A reader forwarded his Genova Stool results and I want to focus on one aspect of it that is shown below. Low biodiversity of gut bacteria, as show below.

A flippant answer would be “Stop washing you fruit,vegetables, hands and have a tablespoon of good organic living soil every day!”  In other words, extreme Hygiene Hypothesis! Instead, I will do a conservative, pubmed based analysis.You may also wish to read this post by Dr. Lipman

Probiotics

The obvious first choice is Prescript-Assist with some thirty species, followed by Floracol probiotics which is similar, but in theory should have different strains. As well as Microflora Restore and any other soil based probiotics that you can fine, In some cases, you may have to search overseas to find such offerings.

Foods

The first food that comes to mind is what I use to encourage biodiversity, 100% rye bread [2012]. Rye was the stable of most North European diet until only a few hundred years ago. Our gut bacteria far better evolved to live off rye instead of wheat. There are usually two choices – both imported from Europe (US Rye bread is usually made with a little rye and a lot of wheat!). Loafs form Germany and Poland (for example Mestemacher Whole Rye Bread) and Sweden/Norway Crisp breads).

Exercise also improves diversity[2014] and as a corollary, less obese people have better diversity[2013]. Fasting also increases diversity [2015]

Going over to AmericanGut.Org, they reported in 2014

• How much of the microbial diversity participants shared with other participants depended greatly on how recently they had taken antibiotics. Those participants who had taken antibiotics within the last year tended to have less shared diversity with other participants.
• Alcohol imbibers tended to have greater microbial diversity than those that don’t drink alcohol at all.
• Spikes in microbiome populations seem to occur around holidays: in July, and in November through January.
• There is no single organism that is found in every person, but some are more common across the population than others.
• People who sleep more and who exercise outdoors have more diverse microbiomes.
• The microbiomes of the elderly resemble those of infants in certain respects, as seen in other studies

Most of the other articles dealt with increasing the amount (that is already there) and not diversity.

Speculation: Eating a wide variety of ethically different (and not “americanized”) foods would also increase diversity.

And the last way, horrible horrible way, long deep french kisses with healthy young things! [80 million living units per kiss! – [2014] … new pick up line, “Kiss me — I don’t want your body, just the bacteria in your body!!”

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