One of the odder things about the human gut microbiome is how different each person is.
Everyone’s microbiome includes different types of bacteria; curiously, they all seem to do more or less the same thing, in both sickness and in health. It is one of the foundational mysteries of human biology, how complex be have our of millions of bacteria, is vastly different person to person, can create such similar results in the end, such as in the production of short-chain fatty acids, or amino acids.
Some microbiome are more specialists than others, carrying out a Saller amount of biochemical production than the more common varieties but doing it well for an especially important purpose. Some brains get affected for good or ill.
Consider depression and anxiety. Maybe, for example, people who suffered from these conditions have been colonized by a microbe or group of microbes that relate to that. Or on the other hand maybe they have something missing.
Science is showing that there is something missing, microbes have gone extinct, wither personally via illness or antibiotics or more broadly through changes in the population. Some people lack microbes that are critical to the regulation of mood.
There have been studies that find the gut microbiome of Yanomami in the Amazon have a diverse gut microbiome. They have microbes the rest of the world does not have. The suspicion is that through time we have lost some of the microbiome.
Have questions as me, info@mindhealthconnect.ca
Ref: National Post October 2023