The value of organic matter and beneficial bacteria, fungi and microbes in the soil is well known to prairie farmers.
University of Washington professor David Montgomery and his wife, Anne Bikle, discovered that value for themselves while rejuvenating the poor soil in their urban yard.
They wrote a book about it called The Hidden Half of Nature.
However, Montgomery has come to believe that the outside bacteria, fungi and microbes have a parallel inside the human body: the “soil” produced from food digestion.
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Just as plant roots emit exudates that encourage microbial activity that helps those plants, the mucus in the human gut feeds beneficial microbes that break down fibre, said Montgomery.
In soil, the rhizosphere or root zone makes nutrients available to the plant, just as the gut area in people makes nutrition available to the body.
Fortunately for both plants and people, there is no shortage of microbial life to help with nutrient conversion.
“Fully half of the life on Earth, in terms of its weight, is microbial. Think about that. There’s half of the nature that we think that we see and we know is actually invisible to our senses,” he said. “Microbes outnumber us radically.”
There are more microbes in a handful of soil than there are people who have ever lived, Montgomery added. And again, there’s a human parallel.
“There’s three to 10 times the number of bacterial, viral and fungal cells within and on your body than there are human cells. They outnumber us in terms of active genes in our own body.”
Montgomery suggested that the rise in chronic diseases as a cause of death — illnesses such as Crohns, multiple sclerosis and Type 1 diabetes — are in part caused by a reduction in beneficial microbes that can trigger the gut’s regulatory cells to dampen re-sponse or encourage action to fight disease.
Antibiotic use can kill beneficial bacteria at the same time as it fights harmful bacteria, he said, which changes the human micro-biome.
“The other source that changed our microbiome, that we’ve put far less thought into, is what we eat, simply what we put down the hatch,” he said. “If you think about all those microbiota in your colon and their communication with your immune system, who’s feeding those? … It’s based in great part on what we actually eat.”
The colon depends on complex fibre to help it function, and it takes rich microbial life to break down that fibre for use by the body.
Similarly, organic matter in soil encourages a wide variety of bacteria, microbes and fungi to congregate and make nutrients available to plants, said Montgomery.
“Mulch your soil inside and out.”
That means adding organic matter to the soil and fibre to the diet.
More information on Montgomery and Bikle’s research is available at dig2grow.com.
