In this post, healthy living author, Kelly Kitchen Kop and Just Thrive microbiologist, Kiran Krishnan discuss some important implications the microbiome has on a number of women’s health concerns.
Topics covered include the microbiome’s effect on:
- Estrogen metabolization
- UTIs and other infections,
- Immune health
- Fertility, pregnancy and breastfeeding
- Babies born naturally through the birth canal vs. through C-section
- Plus you’ll discover how women can transfer their microbiome to C-section babies, and breastfeeding.
Excess Estrogen
Kelly:
Kiran, the first thing I want to ask you is a Just Thrive question. Recently I had a thermogram, but [my doctor] said it looks like I may have an estrogen excess, so she wanted me to go on primrose oil.
I've been taking that. And also she wanted me to take another supplement. [B]asically it's concentrated cruciferous vegetables.
And Joanie … who works with Just Thrive, [said] that they're worthless because if your microbiome doesn't have the right bacteria there to handle the excess estrogen, it's not going to do anything anyway. Tell me, how can Just Thrive help with that type of thing?
Kiran Krishnan:
Yeah. Ultimately it's this consolation of bacteria called Estrobolome that exists within your gut. Estrobolome plays different roles within the microbiome, but everything related to estrogen in particular. There's evidence that it metabolizes excess estrogen, but if you have dysbiosis, it can actually reactivate estrogen that's being dumped into the gut to be excreted from the body, so it seems to play both roles.
Now, increasing diversity in the microbiome is related to balancing out estrogen by metabolizing it in the gut and removing it from circulation. What your body does with estrogen is, your glands will produce estrogen, circulate around the body, and then it's dumped into the gut to get rid of it.
In order to create a imbalance within the gut, the estrogen, once it's dumped into the gut, either has to be reactivated and reabsorbed, so then you're building excessive amounts of estrogen, which drives estrogen dominance, or it has to be metabolized—like it's supposed to in the gut—and then removed from the body.
That metabolization of estrogen is dependent on increasing diversity in the microbiome. Increasing intake of cruciferous vegetables can help with increasing diversity. There's not a whole lot of studies on it, but just theoretically, yes, it should, because you're feeding different types of microbes with those macro molecules.
There's a lot of fiber in those types of vegetable sources, so they feed other groups of bacteria that you may not be feeding with your conventional diet, certainly with diets that are high in protein or fat. Those cruciferous vegetables will bring about other microbes.
But Just Thrive plays a big role because we have studies showing that when you increase the intake of spores or start the intake of spores, and there is some dose dependency to it, so you can bump up your dose a little bit, [this] will actually increase the diversity of the microbiome quite significantly, thereby helping balance all the hormone issues.
Kelly:
Should I take more Just Thrive, and should I also take this [cruciferous vegetable] supplement as well?
Kiran Krishnan:
I would think you'd almost be better off just eating more cruciferous vegetables and taking your Just Thrive.
Kelly:
Okay. That's so funny because a lot of times they say you shouldn't be eating too many of these cruciferous vegetables. Some people say that because there's anti-nutrients in those sometimes, especially if they're raw. How does that play into it, do you know?
Kiran Krishnan:
Yeah. Lectin sensitivities and things come into the picture. If you simmer them for a long time with extra virgin olive oil, that seems to negate most of the issues.
UTIs and Vaginal Infections
Kelly:
Yeah, cooking … that's true. All right, great. Tell me more about a healthy urinary tract and how Just Thrive can help prevent UTIs and bacterial vaginosis.
Kiran Krishnan:
UTI issues come from a couple of different things. You could develop a UTI because you're dehydrated, because you're not peeing enough, and part of peeing is also cleansing out the urethra, so that flushing of the urinary tract.
For women in particular, the proximity of the urinary tract is so close to the anal cavity, so you've got continuous exposure to microbes like E. coli that are in the anal area and so that can go up the urinary tract. Everything's internal for women, so that makes it a little more complicated. It's more moist. It's internal. It's a much easier area for places to breed and grow and then move up in the wrong direction up the urinary tract. Men, it's different. We have stuff externally. We've got a longer urinary tract, so it's harder for things to get in there and cause UTIs.
Kelly:
That's why women have more?
Kiran Krishnan:
They tend to have more UTIs because of that, yeah. Just the physiological structure alone, that's a big driver. Now your body is constantly dealing with bacteria in the urinary tract. We used to think there was this old adage that urine was sterile, but it's not.
Nothing in your body is sterile. Your blood is not sterile. Your blood has a thousand bacteria cells for every milliliter of blood, and we have 5,500 milliliters of blood. That's how many bacteria we have floating in our blood. A thousand times 5,500; that's a lot. We used to think that our cerebral spinal fluid is sterile. It's not. It's full of viruses, bacteria, everything. Nothing in the body's sterile. We're constantly dealing with microbes going up the urinary tract. But your immune system, your mucosal structures, all of that, fight it off all the time.
