Maintaining Gut Health for Calisthenics Athletes – Source of Strength

These cells are mostly bacteria and have evolved with us for millions of years. Collectively, we call them the microbiome or microflora,  and they live in symbiosis with us.

They have a variety of important functions including but not limited to: producing vitamins, assisting in keeping the immune system in check, preventing colonization by pathogenic bacterial species and producing short chain fatty acids that have a myriad of effects on our bodies!

Microbiota are a hot topic in current studies, and rudimentary links have been established between poor gut health and cardio-metabolic diseases including metabolic syndrome, diabetes and others.

Needless to say, it’s important to keep these micro-organisms happy and healthy. How do we do that you might ask? By considering diet.

Highly processed sugars are well known to alter gut biodiversity, and rudimentary evidence suggests that artificial sweeteners could play a role as well.

It’s important to note that the gut microbiome is in constant need of being actively maintained, and changes can quickly be reversed by dietary lapses.

Studies in murine models suggest that metabolic changes achieved by dietary modifications could be a) abolished by anti-biotic intervention and b) transposed to other mice by fecal transplants. This is important as it a) isolates microflora as a significant metabolic player, not just an accessory to human metabolism and b) gives perspective to microfloral metabolic changes in the absence of dietary change.

Sources:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5082693/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25231862

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