Microbiome Quotes

The single greatest predictor of a healthy gut microbiome is the diversity of plants in one’s diet.

A growing number of studies have made a link between animal behavior and the trillions of bacteria and fungi that live in their guts, many of which produce chemicals that influence animal nervous systems. The interaction between gut microbes and brains—the “microbiome-gut-brain axis”—is far-reaching enough to have birthed a new field: neuromicrobiology.

The “loss of a sense of self-identity, delusions of self-identity and experiences of ‘alien control,’ ” observed an elder statesman in the field of microbiome research, are all potential symptoms of mental illness. It made my head spin to think of how many ideas had to be revisited, not least our culturally treasured notions of identity, autonomy, and independence. It is in part this disconcerting feeling that makes the advances in the microbial sciences so exciting.

More specifically, he found that the consumption of thirty different plants in a given week was the greatest predictor of gut microbial diversity.

We are well on our way to a unified theory of biology that will merge body and environment, brain and mind, genome and microbiome.

Every person aerosolises around 37 million bacteria per hour. This means that our microbiome isn’t confined to our bodies. It perpetually reaches out into our environment.

We now know that gut microbes are part of this axis, in both directions. Since the 1970s, a trickle of studies have shown that any kind of stress – starvation, sleeplessness, being separated from one’s mother, the sudden arrival of an aggressive individual, uncomfortable temperatures, overcrowding, even loud noises – can change a mouse’s gut microbiome. The opposite is also true: the microbiome can affect a host’s behaviour, including its social attitudes and its ability to deal with stress.40

During rush-hour traffic, emissions of siloxane, a microbiome-destroying ingredient in shampoos, lotions, and deodorants, are found in comparable levels to vehicle exhaust.17 Just one more reason to dread your daily commute.

Probiotics and Prebiotics If you’re suffering from gut-induced depression, how do you reset your gut microbiome to steer you back to a healthy mental state? The key is to increase probiotics and prebiotics in your diet. Probiotics are live bacteria that convey health benefits when eaten. Probiotic-rich foods contain beneficial bacteria that help your body

The microbiome affects our mood, libido, metabolism, immunity, and even our perception of the world and the clarity of our thoughts. It helps determine whether we are fat or thin, energic or lethargic. Put simply, everything about our health-how we feel both emotionally and physically-hinges on the state of our microbiome.

We inherit every one of our genes, but we leave the womb without a single microbe. As we pass through our mother's birth canal, we begin to attract entire colonies of bacteria. By the time a child can crawl, he has been blanketed by an enormous, unseen cloud of microorganisms--a hundred trillion or more. They are bacteria, mostly, but also viruses and fungi (including a variety of yeasts), and they come at us from all directions: other people, food, furniture, clothing, cars, buildings, trees, pets, even the air we breathe. They congregate in our digestive systems and our mouths, fill the space between our teeth, cover our skin, and line our throats. We are inhabited by as many as ten thousand bacterial species; those cells outnumber those which we consider our own by ten to one, and weigh, all told, about three pounds--the same as our brain. Together, they are referred to as our microbiome--and they play such a crucial role in our lives that scientists like [Martin J.] Blaser have begun to reconsider what it means to be human.

Sadly, the pharmaceutical industry has hijacked our health care system. Big Pharma runs the studies, they control the research,

fecal transplants from people with healthy microbiomes will one day provide a more effective treatment for depression than Prozac or therapy.

A glass or two of red wine may be good for your heart but not for your microbiome. Studies show that just one drink per day in women and two in men can induce dysbiosis and bacterial overgrowth. Levels of good bacteria like Lactobacillus fall, while potential pathogens rise, leading to an increase in toxins and other chemicals that can cause inflammation, damage the liver, and increase permeability of the gut. Most of the overgrowth happens in the small intestine and can lead to malnourishment because the excess bacteria consume the nutrients that the small intestine would normally absorb. Some studies report an incidence of small intestinal bacterial overgrowth (SIBO) in alcoholics that’s three times that of the general population.

The fact is that hundreds of trillions of microbial “invaders,” mostly in our gut, are absolutely necessary for our survival, and there are ten times more of them than cells in the human body. Because the body cannot survive without its microbes (collectively called the “microbiome”), they are the functional equivalent of any of our other vital organ systems. In (belated) recognition of the importance of the microbiome, humans and most other organisms are now properly defined as superorganisms (complex organisms composed of many smaller organisms). (Saey

Currently, U.S. soils are degrading ten times faster than they can be replenished. Tilling also dries out soil—it was a key factor causing the Dust Bowl crisis in the 1930s—and disturbs the microbiome.

