Anybody truly interested in anti-aging strategies knows that Stem Cells are something to know about. While there are many stories about stem cell injections and the healing miracles that can result, did you know that your body makes its own stem cells? Yes, that’s right…you don’t have to travel to Panama. Your own body makes stem cells that disperse through the body, targeting injured or diseased organs for renewal. Once there, those stem cells turn into (we call it differentiate) whatever kind of cell is needed. We actually know quite a lot about boosting production of stem cells!
One of the reasons that younger people heal faster than older people, and, well, look younger is that your bone marrow produces stem cells. When you’re young, there is a lot of active bone marrow-almost every bone is producing. When a person gets older, their bone marrow calcifies, and it may only be part of your leg bone (femur) that’s actually producing stem cells.
Similarly, if you’re more of a couch-dweller than CrossFitter, your bone marrow turns to…fat. Yes, it isn’t just around your middle, but the very core of your bones that makes those vital stem cells turns to fat! In fact, it has been clearly shown that weightlifting exercise builds better bone density. That wouldn’t be possible unless weightlifting also improves circulation in the bone-so it’s safe to say that it helps to maintain stem cell production.
As you might have guessed from the blog post title, your gut bacteria (also known as your microbiome) helps to stimulate bone marrow to produce more stem cells. It also helps those stem cells to function better! Studies have shown that antibiotics dampen bone marrow activity, via reduction in gut bacteria. Dysbiosis, an imbalanced/unhealthy gut bacteria, also reduces bone marrow stem cell production.
Another study showed that chronic hypoxia dramatically reduced stem cell production, through its damage to the gut microbiome. If you exercise, and certainly if you CrossFit, we know that you’re breathing-a lot! so it’s safe to say that just breathing better can help ensure that your bones produce stem cells.
It isn’t just gut bacteria; even the oral microbiome-the bacterial population of your mouth-has been shown to help maintain stem cell production in your gum tissue!
The gut microbiome has also proven to be critical for organ transplantation or stem cell transplantation success. It seems that if you want to add new parts to the body, you first have to fix the reason the old parts didn’t work out…
In the next few blog posts, I’ll be exploring other natural strategies for improving your body’s stem cell production. For now, though, how do you improve your microbiome? The first step is to see how it’s doing! For this, I recommend a uBiome test. Visit https://ubiome.com/consumer/explorer/ and order a Time Lapse kit. It’s three gut bacteria test kits at a great discount. Use the discount code SYMBIONTFACTOR to save an additional 15%. If you’d like to learn more about gut bacteria, you can download the book that I wrote about it by visiting this link: https://neurodoc4u.thrivecart.com/thesymbiontfactor/
So, breathe deeply, exercise hard (preferably CrossFit) and work on improving your gut bacteria!
Richard Matthews DC DACNB
References:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6085989/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25708215
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29576480
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29789585
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29266799
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