Our firm gets numerous medical publications online. Every once in a while I see an article that makes me think: “We really know very little about how our bodies work.” An example was an article entitled: “C-Section Babies Face Higher Crohn’s Disease Risk Later in Life.” Linking a cesarian-section birth with a baby having an intestinal disease later in life sounded bizarre.

It turns out that the link is premised on the gut biome. You may have been seeing more references in the past few years to the “gut biome,” and there now are numerous TV ads for various probiotics to whip your gut biomes into better shape.

Gut biome, also called gut microbiome, describes the trillions of bacteria that reside in your gut. Yes, I said “trillions.” Of the roughly 40,000,000,000 bacteria in your body, most of them them are found in your intestines. And they play a very important role in your overall health in many ways. 

But how does this relate to a C-section birth? The infant’s intestines are sterile or have a very low level of microbes, but during a vaginal birth the baby is exposed to the mother’s microbial population and rapidly produces its own set of gut microbiota. With a C-section, however, that process does not occur. Those babies have a much smaller amount of microbiota.       

This difference reduces over the first 6-7 months of life, but apparently the impact on gut health of the individual remains for many years. A major study in Sweden found “early-life aberrations in gut microbiota may have long-lasting consequences that have been associated with . . . an increased risk for inflammatory-mediated disease.” Crohn’s disease is an inflammatory disease that affects the walls of the colon.