us both in a positive and negative way, and how we can use them to improve our health. This will kind of be a mini-series within the larger Better Health Challenge.
This article is just to get you to realize that these microorganisms affect everything! They primarily work in the digestive system of our bodies to help digest food and that is where the fun begins. From that point, just by slightly changing the overall environment of the gut we can start having all kinds of issues. Hormonal imbalances, insomnia, infections, weight gain, weight loss, energy levels, mood swings, chronic disease, etc. If something good or bad is happening to us these microorganisms almost certainly play a role in it.
Current science is discovering that the overall microbial environment in your body may play a larger role then even genetics in what kind of diseases you develop, including the big ones, cancer and heart disease.
There are many things you can do to help improve your overall health that involve the little critters in your body. Something as simple as eating yogurt helps favorably improve the environment in your gut by promoting growth of beneficial bacteria. And something as simple as using antibacterial soap on a regular basis can actually leave you more susceptible to things such as the common cold.
This topic deserves quite a few articles to cover, but as for now I found a fun little video created by NPR that helps illustrate this idea…
This is our 39th challenge in The Personal Health Challenge Series…