The Microbiome

I’ve been digging into health and fitness for years, and the more I learn, the more I keep circling back to one thing: the microbiome. Not just the gut microbiome everyone talks about, but the microbiome that lives everywhere in the body—your mouth, nose, sinuses, skin, eyes, ears, and every surface that touches the outside world. We think we’re one organism, but the truth is we’re an entire ecosystem pretending to be a person.

And here’s a mind-bender most people don’t know:
If you scooped up all the microbes in and on the human body—the bacteria, fungi, yeasts, and viruses—they would weigh about three pounds.
That’s the same weight as the human brain.
Three pounds of living organisms that aren’t “you,” yet your health depends on them every second of the day.

For years I dealt with this annoying habit of constantly clearing my throat. My whole adult life, really. Doctors blamed allergies, dry air, post-nasal drip—you name it. I always chalked it up to working outside, cutting brush, gardening, and being exposed to everything in the woods. But still… it never went away.

The more I read about the microbiome, the more something clicked. What if the problem wasn’t in my sinuses at all? What if the imbalance was starting in my mouth?

Most people don’t realize it, but the mouth has its own microbiome—its own independent world. And when that balance is off, it can affect your sinuses, ears, throat, inflammation levels, even how often you get colds. Once I learned that, it made perfect sense why the throat clearing wouldn’t stop.

So I tried an experiment. I started using probiotics specifically for the oral microbiome—BLIS K12 and M18 lozenges, Hyperbiotics Pro-Dental, TheraBreath’s oral probiotic, the NOW OralBiotic line. Nothing fancy. Just let one dissolve in my mouth every day.

And then something happened I wasn’t expecting.

Within a month…
my post-nasal drip stopped cold.
No more throat clearing. No more scraping my throat every 30 seconds. No more gunk sliding down the back of my throat. The whole thing just vanished.

I didn’t change my diet.
I didn’t add allergy meds.
I didn’t do anything different except help repopulate those three pounds of microbes that run so much of our internal world.

It made me realize how powerful those tiny organisms really are. They influence our digestion, immunity, mood, inflammation, sleep, and yes—even something as simple as constant throat clearing. When they’re in balance, we feel good. When they’re out of balance, we feel it everywhere.

For decades I lived with an issue that doctors treated like a nuisance. But the fix wasn’t a pill, or a spray, or an allergy test. It was simply supporting the little three-pound universe inside my body that’s been trying to help me all along.