Peeing helps by flushing it out. If any of those things go imbalanced, meaning you're not peeing enough, or let's say you're peeing enough, but your immune system is dysfunctional, your mucosal immune system is dysfunctional, you're going to increase your risk for that turning into an infection. Just like infections in the body, just like cancer even, we are constantly fighting it all day long. There's cancer cells being developed in your body every single day, multiple times a day, but your immune system detects it, finds it, and shuts it down.
It's all about keeping that immune system up and functioning. The central command for the immune system is in the gut. Almost 80% of your immune tissue is in the gut. All of the sampling that occurs in terms of how our body understands the world around us starts in the gut. And the mucosal immune response, which covers every mucosal surface in your body, including your urinary tract, the master command for that is in the gut. So if your mucosal immune system is going to be robust and be able to fight off these infections that are constantly being generated, then your gut microbiome and your gut immune system has to be in tip top shape.
The best way to try to reduce your risk of these recurrence issues is to have a really healthy gut microbiome and an unregulated and functioning immune system in the gut. Probiotics, like Just Thrive, can play a big role in that.
Pregnancy and Fertility:
Kelly:
Okay, great. Same with yeast infections. We've talked about that before, specifically. What about a young mom who is maybe having trouble getting pregnant, wants a healthy pregnancy, labor and delivery. How does a healthy gut affect that?
Kiran Krishnan:
Yeah. A lot of fertility has to do with what microbes are living in your vaginal canal. Having the right lactobacilli, and it's interesting to note that most women are dominated by one species in the vaginal canal. It's one of four. It's either L. crispatus or L. genci, one of the four main Lactobacilli. But most healthy women with the healthy vaginal flora will have a predominance of just one bacteria, that'll makeup 90% of the microbes in there, which is a very unique thing. I can't think of any other areas in the body where you have an entire ecosystem dominated by one microbe.
Everywhere else in the body, we've got a pretty good amount of diversity. The only other area where diversity is not really a good thing is on the skin microbiome. You want a predominance of a couple of different microbes, but the predominance of that one healthy microbe, that's your vaginal microbe, is one of the determining factors on fertility because it changes how your hormone response is in your ovaries and how your uterus functions and the lining of the uterus. All of those factors are determined in large part by that one microbe in your vaginal canal.
Kelly:
Determined by which one it is or how much of it you have?
Kiran Krishnan:
How much of it, it has. How dysfunctional it is. If you've got a dysfunctional vaginal microbiome, you've got too many other microbes in there, you've got yeast, you've got issues. All of that will change the ability to actually get pregnant because it'll change the hormone response, it'll change gonadotropins, it'll change how your uterus forms. All of these things are affected by those microbes.
Now, the gut microbiome specifically has an ability to support the growth of beneficial bacteria in the vaginal canal. And it does that by feeding the vaginal bacteria with metabolites from the gut through the mucosa. Also, up regulating the immune response in the mucosa in the gut, changes the immune response in the mucosa in the vaginal canal. It helps your immune system fight off other bacteria that are trying to overgrow in the vaginal canal, and it maintains the dominance of that one strain.
Ecologically, from a microbe standpoint, that's a very uncomfortable scenario. Almost anywhere where you look at bacteria outside of places like hospitals where they're constantly sterilizing the environment, you don't have a predominant species in a microbial ecology. You tend to have a spread of many different species. You don't have one that takes up 90% of the cells. That is what's going on in the vaginal microbiome. In order to keep all the other bacteria from constantly trying to take over, your immune system has to function in the vaginal microbiome, to bring down the growth of those other microbes. It's a constant battle between your immune system and the microbes that live there, trying to maintain that predominance of the one. And again, 80% of your immune system is in your gut, so that priming of the immune system, keeping it up in tiptop shape to help maintain the healthy vaginal canal, is done in the gut.
Kelly:
A lot of women, you're saying, who can't get pregnant, they overall are unhealthy as far as their immune system?
Kiran Krishnan:
They could be, yeah. It's one of many factors. There's lots of causes, but it's certainly something that people need to be paying attention to.
Kelly:
This will be an easy, non-invasive thing to try for a woman to just take [probiotics].
Kiran Krishnan:
And if you're doing other things, if you're working with a fertility specialist, and you're doing all these other things that could be really beneficial, it would behoove you to focus on the gut as well, because you don't want anything getting in the way of having that happy, healthy child, getting that pregnancy. This is an important thing for people to pay attention to in addition to the other things they may be doing.
Kelly:
And most conventional docs probably don't even know about this.
Kiran Krishnan:
Absolutely. It's all very new stuff, yeah.