We are only beginning to understand the importance and nature of a woman’s vaginal microbiome. Babies born by Cesarean section are robbed of this initial wash. The consequences for the baby can be profound. Various studies have found that people born by C-section have substantially increased risks for type 1 diabetes, asthma, celiac disease, and even obesity and an eightfold greater risk of developing allergies.

Unfortunately, there’s no pill that can alter our gut microbiomes to be more Hadza-like. “Because they take in microbes from food they pull from the dirt, as well as air and land,” said Schnorr. “You really need continuous exposure to outside microbes.” University of Chicago microbiome scientists have in fact declared that “dirt is good.” The more time a person spends outside getting down and dirty in it, the better.

once he sticks his tongue in my mouth his bacteria become part of my microbiome for literally the rest of my life. Like, his tongue will sort of always be in my mouth until I’m dead, and then his tongue microbes will eat my corpse.

Whether one calls slime molds, fungi, and plants “intelligent” depends on one’s point of view. Classical scientific definitions of intelligence use humans as a yardstick by which all other species are measured. According to these anthropocentric definitions, humans are always at the top of the intelligence rankings, followed by animals that look like us (chimpanzees, bonobos, etc.), followed again by other “higher” animals, and onward and downward in a league table—a great chain of intelligence drawn up by the ancient Greeks, which persists one way or another to this day. Because these organisms don’t look like us or outwardly behave like us—or have brains—they have traditionally been allocated a position somewhere at the bottom of the scale. Too often, they are thought of as the inert backdrop to animal life. Yet many are capable of sophisticated behaviors that prompt us to think in new ways about what it means for organisms to “solve problems,” “communicate,” “make decisions,” “learn,” and “remember.” As we do so, some of the vexed hierarchies that underpin modern thought start to soften. As they soften, our ruinous attitudes toward the more-than-human world may start to change. The second field of research that has guided me in this inquiry concerns the way we think about the microscopic organisms—or microbes—that cover every inch of the planet. In the last four decades, new technologies have granted unprecedented access to microbial lives. The outcome? For your community of microbes—your “microbiome”—your body is a planet. Some prefer the temperate forest of your scalp, some the arid plains of your forearm, some the tropical forest of your crotch or armpit. Your gut (which if unfolded would occupy an area of thirty-two square meters), ears, toes, mouth, eyes, skin, and every surface, passage, and cavity you possess teem with bacteria and fungi. You carry around more microbes than your “own” cells. There are more bacteria in your gut than stars in our galaxy. For humans, identifying where one individual stops and another starts is not generally something we

If I'd been the author, I would've stopped thinking about my microbiome. I would've told Daisy how much I liked her idea for Mychal's art project, and I would've told her that I did remember Davis Pickett, that I remembered being eleven and carrying a vague but constant fear. I would've told her that I remembered once at camp lying next to Davis on the edge of a dock, our legs dangling over, our backs against the rough-hewn planks of wood, staring together up at a cloudless summer sky. I wouldv'e told her that Davis and I never talked much, or even looked at each other, but it didn't mater, because we were looking at the same sky together, which is maybe more intimate than eye contact anyway. Anybody can look at you. It's quite rare to find someone who sees the same world you see.

Drinking lots of alcohol makes the gut leakier, allowing microbes to more readily influence the brain. Could that help to explain why alcoholics often experience depression or anxiety? Our diet reshapes the microbes in our gut, could those changes ripple out to affect our minds? The gut microbiome becomes less stable in old age-could that contribute to the rise of brain disease in the elderly? And could our microbes manipulate our food cravings in the first place? If you reach for a burger or a chocolate bar what exactly is pushing that hand forward?

Even the majority of the cells in your body are microorganisms. They outnumber the cells of your body by 10 to 1. Those microbes are living, metabolizing chemicals, producing waste chemicals, and interacting with each other. Collectively, they are known as your microbiome. You are their ecosystem. It’s

registered dieticians, and other health professionals. Justin’s talk was the highlight of the event for me. It conveyed the excitement of discoveries about the human microbiome and suggested answers to puzzling questions I had about health conditions that are on the rise. Asthma, allergies, and autoimmunity have all increased in North America and other developed areas of the world. Why is the incidence of peanut allergy so much greater today than it was when I grew up in the 1950s? And what is the explanation for the spectacular increase in gluten sensitivity? That last question had bothered me greatly. Granted that gluten

If these retroviruses are affecting the immune system of the gut (and by extension the brain), you’d also expect to find abnormal bacterial populations, as well. This has become a fascinating area of scientific research, and these bacterial populations in the digestive system have become popularly known as the “microbiome.

