Reporter Han Bing reported that in the modern football world, there are many factors that determine the performance of players. In addition to the daily training techniques, intensity, rehabilitation methods and follow the exercise and biological science of hydration, nutritional supplementation, and enough sleep, fans may not imagine that the microbiome living in the athlete's intestines can also affect the player's on-field performance to a certain extent. Although it is well known that the gut microbiome is closely linked to human health and disease, its effects on athletic ability are little known.
In the past 10 years, sports science has made great strides in various fields, from the renewal of high-tech assistive technology equipment to the exploration of the potential of the players themselves and the acceleration of rehabilitation. Today, though, we're going to talk about something relatively unfamiliar: the effect of the gut microbiome on athletic ability. The gut microbiome, like fingerprints, varies from person to person and has a variety of properties, but has at least been shown to help players improve athletic performance in some functions. And, while top players and coaches hope to benefit first from the research, a deeper understanding of the link between the gut microbiome and physical health is more beneficial to the health of all populations.
Microbial energy is enormous
A week before the 2015 Boston Marathon, Jonathan Sherman followed athletes around the city in a taxi and persuaded them to provide their own feces. Sherman is a postdoc in the lab of geneticist George Church at Harvard Medical School in Boston, where he focuses on the effects of the gut microbiota on athletic performance. At that time, he collected stool samples from elite athletes and amateur runners who competed in the competition and continued to visit them after the race to collect more samples. Four years later, his efforts finally came to fruition: a paper confirming a causal relationship between the gut microbiome and motor performance, published in the prestigious journal Nature.
There are trillions of microbes in the human body, most of which are found in our gastrointestinal tract in communities. While some are pathogens, many are beneficial to human health. Disruption of the gut microbiota is often directly associated with gastrointestinal disorders, such as gastroenteritis, and has been linked to diabetes, cancer, heart disease, obesity and even mental health disorders. Recent 20 years of technological advances and more gene sequencing have helped the sports medicine community untangle the conundrum of whether there is an inevitable link between the gut microbiota and athletic performance.
The composition of the human gut microbiome is influenced by many factors, including birth patterns, medication use, tobacco and alcohol habits, mental stress, age, and eating habits. While research is still in its infancy, researchers have begun to discover a link between the gut microbiome and athletic performance, and have begun to develop products that are available to top players to help them improve their athletic performance.
For professional players and athletes, the most direct impact of the gut microbiome is cardiorespiratory health, which is unexpected by most people. The diversity of the gut microbiota is beneficial to cardiorespiratory health, and biological scientists have been able to use microbial databases to infer the functions that the microbiota associated with cardiorespiratory health may have, including microbiota mobility and fatty acid synthesis. One of the roles of the gut microbiome is to help break down complex carbohydrates through fermentation, producing short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs) as by-products. Short-chain fatty acids are an important source of energy in muscle. Studies have shown that healthier people have higher levels of butyrate (one of the short-chain fatty acids) in their stools. While butyrate is one of the main fuel components of intestinal cells, raising butyrate levels is obviously very important for the health of athletes.
The researchers compared differences between the gut microbiota of amateur and professional athletes, showing that levels of the Prevotella bacteria were strongly related to the athletic performance of both. A 2014 study of professional football players further demonstrated that the diversity of the gut microbiome is directly related to athletic performance: the gut microbiome of professional athletes has greater diversity. Sherman's 2018 study showed that top athletes also have greater differences in genetic function between amateur athletes, including differences in carbohydrate metabolism, amino acid synthesis, and short-chain fatty acid production.
The "new weapon" of athletes
Sherman's team found a surge in abundance of Veron's cocci compared to sedentary people who rarely exercised. Veronella metabolizes lactic acid, a byproduct of anaerobic training that causes muscle soreness after strenuous exercise. Players produce large amounts of lactic acid after strenuous exercise, and Veron's Cocci can convert it into propionic acid to reduce lactic acid concentrations, and the resulting butyrate can promote muscle function. Mouse trials demonstrated that mice supplemented with Veronella extended their running time by 13 percent.
Because of this important research on the gut microbiome, Sherman and colleagues founded a company called Fitbiomics in New York, hoping to improve the athletic performance of athletes and improve the health of the general public through their products. Sherman's team also studies Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium, looking for special strains that can support digestive, metabolic, and immune health to help top athletes achieve truly optimal physiological function and optimal health. Fitbiomics' sports probiotic product, which has been launched in 2021, is a probiotic capsule called Nela. Each capsule includes the company's special blend of 3 lactic acid bacteria probiotics for $75 each. Fitbiomics hopes to use this product to open up the market for probiotic supplements for elite athletes.
The probiotic industry has been on the rise in recent years, with an estimated market size of $75 billion by 2025. However, the intestinal probiotics currently on the market are almost only used to treat diseases or specific groups of people such as infants and young children, and top professional athletes rarely get the help of intestinal microbiota products developed by related research. Adrian, a swimmer who has won five Olympic gold medals, and many footballers are very interested in the results of the Sherman team's research, hoping that the gut microbiome products will have an unprecedented impact on the professional sports world. Moreover, at least for now, the Anti-Doping Agency does not consider products that improve the gut microbiota of athletes to be banned stimulants. After all, it's hard to define whether such probiotic products are giving athletes a healthier fit or artificially improving athletic performance quickly in the short term. All probiotic supplements for professional athletes are not drugs, nor are they products that are explicitly prohibited by anti-doping agencies to change the speed of athletes' nervous response and maintain excitement.