If we used to say ‘it’s me and my circumstances’, now the fashionable expression is ‘it’s me and my microbiota’. It is that army of bacteria that live in our body, help us in digestion or in managing the immune system, and that maintain a peculiar balance among themselves. So much that we find out something is wrong because we ourselves start to go wrong. Sara Marín has spent years studying the role of this great ‘invisible organ’. She is a resident doctor at the Virgen de la Arrixaca hospital in Murcia, she has almost 2 million followers on Instagram (@uncafecontudoctora) and will participate in the upcoming WeLife Festival with a novel approach to female hormones, the microbiota and the vagus nerve.
She herself began to research the microbiota when she was still a medical student. Her own digestive problems and her cousin’s son, who had autism and showed a notable improvement after starting to take probiotics, pushed her to investigate and dedicate her bachelor’s thesis to a microbiota that was hardly talked about yet.
Why now and not before?
Up to 90% of the population could have digestive problems of various kinds, “with abdominal bloating and inflammation being the most common,” notes the doctor. The causes are well known: an accelerated lifestyle and a hurried diet that is far from our grandparents’ “stew,” astronomically high levels of stress, lack of sleep… And all converge on one point: it affects our microbiota, hence the rise of interest in these bacteria. “We are seeing more and more difficult digestions, autoimmune diseases that are related in about 70% of them to the microbiota and intestinal permeability… Parallel, we have new generations who want to take care of themselves and feel good. That’s why studies on this matter have multiplied,” she says.
If intestinal discomfort was once endured in silence, now responses and solutions are sought. “We want to understand what is happening to us, see where it comes from and know what we can do intelligently to optimize or ‘hack’ our health,” says the doctor, in a language very typical of Generation Z. “People no longer want to normalize the idea of ‘there is nothing you can do’ because there is something you can do!”, she emphasizes.
Sara Marín recalls when other professionals would say ‘what a silly thing this is’, that they were nothing more than “bugs and bacteria”. Now the scientific evidence is overwhelming and is obliging doctors to update themselves and to take the well-being of the microbiota into account before prescribing a treatment. The clearest proof is the caution with antibiotics, the strategies that involve changing the diet or incorporating probiotics into habitual nutrition.
Everything happens in our gut
You may wonder why now it seems that everything happens in our gut and affects the rest of our body. “The microbiota does not change in a day. This begins in childhood, when families did not know that white flour isn’t so good, with the Nutella sandwich, with eating sweets every afternoon… There have been years and years that have affected our gut and have brought us to this point,” she reveals.
As adults we worsen the scenario. We add stress, anxiety or central nervous system disturbances. “We are seeing how our bacteria have a very close connection with the brain, known as the gut-brain axis. Many problems we see like anxiety or depression originate with digestive disorders. In the end, we treat them with drugs like serotonin, which is related to happiness and we are really pulling a patch because many depressions have another cause behind them, such as a digestive disturbance that is causing all this to happen. We treat the consequences and not the focus,” she acknowledges.
Treating depression without knowing the origin
The early research on the microbiota dates back to the late seventeenth century, with the first discoveries by Dr. Anton van Leeuwenhoek about microorganisms, but it would not be until 2006 when technology allowed deciphering the diversity of microorganisms and understanding why every individual has a unique microbiota.
Sara Marín reveals, for example, that people at her health center who take Anxiolytics, antidepressants and sleeping pills also have digestive problems, bloating, reflux or dyspepsia. Following the discovery of that connection between bacteria and the brain, it is now known that many of those disorders originate from digestion. The medication they were taking was not the solution, but a patch.
There was a need to channel the approach toward the microbiome.
Attend to the signals of the microbiota
Microbiotica is backed by solid scientific research that has already confirmed that, for example, when we take antibiotics a probiotic should be administered because it will prevent the gut from being disturbed or the inflammation or infections from arising.
Marín also highlights how well they work to solve digestive problems, especially in gastroenteritis in children or infant colic. “And their use is very interesting to help people who suffer from irritable bowel syndrome, where most of the evidence has been demonstrated,” she adds.
Special mention deserves how these latest discoveries have also found the relationship between the microbiota and the development of Alzheimer’s. There are bacteria that can influence the accumulation of the protein that contributes to the progression of this disease. “In specific doses, the bacteria could be used to prevent neurodegenerative disorders or to prevent autism,” she says, hopeful.
They could even help predict the risk of colon cancer.
Towards a more personalized medicine
Researchers in microbiota reject that this is a trend. “What is fashionable is not to settle for a diagnosis that doesn’t convince. We all want to feel well and that forces us to know more about the microbiota,” says Marín. And she acknowledges that it is difficult to study because the microbiota of each person changes every 24 hours, so it is difficult to find patterns to continue a research.
But the studies are on the right track and Sara Marín hopes that “we will reach personalized medicine when microbiota analyses become more common, as a way to prevent diseases or to find more effective treatments,” she says. It will contribute to precise diagnostics and therapies thanks to personalization and to treating each disorder in an individual way.
The microbiota influences everything… but it is not everything
Sara Marín has a message for all those who are starting to worry about what happens in their intestine: “The microbiota influences all diseases, but let’s not treat it as something to exclude other pathologies, nor attribute everything that happens to us to it,” begins. “Let’s review our health and learn to rule out other things that are behind it, apart from a microbiota that perhaps isn’t as healthy as we’d like,” she concludes.
“Now it seems that everyone has SIBO on social networks. Everything is SIBO!” But abdominal bloating or discomfort does not necessarily have to be related to gut bacteria, and certainly not without a test. It has become very fashionable to talk about this bacterial overgrowth when, many times, what is happening is that we are stressed and have not eaten well. “Your microbiota is a whistleblower of how you take care of yourself,” she adds. Because it isn’t always that when we feel unwell it is its fault.