Modern lifestyle habits have therefore primed your body for unhealthy microbial expansion. If there is no benefit to curtailing your carbon footprint or erecting levees against the equivalent to rising oceans in your body, what can you do to turn the tide against microbial expansion and invasion? Thankfully, you can do plenty.

When microbiologists first started cataloguing the human microbiome in its entirety they hoped to discover a "core" microbiome: a group of species that everyone shares. It's now debatable if that core exists. Some species are common, but none is everywhere. If there is a core, it exists at the level of functions, not organisms. There are certain jobs, like digesting a certain nutrient or carrying out a specific metabolic trick, that are always filled by some microbe-just not always the same one. You see the same trend on a bigger scale. In New Zealand, kiwis root through leaf litter in search of worms, doing what a badger might do in England. Tigers and clouded leopards stalk the forests of Sumatra but in cat-free Madagascar that same niche is filled by a giant killer mongoose called the fossa; meanwhile, in Komodo, a huge lizard claims the top predator role. Different islands, different species, same jobs. The islands in question could be huge land masses, or individual people.

Baby’s first colonizers are supposed to be predominantly lactobacilli, the microbes picked up in the vaginal canal. Lactobacillus sets up a healthy human gut with positive influence over digestion and immune functions. If other species of bacteria are baby’s first colonizers, the baby’s microbiome sets up differently, maybe harmfully.

Developers and entrepreneurs may someday be able to use CRISPR-based home testing kits as platforms on which to build a variety of biomedical apps: virus detection, disease diagnosis, cancer screening, nutritional analyses, microbiome assessments, and genetic tests. “We can get people in their homes to check if they have the flu or just a cold,” says Zhang.

1 capsule Bacillus coagulans GBI-30,6086 2 tablespoons prebiotic fiber (inulin or raw potato starch) 1 quart half-and-half or other liquid

Like death, taxes, and marital spats, fungi are an inevitable part of human life.

Convenience, mass food commercialization, and the lack of blood and dirt under our fingernails have contributed to a silent but massive health epidemic.

Here are some lethal combinations: Bonnie and Clyde, Thelma and Louise, the gliadin protein in wheat and LPS endotoxemia.

In fact, 90 percent of serotonin and 50 percent of dopamine are actually produced in the gut.

As soon as we pass through the birth canal we begin to become 90 percent microbe.

Arroyo’s work, seventy-five years old, remains the standard reference on rum and its associated microorganisms—which is weird, if you think about it. As far as I can tell, no one has tried to sort through the microbiome of a dunder pit or isolate species other than the ones Arroyo recommended. Rum, especially strange, dark ones full of exotic esters, is one of the most underrated things to drink.

Before getting into CRISPR, Zayner tried a variety of synthetic biology experiments, including on himself. To treat his gastrointestinal problems, he performed a fecal transplant (don’t ask) to transform his gut’s microbiome. He did the procedure in a hotel room with two filmmakers documenting the scene, and (in case you really do want to know how it works) it became a short documentary called Gut Hack that can be found online.2

This is the science behind how UPF affects the human body: • The destruction of the food matrix by physical, chemical and thermal processing means that UPF is, in general, soft. This means you eat it fast, which means you eat far more calories per minute and don’t feel full until long after you’ve finished. It also potentially reduces facial bone size and bone density, leading to dental problems. • UPF typically has a very high calorie density because it’s dry, and high in fat and sugar and low in fibre, so you get more calories per mouthful. • It displaces diverse whole foods from the diet, especially among low-income groups. And UPF itself is often micronutrient-deficient, which may also contribute to excess consumption. • The mismatch between the taste signals from the mouth and the nutrition content in some UPF alters metabolism and appetite in ways that we are only beginning to understand, but that seem to drive excess consumption. • UPF is addictive, meaning that for some people binges are unavoidable. • The emulsifiers, preservatives, modified starches and other additives damage the microbiome, which could allow inflammatory bacteria to flourish and cause the gut to leak. • The convenience, price and marketing of UPF urge us to eat constantly and without thought, which leads to more snacking, less chewing, faster eating, increased consumption and tooth decay. • The additives and physical processing mean that UPF affects our satiety system directly. Other additives may affect brain and endocrine function, and plastics from the packaging might affect fertility. • The production methods used to make UPF require expensive subsidy and drive environmental destruction, carbon emissions and plastic pollution, which harm us all.

The First 5 in 5 × 5 × 5: The Health Defense Systems There are five health defense systems in your body: angiogenesis, regeneration, microbiome, DNA protection, and immunity. These systems maintain your health in a state of perfect balance. When mild disruptions occur in your health, the systems adjust themselves to take care of the problem and continue functioning behind the scenes, so you don’t even notice—that’s what you want your health to be like your entire life.

