Food and Gut Microbes

Cooked food is easier to swallow and is invariably overeaten. This excess food (organic material) in the body, if not fully metabolized and assimilated into our own body, generates a very large microbial population in our gut. The microbial population is directly proportional to the quantity of food we leave undigested.

When we space our meals and completely digest everything we eat to be used for our own body, then only that microbial population survives which grows on our leftovers we cannot metabolize anyway. Most of us do not completely digest our previous meal before eating our next meal. This pushes undigested or partially digested material down our digestive tract, which generates microbes that grow on the same food we should be using to maintain our body. Our body therefore sees these microbes as antagonistic because they compete for the same food we should be digesting.

Any organism or material considered antagonistic or harmful must be excreted to protect our body. As soon as our body sees an antagonistic microbe, it triggers our immune system (body’s defense mechanism). Constant presence of antagonistic microbes leads to perpetual inflammation of intestinal walls, which is the root cause of most of our lifestyle diseases.

The human body contains about 40 trillion cells. Estimated microbial cell count is anywhere from 40 to 100 trillion! When we harbor a large gut microbial population, a significant fraction of what we eat ends up getting consumed and processed by the gut microbes.

Natural food typically takes longer to eat because we must chew it thoroughly before it can be swallowed. Thus we end up eating slowly, which provides the signal of satiation to our brain in time, and we do not overeat. Consequently we do not leave much undigested material for gut microbes. Thus, consuming ready-to-eat natural food reduces the microbial population in our system considerably.

Those microbes that live on our leftovers are symbiotic and create a protective environment within our gut. They help fight any pathogens we may ingest unknowingly. Thus our immune system does not get activated and we get a natural feeling of ease from within.

Source: the-scientist.com/news-analysis/how-do-infant-immune-systems-learn-to-tolerate-gut-bacteria-30430