Trust Your Gut

Unless your gut is telling you to avoid reading this blog post and go do something else. If that’s the case, then ignore it. Research is giving us more and more reason to give credit to our gut for so many different aspects of our health. If you’re into more of the science behind it, take a look at this article that gives a great overview on how the bacteria of your gut are essential to how you function. In brief, many of these bacteria are able to digest things that we can’t, and make products that we can use, prevent harmful bacteria from damaging us, trigger necessary homeostatic reactions, and so much more.

Ok, so what? Yeah our microbiome is essential to our function, meaning the reverse is also true if it gets messed with. While it isn’t necessarily intuitive, anyone who thinks about it enough could realize that if everyone has bacteria in their gut, then there must be some sort of beneficial reason for its presence or it wouldn’t be so prevalent. Is there anything more interesting than just an important role in survival? What else does our microbiome do for us? When it comes to questions like these, we often need to look no further than research. As an endurance athlete, I wanted to know if our microbiome had any role in endurance sport performance, like whether some people had some bacteria in their gut that provides some sort of product that increases performance, or something along those lines. After I short search, I was not disappointed. An article from a team at Harvard studying Boston marathoners found that a certain bacteria that was normally a small part of the microbiome was extremely active in a vast majority of the marathoners following activity. It was found that this bacteria processes lactate and produces free fatty acids that we can then use in beta oxidation during long duration activities.

To me, this adds not only a new layer of depth to the study of the roles of the microbiome, but also another layer to the ethics of performance maximization of sport. If there are bacteria found to increase performance when in the guts of athletes, would it be ethical to artificially increase your numbers of this bacteria? In my mind it would be on the same level as blood doping, but it will be interesting to see what comes from this.