Literally right this second, there are over five hundred million nerves in your intestines sending feedback to your brain through the vagus nerve. That’s five times more nerves than you’ll find in your spinal cord. That is a lot of information!

You are not what you think you are. Instead of the form staring back at you when you look in the mirror, what you should imagine is your body as a collection of multiple dynamic ecosystems made up of very tiny, and very biologically diverse, organisms.

EATING THE RAINBOW When you start eating differently, your microbiome will start changing within two to three days. Getting five different vegetables into your diet every single day will accelerate the process of optimizing your microbiome. To enhance the benefits even further, try to make these vegetables as many different colors as you can. This means it’s much more likely that you will encourage the growth of more beneficial bacteria as well as getting maximum gut-bug diversity. But that’s not the only benefit.

Downstairs in the body, sleep restocks the armory of our immune system, helping fight malignancy, preventing infection, and warding off all manner of sickness. Sleep reforms the body’s metabolic state by fine-tuning the balance of insulin and circulating glucose. Sleep further regulates our appetite, helping control body weight through healthy food selection rather than rash impulsivity. Plentiful sleep maintains a flourishing microbiome within your gut from which we know so much of our nutritional health begins. Adequate sleep is intimately tied to the fitness of our cardiovascular system, lowering blood pressure while keeping our hearts in fine condition.

But even if you do not have SIBO or SIFO, it is likely—virtually guaranteed—that you have, at the very least, dysbiosis. Substantial disruptions of the bacterial and perhaps fungal species inhabiting your colon still pose implications for health, whether or not you are regular or require a stack of magazines for bowel habit success.

We live in an exciting time. We now know more than ever about our biology and about our history, allowing us to peer into the future with greater clarity than has previously been possible. But at the same time, the changes we are undergoing, brought about by our own advances in technology, medicine, transportation-- and by the growing impact we are having on the world around us-- mean that we live in a time in which the future looks increasingly less like the past. We have become an odd species, indeed, but our story is not yet over. Like all species, Homo sapiens continues to evolve, so there is one thing we can say with certainty: the people of tomorrow will not be the same as the people of today.

You leave the womb sterile, or so it is generally thought, but are liberally swabbed with your mother’s personal complement of microbes as you move through the birth canal. We are only beginning to understand the importance and nature of a woman’s vaginal microbiome. Babies born by Cesarean section are robbed of this initial wash. The consequences for the baby can be profound. Various studies have found that people born by C-section have substantially increased risks for type 1 diabetes, asthma, celiac disease, and even obesity and an eightfold greater risk of developing allergies. Cesarean babies eventually acquire the same mix of microbes as those born vaginally—by a year their microbiota are usually indistinguishable—but there is something about those initial exposures that makes a long-term difference. No one has figured out quite why that should be.

MMR, polio, and varicella are live attenuated vaccines. The contaminants and excipients include human MRC5 cells, Human WI-38 lung cells, monkey kidney cells, guinea pig cell cultures and bovine serum. Live viral vaccines are all grown in human and animal cells lines and these animal and human cell lines contain human and animal retroviruses (adventitious agents which can recombine to generate new infectious retroviruses during the manufacture.) In addition to the animal and human retroviral contaminants, the carcinogen formaldehyde, antibiotics which dysregulate the GI [gastro-intestinal] and nasopharyngal microbiomes, glutamate, and bio-incompatible contaminants including nickel and chromium (EXH 6) can synergize in toxicity and the development of neuroinflammatory, neurodegenerative and neuroimmune diseases and cancer which can become clinically apparent decades later.10

2 cups water 1 tablespoon whole cloves 1 teabag green tea 1 teaspoon FOS powder 2 teaspoons allulose (optional) Additional sweetener to taste 1 cinnamon stick (optional) In a small saucepan, combine the water and cloves and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat and cover to maintain a low simmer for 10 minutes. Add the teabag in the last 1–2 minutes of simmering, then remove from heat. Discard teabag. Stir in the FOS, optional allulose, other sweetener, and optional cinnamon stick, and serve or sip throughout the day. MATCHA,

Despite these trends, our culture pushes a Bad Energy world onto kids who cannot protect themselves. Our culture has normalized giving one-year-olds packaged, ultra-processed foods like cake, Goldfish, rice puffs, juice, and french fries. We slather toxic, artificially scented lotions and shampoos all over their tiny bodies as soon as their first hospital bath. We damage their livers and antioxidant capacity with too much acetaminophen (Tylenol) at the first sign of fussiness or a cold. We blast their microbiomes with heavy-duty antibiotics at the first sign of a possible ear infection. And we interrupt their sleep for unconscionably early school times, then force them to sit at desks in school for six or more hours a day. We create terror and chronic stress in their bodies from social media and overall media exposure. The world kids live in is inflammatory and metabolically disastrous unless parents staunchly go against the tide of “normal” American culture. The irony is that so many parents wish that parenting were easier—fewer infections, less colic, easier behavioral patterns—without thinking through the lens of energy production in their children’s bodies. We can do so much to make our lives and our kids’ lives easier by controlling the controllable.

