132 the O’ spa the O’ spa GUT MICROBIOTA: a commentary on the internal struggles of our second brain A complex and articulated community, interconnected and engaged in a constant and feverish communication, with a Gross Domestic Product among the highest. Thirty-nine trillion individuals consuming, producing, prospering and residing on a fertile territory, covering two square meters of surface and an eight meters-long tunnel, colonized about nine months after its creation. In this underground metropolitan area lives an extremely important colony, solely consisting of immigrants working in extreme conditions such as non-existence of light and, sometimes, of oxygen. Despite the absence of a central government system and any kind of representation, the different species and ethnic groups usually cohabit in a virtual absence of conflicts. Among the great families that dominate this region: Lactobacillus and Bifidobacteria, Escherichia, Eubacteria, Bacteroides, Clostridium. They are our guests, allies whose support we can’t do without: our symbiont, our personal army. The term 'microbiota' refers to the set of organisms living inside us. It is estimated that every human being is home to between 500 and 10,000 different species in the form of bacteria, fungi and viruses. The relationship linking us to them is of a mutualistic type, a give-and-take ensuring advantages for both sides. Without the one that some scientists regard as a proper organ, we would have no way to degrade substances such as cellulose and cartilages or to benefit from vitamin K, essential for blood clotting, that our body is unable to produce by itself. It is also a precious gene reservoir. Each of us comes into the world with a set of fixed genes that does not take into account some difficulties the body can encounter in life. Our gene reservoir compensates for this rigidity, patrolling territory and mutating for us. When the child experiences particular stresses, when he undergoes antibiotic treatment or bad nutrition, the microbiota changes and keeps mutating until the seventh/tenth year, time when it reaches its balance. From then on, it will be the gut microbiota to rule and legislate on key functions such as metabolism and to protect us from the major pathogens. However, if the microbiota is wrongly structured during the early years, it will cause an overactivation of the immune system and, consequently, the development of chronic inflammatory diseases. Therefore, microbiota is mutable. Nutrition, lifestyle, adverse external factors can impoverish whether the number and the variety of our symbionts, thus threatening not only our intestine’s eubiosis but also, by virtue of the relationship between it and our brain, our feelings and thoughts. For example, it has been proven that the aforementioned stress elements can damage our microbiota to the point of causing the onset of the irritable bowel syndrome. The deep underground labyrinth in which it resides is in fact endowed in its internal surfaces with a dense nervous system, as with a number of neurons equal to about one hundred million. Largely independent of the central nervous system, the gastrointestinal tract is connected to it by the vagus nerve, Ariadne’s thread of the enteric nervous system, through which information interesting the so-called gut-brain axis spread. #the O’ spa curated by Stefano Santangelo 133
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