Dysbiosis
The gut garden loses variety
A couple of pounds of microbes live in your gut, and they are not passengers. They train your immune system and manufacture compounds your own cells cannot make. A young gut is a garden with forty species in it. An older one is often six, and the weeds are winning — while the wall between the garden and the bloodstream grows leakier.
Variety beats any single superfood: thirty different plants across a week does more than any powder. Fibre feeds the good ones, fermented food adds to them. Take antibiotics when you genuinely need them and not when you do not. Probiotic capsules are sold a long way ahead of what the trials actually show.
The science, in one sentence
The gut’s microbial community loses diversity and shifts toward species that provoke inflammation, while the gut wall grows more permeable.