colonize the gut may determine our interactions with the environment, protecting us from or predisposing us to the development of allergy and autoimmunity. They may protect us from or predispose us to becoming obese or diabetic. They may inhibit or intensify inflammation in the body. They may interact with artificial sweeteners to cause insulin resistance and weight gain in some individuals. They may even influence mental function and emotional wellness. I first heard about this new view of the microbiome from one

In Super Genes, Chopra and Tanzi acquaint us with new research that shows that “Some microbiomes may work better at nutrient extraction than others, with obese people extracting too much and skinny people extracting too little.” They also tell us that the microbiome reaches beyond digestion into every part of the body, and “It’s now known that gut bacteria produce neuroactive compounds that interact with brain cells and which can even control the expression of our own genes through epigenetics. When the natural balance of the microbiome becomes disrupted and unbalanced, we call it dysbiosis, yet only now is it being discovered that far from being just a digestive problem, dysbiosis is systemic in the damage it causes. The range of disorders linked to it is growing but is already startling in its numbers: links have been found to asthma, eczema, Crohn’s disease, multiple sclerosis, autism, Alzheimer’s disease, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, obesity, cardiovascular disease, atherosclerosis, cancer, and malnutrition. Avenues for new treatments are leading down the same road—to the microbiome.

Every person aerosolises around 37 million bacteria per hour. This means that our microbiome isn't confined to our bodies. It perpetually reaches out into our environment. [...] I contain multitudes, yes, but only some of them; the rest, I extend into the world like a living aura.

As explained by Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health (of which NIMH is a part), “The connectome refers to the exquisitely interconnected network of neurons (nerve cells) in your brain. Like the genome, the microbiome, and other exciting ‘ome’ fields, the effort to map the connectome and decipher the electrical signals that zap through it to generate your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors has become possible through development of powerful new tools and technologies.”37 The connectome is now being mapped in detail under the auspices of NIMH.

Yet despite the excessive hype, the concept behind probiotics is still sound.19 Given all the important roles that bacteria play in our bodies, it should be possible to improve our health by swallowing or applying the right microbes. It’s just that the strains in current use may not be the right ones. They make up just a tiny fraction of the microbes that live with us, and their abilities represent a thin slice of what the microbiome is fully capable of. We met more suitable microbes in earlier chapters. There’s the mucus-loving bacterium, Akkermansia muciniphila, whose presence correlates with a lower risk of obesity and malnutrition. There’s Bacteroides fragilis, which stokes the anti-inflammatory side of the immune system. There’s Faecalibacterium prausnitzii, another anti-inflammatory bug, which is conspicuously rare in the guts of people with IBD, and whose arrival can reverse the symptoms of that disease in mice. These microbes could be part of the probiotics of the future. Their abilities are relevant and impressive. They are well adapted to our bodies. Some are already abundant – in healthy adults, one in every twenty gut bacteria is F. prausnitzii. These are not D-listers of the human microbiome like Lactobacillus; they are the stars of the gut. They won’t be shy about colonising it.20

We humans are made such that loving attention can overcome both genetics and environment to a truly remarkable extent.

Physical or emotional stress Microbiome experiences stress Via the enteric nervous system (the nervous system in your gut) and/or the vagus nerve, the gut alerts your brain, specifically, your hypothalamus, a gland that regulates your body’s hormonal system. Your hypothalamus initiates the stress response (also known as the “fight or flight” response) by alerting your pituitary gland. Your pituitary passes the message on to your adrenal glands (located above your kidneys). Your adrenals release a complex cascade of stress hormones, including cortisol.

Stress imbalances microbiome, disrupts gut, promotes brain dysfunction Imbalanced microbiome disrupts gut, promotes brain dysfunction, induces exaggerated response to stress Dysfunctional gut imbalances microbiome, promotes brain dysfunction, induces exaggerated response to stress

NTIS is far more common than we ever suspected, and it affects many patients even with what might be considered “low-grade” or “nonclinical” chronic depression and anxiety.

