6th Grade · Science · Reading Passage · shared by Luke Morgan
A 6th Grade Science reading passage on gut health, the microbiome, bacteria, and how antibiotics affect the body.
The Inner Garden: Understanding Gut Health
Inside your body lives a vast community of tiny organisms that help keep you healthy every single day. This complex collection of living things is known as the microbiome , and it contains trillions of helpful bacteria. These microscopic residents help digest your food, produce essential vitamins, and protect your immune system from harmful invaders. In a healthy person, this internal garden is filled with many different types of bacteria working together. Having a wide variety of these tiny helpers is very important for maintaining a strong and balanced body. When your gut has high diversity, it is much harder for dangerous germs to find a place to grow.
Sometimes, harmful bacteria enter the body and cause a serious illness that requires medical help from a doctor. To fight these infections, doctors often prescribe powerful medicines called antibiotics to stop the bad germs from spreading. While these medicines are life-saving tools, some types are designed to kill many different kinds of bacteria at once. These are called broad-spectrum treatments because they cast a very wide net to catch the cause of sickness. Because they are powerful, they do not only target the germs making you feel bad during your illness. They also affect the many beneficial bacteria that have lived peacefully in your digestive system for your entire life.
When a person takes these medicines, a process of unintended depletion begins to happen within the digestive tract. The medicine travels through the body and wipes out large numbers of both the harmful and helpful bacteria. This sudden loss of life creates a massive drop in the diversity of the organisms living inside the gut. Instead of a thriving garden with many species, the gut becomes like a field…