In terms of food, nutrition, and product use that can affect my microbial communities personally, I have to make a lot of very conscious choices based on the way I react to certain foods. For example, I’m very lactose intolerant. I get awful stomach aches, intestinal pain, and other rather gross side effects when I consume milk products. Therefore, I have to make the decision to not consume these foods otherwise my bowel is entirely cleaned out and I probably lose a lot of bacteria in the process. I actually went and looked up how lactose intolerance affects the gut microbiome whether you have eaten milk products or not, and found a really interesting study at this website (http://www.pnas.org/content/114/3/E367.full) that gave a lot of information about this specific question (who would have thought!?). In short, I am lacking lactose-fermenting bacteria that people who can digest lactose would otherwise have. More importantly, galactooligosaccharadies help with that! The whole article was actually extremely fascinating and it’s exciting to know that studies that actually apply to me personally are being conducted (because I feel like a lot of the studies I read are about super intense diseases that I don’t have or know anyone who has them).