When researchers explain the methodology of how they performed their research, there is often a portion that describes the preparation of the lab animals. This section explains that standardized such-and-such breed animals (such as Wistar rats) were “put on a Western diet until their cholesterol and inflammation were sufficiently elevated to carry out the research protocol.” What this means is that the Western diet is used to produce specific disease conditions in the lab animals, so that the researchers can carry out their research on different drug effects. Isn't it a bit ironic that poor diet is used to produce disease for drug testing, and yet doctors do not really push good diet as a way of preventing or treating illness?

It’s shocking that we still tell teenagers that what they eat doesn’t have any effect on their skin and then subject them to years of antibiotics that can have serious effects on their health. Almost all of the patients I see in my practice with Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis have a history of taking antibiotics for acne, and while that doesn’t necessarily prove causation in those particular patients, the medical literature is full of studies that now confirm that antibiotic use, particularly in childhood, is a major risk factor for the development of these diseases. While

The more different types of plants you eat, the more diverse your microbiome.

People who have at least one alcoholic drink a week have a more diverse microbiome than those who don’t drink at all.

The gut is home to the microbiome, which is made up

if unexpected skateboarder, and a tireless advocate for microbes since well before “microbiome” became a fashionable buzzword. “She talks about “the New Biology”, and that’s all caps when Margaret says it,” one biologist told me. She didn’t always think like this. It was the squid that changed her mind.

There's no such thing as good and bad bacteria or fungi. It's not good and bad. It's just whether there's too much of it or too little of it and things are out of balance, so the 'bad things' have an opportunity to prosper.

Benjamin Franklin said, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

By sprinkling black pepper on your curry, you increase the bioavailability of curcumin by 2,000 percent.

While it’s true that infectious diseases like cholera and tuberculosis still plague poorer countries, in the more developed world it’s actually the lack of germs that’s making many of us sick.

dementia. The most startling statistic is that individuals who do not brush their teeth daily have a 22 to 65 percent greater risk of developing dementia than those who brush their teeth three times a day!

CALL US Grant us this day Bruising the make of us. At times over half of our bodies Are not our own, Our persons made vessel For non-human cells. To them we are A boat of a being, Essential. A country, A continent, A planet. A human Microbiome is all the writhing forms on & inside this body Drafted under our life. We are not me— We are we. Call us What we carry.

What you eat directly influences your gut bacterial health. When you eat plant-based foods, the dietary fiber feeds your microbiome. When they are content and well fed,

With a limited number of genes, humans enjoy a stable human genome. We inherit it from our parents, and it can give us a genetic predisposition for a variety of biological and pathological traits. Conversely, the human microbiota expresses one hundred times more genes than humans, is extremely plastic, and can change from individual to individual and within the same individual over time, all as the consequence of a variety of environmental factors that can shape its composition and function. Our human genome has coevolved with the trillions of constantly changing microorganisms found in and on the human body.

They do this already: if emulsifiers damage the microbiome, let’s add some probiotics. If the food’s too soft, add more gum. If it’s too dense in energy, add artificial sweeteners. Their solution to ultraprocessing is hyper-processing, also known as reformulation.

Gut health is so vital to our health because the microbiome has many functions: •​Makes and regulates hormones and neurotransmitters •​Absorbs nutrients •​Supports immune function •​Regulates estrogen levels in the body •​Fends off pathogens and parasites, and keeps healthy bacterial balance in check Estrogen

Gut health is so vital to our health because the microbiome has many functions: •​Makes and regulates hormones and neurotransmitters •​Absorbs nutrients •​Supports immune function •​Regulates estrogen levels in the body •​Fends off pathogens and parasites, and keeps healthy bacterial balance in check Estrogen and progesterone fuel the good bacteria in our guts. Without adequate levels, we can develop dysbiosis and its wide range of digestive disturbance symptoms, including diarrhea, cramping, constipation, bloating, and indigestion. When the gut microbiome is healthy, the estrobolome produces optimal levels of an enzyme called beta glucuronidase. As the liver metabolizes estrogen, it delivers this conjugated estrogen to the bile for excretion into the gut. A healthy estrobolome minimizes reabsorption of estrogen from the gut, and instead helps you poop it out. However, if you’re constipated and not pooping daily, or have an excess of bacteria producing beta glucuronidase, you can keep recycling estrogen in the gut and become estrogen dominant.

*BAM* and throw some stuff in the mason

Gut dysbiosis, studies suggest, may be a possible root cause for some conditions that we label “mental illness,” including depression, autism, anxiety, ADHD, and even schizophrenia.47 Several animal studies have shown a direct link between a decline in the health of our microbiome (as a result of poor diet and environmental influences such as stress and toxic chemicals) and a sharp rise in the symptoms associated with anxiety and depression48 in humans.

