The health of human body is closely related to our spleen and stomach. Chinese medicine says that the spleen and stomach are the foundation of the day after tomorrow. However, in the past, health care only paid attention to the spleen and stomach, but ignored the important link of the spleen and stomach-intestinal flora. There are hundreds of trillions of bacteria in the human body, most of which are parasitic in our gastrointestinal tract in the form of colonies, which is more than ten times the total number of human cells. According to statistics, there are hundreds of different bacteria in intestinal flora, of which more than 99% are anaerobic bacteria, but the density of aerobic bacteria in cecum is the highest. It was found that these flora weighing about two kilograms in the intestine combined all the elements of the human genome, and the number of genes expressed in these genomes was more than 100 times that of human genes. Intestinal flora is related to people's diet, nutritional status, environmental changes, diseases, medication and living environment, and it is symbiotic with people, turning people and intestines into a consortium, so it is regarded as an important organ of the host. The study of intestinal flora is very important in the world. Recently, there are two large-scale international projects, one is human microbiology project, and the other is human intestinal metagenome project. Its purpose is to study the correlation between human microorganisms and human health. From the research, intestinal flora mainly affects human health through the following five aspects: 1. Intestinal flora can produce some essential vitamins and nutrients, such as vitamin K, vitamin B 12, folic acid and vitamin B7. And provide some nutrition to the human body through them. 2. Intestinal flora can produce some bioactive substances with immune response to regulate human physiological functions. For example, the production of bile acids helps the body digest fat. 3. Intestinal flora can produce signal molecules with pharmacological activity related to host metabolism. For example, intestinal flora can produce signal molecules that ferment human dietary fiber into short-chain fatty acids, and cooperate with GX protein-coupled receptors to affect the insulin sensitivity of adipocytes and peripheral target organs, thus regulating the energy metabolism of the host. At the same time, intestinal flora can help establish, maintain and stabilize the intestinal tissue barrier function. 4. Intestinal flora can compete with foreign flora, which can stabilize the flora in human body by resisting the reproduction of foreign flora. 5. It was also found that intestinal flora interacted with each other through environmental changes. For example, the composition of intestinal flora of some mammals can change at low temperature, and the change of intestinal flora plays a great role in animal fat burning, sugar metabolism and weight loss. Another example is intermittent fasting, which can greatly change the species and quantity of intestinal flora, improve the speed of glucose metabolism by intestinal flora and reduce people's weight, especially the early weight gain of middle-aged and elderly people. From this article, we can know that intestinal flora is not a simple parasitic relationship with human hosts, but maintains our health through their own biochemical and physiological reactions. In the next issue, we will tell you what will happen to the intestinal flora after illness. Hello, I'm Dr. Gao Xiang. I hope what I have learned here can help your health. Please continue to pay attention to my official WeChat account medical flashlight, and I will share some health knowledge for you every week. If you have any questions, please leave a message backstage! Disclaimer: The above content comes from the Internet, and the copyright belongs to the original author. If there is any infringement of your original copyright, please let us know and we will delete the relevant content as soon as possible.