Biomes, They are A-Changin’

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Why your microbiome is considered an ‘essential organ’.

With an end result that amounts to a more or less flat line, homeostasis sounds passive — but it’s quite the opposite. For instance, a great deal goes into maintaining our circadian rhythm, or the body’s sleep-wake cycle. In most organisms, the internal clock is set to a 24-hour cycle, in keeping with light and dark. While cycling through each day, body temperature, stress hormones, wakefulness, and even digestion and metabolism are synced up to achieve balance within. But we don’t do it alone. More and more, we’re finding that our gut microbiome, the bustling community of microorganisms in our intestines, is intimately involved in this rhythmic ebb and flow.

In the past several decades, research on the gut microbiome has connected the bugs that live in our colon with just about every aspect of health and wellbeing imaginable, from digestion to immune function to social behavior. In many cases, the microbes that inhabit the body have so much impact on their host’s function that the microbiome is considered an essential organ in and of itself. Now, some of the newest research is revealing that these powerful microbes are affected by — and may even be in control of — some of the body’s important rhythms as well.