For your community of microbes – your ‘microbiome’ – your body is a planet. Some prefer the temperate forest of your scalp, some the arid plains of your forearm, some the tropical forest of your crotch or armpit. Your gut, ears, toes, mouth, eyes, skin and every surface, passage and cavity you possess teem with bacteria and fungi. You carry around more microbes than your ‘own’ cells. We are ecosystems, composed of – and decomposed by – an ecology of microbes, without which we could not grow and behave as we do. The forty-odd trillion microbes that live in and on our bodies allow us to digest food and produce key minerals that nourish us. Like the fungi that live within plants, they protect us from disease. They guide the development of our bodies and immune systems and influence our behaviour. If not kept in check, they can cause illnesses and even kill us. We are not a special case. Even bacteria have viruses within them. Even viruses can contain smaller viruses. Symbiosis is a ubiquitous feature of life.

There seems to be a microbiome “signature” of frailty. Fecal samples from frail individuals show a striking lack of bacterial diversity5698 and, in particular, a deficit of fiber-eating “good bacteria”5699 such as Lactobacillus.

Each individual gut can contain up to a thousand different species of bacteria, though most of them belong to two groups—Firmicutes and Bacteroides—which make up about 75 percent of the entire microbiome.

Microbiota Hypothesis” suggests that dust from homes with dogs may influence the development and response of the human immune system by changing the composition of the gut microbiome in ways that reduce someone’s risk for allergies and asthma.

Now we know that our gut is akin to a teeming tropical rain forest with its own diverse ecosystem, communities, and multiple signaling devices, languages that single-celled organisms use to talk among themselves.

Over the past fifty years, we have introduced innovation after innovation that has overlooked, depleted, and destroyed our microbiomes. It’s no coincidence that in the same time frame there has simultaneously been a stark increase in major diseases, from obesity to the current mental health crisis to the autoimmune epidemic that I treat in my clinics every day.

The truth is that inside your digestive system lives a galaxy made up of trillions of bacteria belonging to at least ten thousand different species, plus an as-yet-undetermined number of viruses, fungi, and other microbes. This is your gut biome. You also have an oral biome with seven hundred species of bacteria and a skin biome with a thousand different species.

We have a health care system that’s great at identifying problems once they exist and then trying to manage them with a combination of pills and procedures. Sure, we can improve symptoms or slow disease progression in some cases, but it always comes at a cost. It’s sick care, not health care. There is little to no focus on prevention.

Every microbiologist I spoke with agreed that antibiotic overuse is likely a bigger contributor to messing up our microbiomes—gut and skin—than hygiene itself.

I remember when I first learned that human beings had microbial clouds hovering in the air around them at all times. I'd been sitting at my desk on the fifth floor of a corporate building in lower Manhattan for five hours when the data scientist James Meadow told me I’d probably shed millions of microbes all over my cubicle that day. "You know the dirty kid from Peanuts? Pig-Pen? It turns out we all look like that," Meadow said into the phone. He worked at the time at a company in San Francisco focused on monitoring the health of the indoor microbiome in places like offices and hospitals, and he'd recently published a paper. "We give off a million biological particles from our body every hour as we move around," he continued. "I have a beard; when I scratch it, I'm releasing a little plume into the air. It's just this cloud of particles we're always giving off, that happens to be nearly invisible.

Working from the other end of the digestive system, fecal microbiota transplantation, FMT for short, is a more radical approach that is being used already to treat colitis, irritable bowel syndrome, and other inflammatory illnesses.25 The technique is simple, though not quite as relaxing as drinking yoghurt: a sample of microbiome from a healthy donor is presented to the patient via an enema, through a colonoscope, or via a tube passed through the nostrils into the stomach or duodenum. The

The microbiome is so crucial to human health that it could be considered an organ in and of itself. In fact, it has been suggested that since without it we could not live, we should consider ourselves a “meta-organism,” inseparable from it. This

There are some infections that definitely require antibiotic treatment, but more often the need for antibiotics is a gray area. A study published in the journal Pediatrics found that pediatricians prescribed antibiotics 62 percent of the time when they perceived that parents expected them to be prescribed, and only 7 percent of the time when they thought parents didn’t, suggesting that the need for antibiotics is almost always optional. It’s not just children who are being overtreated. Two out of every three adults who see a health practitioner for cold or flu symptoms are prescribed antibiotics, which 80 percent of the time don’t meet Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidelines for antibiotic therapy. When I ask my patients about previous antibiotic use, they usually respond that they took “a normal amount,” but after I have them add up every prescription, they’re often shocked to realize just how much “normal” really is.

