In 2019, a team of scientists from Harvard University monitored the bacterial flora of 15 Boston Marathon runners during the week before and after. They made many discoveries, but one was especially interesting: after the competition, everyone suffered a significant increase in bacteria of the Veillonella genus.
It was already known that exercise alters the microbiota And, in fact, it wasn’t particularly surprising that these bacteria (which break down lactic acid and therefore reduce fatigue) were in there. What they wanted to discover was something else. Therefore, they took samples of this flora and introduced them into mice.
The result was a very significant increase in physical resistance. Since then, there are people trying to take advantage of this.
The treasure hidden in the intestine. Now a team from France has studied the intestinal microbiota of elite athletes with high aerobic capacity (footballers and cyclists). The central idea was to see if there were differences in the composition of the flora and its functionality compared to non-athletic people.
The first surprise is that the more sports the subjects did, the lower the diversity of their microbiota. And I say that it is surprising because, as Rosa del Campo tells us through SMC Spain“this is associated with an unhealthy condition.” However, in this case it seems that “it is justified by the specialization of these bacteria in the intestine.” That is, by subjecting the microbiota to more demanding environments, it self-regulates to optimize itself.
However, as he says the researcher at the Ramón y Cajal Hospital, that is not the most interesting thing. “The most striking thing is when they evaluate the ability to reproduce this in mice.”
What have they done? They have taken very sedentary and very athletic people and “have transplanted their feces to mice for several days.” The result shows that “the aerobic effort capacity in mice is conditioned by the microbiota.”
Because? Although the research is still somewhat preliminary, everything seems to indicate that “it is fundamentally due to glycogen consumption, good sugar control and production of short chain fatty acids.”
What implications does this have?? Well, it seems like quite a few. It must be remembered that for years the anti-doping agencies working to fight against microbiomic doping. In fact, everything seems to indicate that the “fecal transplant“It is a common practice in certain elite sports environments.
But the question, as always, is whether this can be scaled. If we can begin to intervene in the microbiota on a massive scale to improve the health of broad layers of the population. For years now, the probiotics boom has caught big pharmaceutical companies on the wrong foot and has flooded the market with pseudoscience.
However, and although it is true that in recent years Doubts have arisen about how much health we can achieve through the stomachOr, the possibility is still on the table.
Image | Julien Tromeur | Miguel Amutio
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