Microbiome Via Birth Canal, C-Section Implications, and Breastfeeding
Kelly:
They get pregnant, and then their healthy gut will obviously help the baby to be especially healthy. But [something that’s also] super important is then when they come through the vaginal tract, you've told me that before.
Kiran Krishnan:
Totally. Yeah, then you're giving the baby... the baby's life in general, and the baby's health outcomes. Of course, from birth, all the way till the baby's a full grown adult, is determined in large part by what kind of microbes the baby picked up moving through the vaginal canal and through birth. Mom's duty is to pass on the best and most robust microbiome to the child.
Even if you're not focusing on your gut for fertility reasons, let's say you are able to get pregnant in other ways, and you have a good stable pregnancy, you need to keep in mind that you're passing on those microbes to your child. Are you going to pass on microbes that are increasing the child's risk for anxiety? Are you passing on microbes and increasing them for allergies, autoimmune disease, obesity, or are you going to pass on a robust, healthy microbiome that's going to protect the child and allow the child to thrive?
Kelly:
You told me before, but remind me, babies born by C-section, either they've done experiments or whatever with trying to get that mucosa in and around the baby's mouth and stuff, right?
Kiran Krishnan:
Yeah.
Kelly:
They still benefit even though they were born by C-section?
Kiran Krishnan:
Yep. And that can be done now. Most hospitals are pretty open to it now.
Kelly:
Do they do it regularly though, or is it...
Kiran Krishnan:
It's not offered. No, you have to be a proponent of it. You have to push the doctor to do it. I actually was just having a conversation with a couple that I worked with that did that. They had a planned C-section for numerous reasons, and so prior to going to the hospital, the husband and the wife in the bedroom were taking out sterile gauze and figuring out ways to shove it into the birth canal. And so they were doing all of this funny stuff, and then they made their way to the hospital. And sure enough, as soon as they pulled the baby out through the cesarean incision, they took the gauze out and wiped the baby down with it.
Kelly:
In their mouth?
Kiran Krishnan:
Around the mouth.
Kelly:
Their skin?
Kiran Krishnan:
Yep, everywhere you can, especially in this upper respiratory tract area, because you want the baby to ingest some of that bacteria. Now then the important thing is you wipe the baby down. You don't want to hand the baby to the nurse, and then they take them and clean the baby off. You want to stay with that stuff for a little bit.
Kelly:
Because they wipe them off pretty quickly and try to get them all cleaned up. I wish I would have known all this stuff. I didn't have any C-sections, thankfully. But still, there's so many things that you wish you would know.
Breastfeeding
Kiran Krishnan:
And then of course, breastfeeding, so important.
Kelly:
Yeah, that was my next question. How is that affected, tell me more about that?
Kiran Krishnan:
Yeah, if a baby's not breastfed, they are at significant increased risk for autoimmune conditions, immune dysfunctions, metabolic syndrome; bottle-fed babies tend to be more overweight, have more metabolic dysfunctions.
We also know that mom's milk has over 200 oligosaccharides in it, so really important prebiotics to help seed those initial bacteria that come in. We also know that mom's milk contains up to 600 different types of bacteria itself, so it's a really important source of the baby's microbiome. Passing through the birth canal is part of it. Then for the next year, the baby's going to continuously get new and good microbes from mom's breast milk.
Kelly:
How does a healthy gut make sure that mom has enough milk?
Kiran Krishnan:
It affects everything because number one, in order for mom to produce milk [with the] adequate amount of fat, protein, calories, she has to be able to absorb and assimilate the nutrients she's eating.
We know that the old adage of you are what you eat is actually wrong, it’s you are what you absorb. You can eat all the healthy food you want. If you can't break it down, assimilate it, and absorb it, you're not getting the benefit. And that part is determined by inflammation and the function of the lining of your gut. If your gut is inflamed like in the case of celiac people, who have a lot of damage to the microvilli in the gut and to the mucosa, they cannot absorb fat soluble vitamins, even if they're taking in supplement form, the absorption rate goes way down.
And so they tend to have a higher incidence rate of tooth decay and osteoporosis and all that because they can't get their vitamin K and their vitamin D into their system. The ability to absorb and assimilate nutrients is going to be critical for mom to have really good production of milk and then high quality milk as well. And that is dependent on the health of the gut, so everything comes down to the gut.
Then [there’s] one more thing. In the first six months of life, the baby has no immune system of his or her own. The baby's completely dependent on mom's immune system for protection and all of that immune protection comes through breast milk. Breast milk has the immunoglobulins and all of these important things that the baby needs to fight off the viruses and bacteria and things that the baby's going to be exposed to in the first six months of life. After six months, the baby's own immune system starts to take over and adds protection.
