You really are what you eat—and where it comes from
Thousands of species course through a forest ecosystem, each with its own specific function to the greater good. The species interact with each other, form complex networks that are mutually beneficial, they establish predators and prey, compete for resources, and each member plays a role in influencing its environment as a whole.
The same ecosystem we see inhabiting our forests parallels the ecosystem found in our gut microbiome. To understand how these complex networks coexist, first we need to dive deeper into each individual system.
The gut’s ecosystem
Photo by Sander Dalhuisen on UnsplashWe see our gut, or gastrointestinal tract (GI tract), externally. We notice the work of the mouth, esophagus, stomach, large intestine and small intestine as the pieces of a long tube through which food travels. We recognize that our food is digested by a variety of acids, biles and other juices, but it’s also digested by millions of microscopic organisms that live in our gut.
The gut microbiome is the host to all of these microbes and acts as the habitat which determines which microbes can survive in our bodies. Like any thriving ecosystem, it needs diversity to help establish and maintain a well-balanced community. The gut microbiome doesn’t only affect food digestion; it regulates the digestive system, immune system, endocrine system and even the neurotransmitter system. This means the makeup of your gut microbiome can have a direct affect on mood, mental health and physical well-being.
We’re only beginning to understand the diverse system of bacteria, fungi and viruses and their relationship to the body as a whole. We’ve known that the population of the gut microbiome is affected by the quality of the food, drinks and medications we consume, but researchers are finding that our internal ecosystem is also affected greatly by our external environmental factors as well. As we breathe, touch and exchange the bacteria in our environment every day, these communications are important for establishing and maintaining the microbial diversity in the gut.
With the introduction of urbanization and its modern practices, including caesarian sections, antibiotic use and antibacterial and sanitizing equipment, we’ve not only been killing bad bacteria in our environment, but also sterilizing and disrupting the good bacteria. By not allowing the good bacteria to thrive, we’ve seen an alteration and decrease in gut microbiome diversity and a disruption in our essential health-promoting services and immune system development, which has led to an increase of autoimmune, metabolic, gastrointestinal and cardiovascular diseases.
What does this have to do with our soils? Through the use of pesticides, herbicides and other modern farming practices, we’re mirroring the disruption happening in our bodies in our environment.
The soil’s ecosystem
Photo by Roman Synkevych on UnsplashJust as we see our GI tracts, we often look at the Earth’s floor externally. We see a blanket of dirt and matter when there’s an entire world of organisms living beneath our feet. A forest’s ecosystem stretches beyond the animals, trees, grasses and mosses into millions of microscopic organisms, like insects and fungi that live within the soil. In fact, one gram of soil contains 40 million individual bacterial cells.
Similar to our gut functioning, in order for our soil to be healthy, the “food” that goes into it must be diverse. Fields and forests require a variety of plants, a rotation of animals incorporating their fertilizer, trees and their roots, and all of the microscopic bacteria that process and decompose the matter at the end (and beginning) of life.
In our current growing systems with our planting of one crop (monocropping) and conventional animal grazing, we’re feeding our soil one type of food. The bacteria that enjoys eating this one type of food is in luck—it will flourish while the other bacteria starve and die off. Without a variety of good bacteria to occupy the space, soil is left unable to fight off pathogens, regulate during extreme weather, or maintain its structure and nutrients for plant growth.
In the effort to repair our soil’s ability to grow food, we’ve taken to using pesticides and herbicides to try and kill off the remaining “bad” bacteria and insects in order to give our plants and crops a fighting chance. However, many of these chemical inputs further deplete our soil of beneficial bacteria and leave it completely devoid of nutrients or a defence against erosion and desertification.
Not only does a loss of soil vitality affect our ability to grow food for our population, but the soil biodiversity loss is also a public health threat—without the strong, diverse set of microorganisms within the soil, we have fewer good bacteria to exchange with, further weakening our gut microbiome.
The deeper connection
We are more connected to our soils than we could have ever imagined. Beyond our reliance on the consumption of nutrients through plants and meats (through their absorption of nutrients through soil and microbes), we’ve always relied on our relationship between the outdoors and its abundance of bacteria. Whether good or bad bacteria, the diversity of organisms has allowed our gut microbiome to absorb good bacteria, learn to fight off bad bacteria, and gather the resources to strengthen our bodies.
The planet has also relied on this mutually beneficial relationship, as soil microbiome and gut microbiome swap genetic information with bacteria in a process called horizontal gene transfer, or “gene network”. Here, 10,000 unique genes are regularly transferred between 2,234 bacterial genomes, which is essential for the making of healthy bacteria in both the gut and soil.
The more we’ve distanced ourselves from soil and nature through urbanization, the further we’ve come from planetary and population health. The complexity of this relationship makes information slow to discover, but what we do know now is that when the health of the planet’s soil is threatened, our health is threatened, and to restore it includes a reimagining of our modern way of life.
It starts by reverting our soils to encompass a biodiverse ecosystem filled with plants, animals, insects and microorganisms that are crucial to the regeneration and renewal of beneficial bacteria. From there, the healing continues by placing populations back in connection with the natural world by moving away from urbanization.
Restoring our cohabitation with nature provides benefits to human health through the suppression of soil-borne pathogens, provision of clean air, water and food, and exposure to immunoregulation-inducing soil microorganisms. Growing our population in microbe-rich environments has a direct effect on our health, and exchanging bacteria with our environment has a mutually beneficial outcome for our planet’s health.
The recipe to rehabilitating ecology for both our guts and our soils starts here—by reading, learning and gaining as much information about the imbalances as possible. We have to ask ourselves how our habitats have been altered, which foods our species have been relying on, and then work to reestablish a balance. If we provide our ecosystems with the proper nutrients we can increase our collective resilience and restore the harmony of our communities.