You are just 10% human. For every one of the cells that make up the vessel that you call your body, there are nine impostor cells hitching a ride. You are not just flesh and blood, muscle and bone, brain and skin, but also bacteria and fungi. Over your lifetime, you will carry the equivalent weight of five African elephants in microbes. You are not an individual but a colony.Until recently, we … recently, we had thought our microbes hardly mattered, but science is revealing a different story, one in which microbes run our bodies and becoming a healthy human is impossible without them.
In this riveting, shocking, and beautifully written book, biologist Alanna Collen draws on the latest scientific research to show how our personal colony of microbes influences our weight, our immune system, our mental health, and even our choice of partner. She argues that so many of our modern diseases—obesity, autism, mental illness, digestive disorders, allergies, autoimmunity afflictions, and even cancer—have their root in our failure to cherish our most fundamental and enduring relationship: that with our personal colony of microbes.
Many of the questions about modern diseases left unanswered by the Human Genome Project are illuminated by this new science. And the good news is that unlike our human cells, we can change our microbes for the better. Collen’s book is a revelatory and indispensable guide. It is science writing at its most relevant: life—and your body—will never seem the same again.
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This is a fascinating book- how the bacteria living in your gut can drive behavior and determine whether you will develop an autoimmune disorder. This is bizarre field of science that most people are not aware of.
90% of the cells in our body are not human! Yet these bacteria have evolved along with us and contribute significantly to our lives and health. Interesting and engaging book.
I, as a retired PhD scientist involved in clinical trials of pharmaceuticals, was skeptical about the importance of microbiome perturbations in the increasing prevalences of T1 diabetes, obesity, autism, etc, and still remain so, albeit to a lesser degree. Nonetheless the hypotheses are reasonably compelling, to various degrees, and the author has done a fine job of distilling complex biology into readable text for a nonscientistist readership. For many of the topics, Google and Pubmed searches provided me with more details about the underlying work, and I was suprised that some of it was published in first rate journals. In many cases, however, the critical controlled trials to address or refine the important hypotheses have not been conducted. I’d love to know more about the current strategies and results for C Diff overgrowths, for example. But the book certainly has been thought-provoking, and even has changed my perspective about diet, particularly in regard to fiber. I agree with the message that the calories in, calories out dogma is hopelessly naive and the attention to microbiome dynamics and diversity might be a quite important future facet in our of our struggles with weight control.
I was assigned to read this book for a Master’s level course on microbiology. Upon finishing this book, my opinions were mixed. On the one hand, I felt that this novel made the complex scientific studies which provide the basis for our collective knowledge of the microbiota easily accessible. Collen’s writing is both succinct, especially for such an expansive subject, and easy to understand. Many of her vignettes and examples were alluring, drawing you in before, or often during, her delivery of the hard science facts. I overall enjoyed her writing style and the way she presented the information.
However, this did not outweigh the negative aspects. Something about this book left me with a sense of incompleteness. While I do know this book is intended to be an introduction/overview of the microbiota, it felt like many points were presented but left unresolved. It’s possible this is due to the fact that this was an emerging field for which we had only partial answers at the time of publishing (and perhaps even still). Sometimes I felt like a story or example was introduced and was not revisited until much later, to the extent that I had entirely forgotten about it or was overwhelmed by so many partially presented points and how they tied together. To be honest, while reading the book I would often get interested and then as the chapter went on find my concentration waning. In moments, my attention would be grabbed and I would run to share something exciting I had learned (to my family’s dismay). I loved making connections to my own life and contemplating how things, like being delivered by cesarean section or suffering from an infection warranting antibiotics before the development of a chronic condition, may have contributed to the diagnosis carried by someone I know. Yet I do not feel I absorbed as much of it to remember long-term as I would have liked. Time will tell.
At the start, I was most interested in the section exploring the relationship between the microbiota and the mind. However, this section was almost exclusively about autism. I will not deny that discussion was extremely interesting to me, however depression and anxiety were barely mentioned at all despite being significantly more prevalent. I wish these afflictions were explored a bit further, especially with regard to how the microbiome alters the brain.
Overall, I did enjoy this book but I felt like I did not learn as much about the underlying mechanisms as I anticipated. This may be in part because I have a science background and was looking for something more detailed while this was targeted for people who may have less exposure to microbiology. While some mechanisms were discussed, a lot of the book felt like statistics, a research review, or health advice. This book did introduce me to new ideas in this field, like the role of a natural birth for developing the gut microbiome of a baby, as well as expanded on some areas for which I had some familiarity, like the problem of antibiotic overuse. I rated this book 3 out of 5 stars, and recommend it to anyone who is interested in an easy science read or may be looking to learn more about the human microbiota, especially if you have little to no science background (and even if you do). I would be interested to read Collen’s subsequent book which dives into one topic from this novel, obesity and diet, exclusively.
Interesting book. Very easy to follow, and on a topic we should all understand.
This book should be mandatory reading in schools!
I will be reread[ing parts of this book for many weeks. to come. It is well researched and packed with information and new theories about the human body and its many illnesses.
Very informative about a subject greatly affecting our health, as well as easy to read. Amazingly enough given the topic, it was often a page-turner with numerous mini-suspense-filled accounts of how people were hurt by or recovered from things that attacked their microbiota.
Very interesting and encouraging for those who wish to foster good gut health.
Fascinating book! Easy to understand but enough depth to fill you with wonder. Learn more about how health is affected by the microorganisms that evolved with us.
Pair this book with any diet book and it will make you rethink what’s going on with your body and food.
very interesting topic
Interesting insight on antibiotic use & it’s long term effect upon microbiome.
I may finally have found reason enough to give up diet Coke & poor food choices: I Love my Microbes & they Love me back in the most Miraculous ways!
Learning about your Microbiome should be MANDATORY IN SCHOOL! It has the greatest potential to spur us into healthful living & it’s ridiculously curative!
It’s really that epic. Please give this topic your attention & then experiment on it! U won’t be sorry! 🙂
I used to think that gut bacteria, mitochondria, and parasites were by far the exception–they are not. I thought that symbiosis was something rare to be wondered at, not ordinary. So did the author. She examines her body as a scientist would–appropriately, as she is a scientist–by doing a baseline study of her gut flora before attempting to make it normal once again, after some tough medical experiences.
This book is like Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, a look into another world–and also like Sacks, the world is one we know well–the world is us.
What an eye-opener. What fun!
still reading and studying it. Thanks