For more than 30 years, The Health Hut in Mobile and Daphne has focused on high quality, whole-food vitamins, herbs and supplements and a well-educated staff. Natural Awakenings asked owner Jeff Sheldon to explain the role our microbiome plays in immune health and how we can help optimize its function.

How does the bacteria in our GI system affect our immune system?

When our microbiome is balanced—when we’re keeping the bad bacteria down and the good bacteria up—it’s more than an immune building environment, it’s immune-modulating. This means it has the ability to kick the immune system in gear as needed.

The majority of our microbiota live in our gut, and probiotics—the good bacteria—inhibit the growth and reproduction of bad pathogens which we’re exposed to on a daily basis through our food and drink and the things we touch. When there’s an imbalance of bacteria we’re not able to regulate our immune system as we normally would. This happens when we’re exposed to something or we have an unhealthy lifestyle due to things such as poor nutrition, cigarettes and alcohol.

How does childbirth impact our microbiome?

It’s the foundation of everything. If you’re not exposed to the birth canal, there are very specific species of bacteria that do not have a chance to grow in the first few months of life and those are the main species for immune function.

That is not to say a C-section birth will yield an unhealthy child. There will always be a time and place for C-sections. Mothers can ingest probiotic supplements and eat fermented foods to pass to baby during nursing. Many hospitals are actually swabbing the mother during a C-section birth and exposing the child to the bacteria.

What are the best ways to balance our microbiome?

It’s important that we feed the good bacteria through our diet so they populate and grow. They’re living organisms and you don’t want them to starve to death. In our Western diets, foods such as onion, garlic, bananas, oats and soybeans all contain prebiotic fibers that the probiotics live on.

Fermented foods like kimchi, kefir, sauerkraut and pickled vegetables are all good sources of probiotics, but Americans don’t eat a lot of those things. So, many people choose to take probiotic supplements.

How do we choose a good probiotic supplement?

We recommend multi-strain formulas. Look for products that will guarantee their potency and that have strains that are clinically-proven in humans. You can find probiotics at the grocery store that have 4 million viable cells, but we’re measuring these cells in billions. From my rib cage to my hips, there may be 600 trillion viable cells, so when I put in 50 billion, that’s a drop in the bucket. A probiotic supplement measured in millions may not provide much benefit at all.

As a live culture, probiotics in pills are dormant. What brings them out of dormancy is heat and/or moisture so the potency of refrigerated products will likely diminish more slowly than those that have been sitting on the shelf at room temperature.

What happens when we take antibiotics?

Antibiotic usage doesn’t necessarily kill all the bacteria, but the bad guys start outnumbering the good guys. And if we don’t replenish them, that’s how we grow up with these imbalances which can cause other problems later in life—mostly inflammatory-based conditions such as Crohn’s disease, colitis and irritable bowel syndrome. Even autoimmune diseases can be traced back to inflammation in the gut.

Repeated usage can wreck the system long-term, but there is a time and a place for antibiotics. The proven thing to do is to follow up with a good strong probiotic post-antibiotic usage to replenish the good bacteria.

For more information, visit HealthHutAL.com.