Microflora

Microflora, also known as gut flora or intestinal bacteria, are healthy microorganisms that live inside the intestinal tract and perform a number of beneficial functions within the body. Microflora help synthesize important vitamins, nutrients and enzymes that aid in the digestive process. These bacteria also protect our bodies by removing harmful foreign materials that our bodies cannot normally remove and by preventing harmful bacteria from reproducing within body by competitive inhibition- essentially, crowding them out. In an average human, there are somewhere between 300 and 1000 species of microflora. In a healthy body, there are approximately 100 trillion intestinal bacteria- around ten times as many as there are cells in the body.
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