What is the relationship between your microbiome (friendly gut bacteria) and your immune system?
Seventy per cent of your immune system is this microbiome, your gut bacteria. You have trillions and trillions of microbes living in and around your body that are a constantly exchanging with you.
You are giving them a place to live and they give you immune protection, they give you nutrients, they help your blood sugars and they give you other things that are beneficial.
There is over 10,000 different species of friendly bacteria in and around your body. 99% of them are non pathogenic (good guys). The great majority of microbes in your body are living in the large colon just above and in the mucus layer and then you have the colon cells and then you have another layer of protection where you have certain immune cells or guards waiting for an invader to pop through so they can attack and eat them up.
When you have an imbalance (too many bad guys) in the microbiome you start to lose your gut lymphatic layer. You start to have a decrease in your lymph nodes. You start to have fewer antibodies. Antibodies are those things that attach on microbes, they do not kill the microbes, and they put a tag on them for other immune cells to kill them.
Antibodies are very specific to different pathogens. You also have a decrease in the t-cell production. T stands for thymus because the thymus gland helps train the t-cells and you are going to have less of t-cell production.
The primary function of the thymus gland is central tolerance, which is to be able to tolerate your own cells that are beneficial to you because if you do not have that function T-cells or soldier cells they are like special forces would not be able to tell the difference between the good guys and the bad guys and they would end up killing both of them and you end up with your own body cells getting attacked.
That is a condition called an autoimmune disease. Auto antibodies are antibodies that are basically attacking your own tissue but they are not really attacking they are tagging your own tissue as being a bad guy and other immune cells, like T-cells, are going in there and actually trying to attack them and that creates inflammation.
When you have autoimmune conditions you always have inflammation and that is really what is happening. You are getting this constant attack and because the microbiome is so heavily connected to your immune system when you lose your microbiome, you lose your T-Cell production and you lose the central tolerance and you lose the ability to learn to differentiate.
Now we have a situation where we have a lot of friendly fire and we have a lot of collateral damage in the body and a lot of inflammation. T-cells differentiate between your cells and a pathogen cell.
It is quite amazing that your body has this ability to differentiate trillions of cells from pathogens that are not necessarily your cell but they are so intimately involved and there is such a helper to your body that your body has developed a system to keep them alive and not attack and kill them. And also there are certain T-cells that suppress inflammation so if we lose that suppression we get a lot of inflammatory conditions.
If we also do not have enough microbiome we get less small chain fatty acid (SCFA) and one would be called butyrate. Butyrate is not only helpful in balancing your blood sugars and definitely improving insulin resistance but it is also there to help improve your immune system. Also you have less ability to make B12, B1, vitamin K, biotin and even lactic acid. Lactic acid makes the environment for pathogens very uncomfortable.
Also the microbiome are hoarding the food and the space to also limit the amount of pathogenic bacteria to exist. And the less microbiome you have the weaker the intestinal barrier and then you start getting leaky gut.
Dr. Berg’s opinion is that autoimmune disease starts in the gut. If you ever talked to someone who has an autoimmune disease like Hashimoto’s, Crohn’s, Lupus, MS, or any shown below, they almost always have a gut problem.
In his other videos when he talks about the koron aviruc19 (you guessed it), the way that that virus attacks your cell is through a receptor called the ACE2 receptor. Well it just so happens that your gut has way more ace2 receptors than the lung tissue. So this is another mode of entry into the cell that goes beyond just your lung infection, which is quite interesting.
If you want to know what to do to support the microbiome check out these video:
Supercharge Your gut Microbes with Intermittent Fasting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsm7rChLI7w
Increase Gut Bacteria Diversity: Here’s How https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUqVHZSFKZo
This Post has been condensed from Dr. Berg’s video, Gut Bacteria and Viruses https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9g3OO3hkL0
Dr. Berg is a chiropractor, who specializes in Healthy Keto & Intermittent Fasting. He is the author of the best-selling book The Healthy Keto Plan, and is the Director of Dr. Berg Nutritionals. He has taught students nutrition as an adjunct professor at Howard University.
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