Antibiotics aren’t the only cause of dysbiosis. Gastrointestinal infections themselves can deplete the microbiome, and the subsequent decrease in microbial richness can lead to increased susceptibility to disease. Many patients trace the beginnings of their decline in health to an infectious event—from Montezuma’s revenge in Mexico to dysentery on safari in southern Africa to a bout of giardia from contaminated water closer to home. Post-infectious irritable bowel syndrome is a well-described phenomenon, and up to 10 percent of patients with inflammatory bowel disease like Crohn’s and ulcerative colitis point to a significant infectious event that marks the beginning of their illness, particularly if their microbiome was already compromised from prior antibiotic use.

An immune system that doesn’t get up close and personal with enough germs early on is like a kid with overprotective parents, ill equipped to deal with problems when they inevitably happen. Inadequate exposure leads to defects in immune tolerance and a trigger-happy state of heightened activity where essential bacteria, proteins in food, and even parts of our own body (the digestive tract, in the case of IBD) are treated like the enemy and attacked.

If we look at a map of the world today, one of the striking observations is that illnesses like Crohn’s disease are common in more developed countries and rare in less developed ones. The hygiene hypothesis accounts for this uneven distribution by suggesting that less childhood exposure to bacteria and parasites in affluent societies like the United States and Europe actually increases susceptibility to disease by suppressing the natural development of the immune system. This concept has also been linked to the rise of many of our chronic ailments: the obesity epidemic, deadly disorders like metabolic syndrome and heart disease, psychiatric conditions like depression, poorly understood afflictions like autism, and even some forms of cancer—and clinical studies have shown significant disturbances in the microbiome in all of them. We spend huge amounts of time making sure we’re clean—scrubbing ourselves with harsh soaps, sanitizing our hands and environment with chemicals, and eliminating any trace of dirt from our homes and lives—but since the evidence suggests that germs may actually be essential for our well-being, it may be time to rethink our approach to cleanliness and hygiene.

The idea behind the Hormone Reset is simple: in three-day bursts, you’ll focus on making specific dietary changes, starting with eliminating meat and alcohol, which resets your estrogen, liver, and gut microbiome—the genetic material of the trillions of microbial critters that live in your body. Every three days you’ll eliminate specific metabolism-wrecking foods and trade up for better foods, which will reset your misfiring hormones, building on the collaboration and regulatory synergy between them so you can feel like yourself again, in body harmony.

Your body is host to a microbiome: the trillions of other organisms that naturally inhabit your gut, respiratory tract, skin, and other organs. According to some estimates, there are ten times as many foreign microbes in your body as there are of your own cells, and altogether these microbes weigh several pounds.27 We coevolved with these microbes as well as with many species of worms over millions of years, which explains why most of your microbiome is either harmless or performs important functions, such as helping you digest and cleaning your skin and scalp.28 You depend on these critters as much as they depend on you, and were you to eradicate them, you would suffer. Fortunately, antibiotics and antiparasitic drugs don’t kill off your entire microbiome, but the overuse of these powerful medications does eliminate some helpful microbes and worms, whose absence may actually contribute to new diseases.

Breastfeeding is the natural human way of providing exactly that continuous stimulation to the child’s developing microbiome and immune system. Partial breastfeeding continued through the first year would ensure a greater likelihood of tolerance, ending the pointless but confusing wrangle over four versus six months as the better age for introduction to other foods. Strong medical advocacy in support of the WHO goal might just be enough to generate the societal re-structuring that would be needed for such breastfeeding to become possible for more than advantaged minorities.

The microbiome is the sum of our experiences throughout our lives: the genes we inherited, the drugs we took, the food we ate, the hands we shook. It is unlikely to yield one-size-fits-all solutions to modern maladies.

A biologist with a history of tooth decay invents a symbiotic microbe which lives in the human mouth and feeds by cleaning our teeth. It secreted calcium, which is poisonous to it, controlling its growth and preventing it from eating the teeth themselves. So this guy, he wants to spread the thing to the world, but it'd never fly, FDA and human squeamishness and all, so he becomes a party animal. He throws wild partys at the lab, kisses female grad students, where's, babies. He backwashes in sodas left on tables. He bums drags of cigarettes. He grants humanity eternally clean and healthy teeth but dies of a terrible cocktail of STDs.

The story emerging from these studies is not yet complete, but it has already led to fascinating insights. Thanks to its microbes, a baby can better digest its mother’s milk. And your ability to digest carbohydrates relies to a significant extent on enzymes that can be made only by genes present not in you but in your microbiome.

The presence of some serious budgetary myopia is obvious here, as the vast majority of money is spent on studying diseases and virtually none is spent on understanding why healthy people are healthy in the first place.