Exercise your gut microbes for better health

A newly published scientific review highlights the relationship between exercise and gut health with potential implications for health and disease prevention.

The human gut as a complex ecosystem of bacteria, archaea, eukaryotes, and viruses that have co-evolved with humans over thousands of years. These gut microbes can weigh up to 2 kg and are critical to host digestion, metabolic function, and resistance to infection. Experts in nutrition and exercise science from the University of Illinois Urban-Champaign in the United States presented a state of art review of evidence to date highlighting the potential of exercise prescription based on gut microbes in the not too distant future.

The key findings of this review can be summarised as follows:

• The trillions of microbes in the gut play essential roles in human health.
• Exercise training alters the composition and functional capacity of the gut microbiota, independent of diet.
• Exercise-induced alterations of the gut microbiota may depend on obesity status, exercise modality, and exercise intensity.
• Studies suggest exercise may alter the gene expression of specialist white cells called lymphocytes, downregulating damaging pro-inflammatory cytokines and up-regulating anti-inflammatory cytokines and antioxidant enzymes (important for optimal health and disease prevention).

Overall, this review highlights evidence suggesting that regular aerobic exercise confers benefits to the gut microbiota, which may be partially responsible for the widespread benefits of regular physical activity health and wellbeing.  The authors predict a future of personalized microbiome-based lifestyle medicine, where baseline gut microbiota, diet, and other host factors might help predict which exercise program might be most effective for a given individual.

The full scientific review can be accessed at:

https://journals.lww.com/acsm-essr/fulltext/2019/04000/Exercise_and_the_Gut_Microbiome__A_Review_of_the.4.aspx