In that first six months, it's absolutely critical not only to be breastfeeding because you're providing immune protection to the baby, but then your gut has to be healthy because your immune proliferation, your ability to produce antibodies and B-cells and T-cells and macrophages, is in the gut, in the Peyer's Patches of the ileum. Those areas require communication with a healthy microbiome, and inflammation in that area drives inflammatory response, so you're passing on more allergic-type of responses to the baby. Then the baby's responding in a more inflammatory, allergic way to things around it, developing eczema, diaper rash, and food allergies. We cannot overstate the importance of mom focusing on her gut for the health of the baby.
Kelly:
And eating that great diet is so important as long as your gut is in good enough condition to absorb everything.
Kiran Krishnan:
Yeah, just your food choices is only 50% of the story. Unless your body can actually utilize it, then you're not getting all the benefit from it.
Kay:
Has there been much research on the best method for wiping the vaginal mucosa for those C-section babies?
Kiran Krishnan:
In the study that was done, I think there's two methods. One is, you put the sterile gauze in the vaginal canal, while you're going through the C-section and the supposed birthing process, you're going through the Braxton Hicks contractions, and maybe you're going through actual contractions, the water breaks, and all of that happens on that gauze.
And so then once the baby's born, you pull out the sterile gauze and then you wipe the baby down. That's one method. The other method is once the baby's born, you actually just go in there with the swab and swab as far and as around you can in the vaginal canal and swab the baby around the mouth and nose. I think the study done at NYU used that swab method.
Kay:
That's pretty simple. You don't even need to have a special kit or anything for that. Is the timing important? The timing has to be at the time of birth?
Kiran Krishnan:
That's the ideal time, yes.
Kay:
Could you use someone else's?
Kiran Krishnan:
You could. The only problem is, if that mom whose child it is then breastfeeds, that could provide conflicting bacteria, because mom's vaginal bacteria are a mimic of her ecology. And so if she's breastfeeding, then she's providing her own ecology to the child, and it could conflict with the [surrogate vaginal microbiome].
Kay:
The vaginal microbiome, is that a regional thing? Gee, people from the northeast tend to have this one and people from the south have this one or Europe, or is it just an actual individual?
Kiran Krishnan:
Believe it or not, it's based on race.
Kay:
Oh, okay.
Kiran Krishnan:
Women of African descent, African-American women, have different vaginal microbiomes than Caucasian women. Hispanic women have different vaginal microbiomes than Caucasian or African-American women. You can actually class women based on their ethnicity and what their vaginal microbiome looks like.
Kay:
And is breast milk that specific too? If you're using donated breast milk, could that be a conflict of interest between the two [microbiomes] too?
Kiran Krishnan:
That would be a little less [of an issue] because if you gave birth to a child vaginally and then you're using someone else's breast milk, you are actually getting a lot more bacteria over time through the breast milk, so the child's microbiome is going to end up looking more like what microbiome is in the breast milk.
Kay:
That's exactly the opposite of what I thought.
Kiran Krishnan:
Yeah, and that’s because that initial inoculum that comes through from the birth canal is just the initial inoculum. It can be overcome easily with an exposure to antibiotics, or in the case of your question, breast milk, because breast milk has loads and loads of bacteria and prebiotics that are coming in every single day in large amounts, 3, 4, 5, 6 times a day, depending on how much the baby's feeding.
It's tricky because it's similar to fecal transplants in that it can be helpful for certain conditions, but the microbiome is so complex, you don't know what you're transferring on it. If you don't know every possible thing about the donor whose breast milk it is that you're using, you don't know if you're transferring some risk for an autoimmune disease or something like that. That's part of the problem with a lot of these very large scale sharing of biomes, is we don't know what you're transferring on those biomes.
Just Thrive Gut Health Products
Supporting a Strong Microbiome for Strong Women
Women must deal with a unique set of health challenges. Whether you are looking to manage your estrogen level, keep your immune system strong, or support a healthy pregnancy and pass on a robust microbiome to your baby, a daily probiotic gives your body the support it needs to take it all on.
However, it’s important to note that not all probiotics are created equal.
Just Thrive Probiotic is the only probiotic on the market containing not one but four of the most well-researched, proprietary spore Bacillus strains available that work together synergistically. Spore probiotic strains are unique in that they are equipped with a protective outer shell that allows them to safely transverse the harsh conditions inside your stomach that stop nearly all other live cultures dead in their tracks.
With their high survivability rate—1000x better survivability vs. yogurt, greek yogurt & leading probiotics—the Just Thrive spore strains will make it to your gut strong and intact where they’ll start working to support your immune system, fertility, and overall health.
>> Try Just Thrive Probiotic today, and save 22% with a subscription
And in case you didn’t know, All Just Thrive purchases are covered by our Bottom of the Bottle, 100% money back guarantee.
That means you can try Just Thrive Probiotic risk-free, and if for some reason you don’t see a difference (though we bet you will!), simply ask for a full refund at any time…even if the bottle is empty!
>> Test drive Just Thrive Probiotic 100% risk-free
Sources: