Inside Out | Forget the normal new year resolutions: think microbiome instead
Whatever the stresses Donald Trump and other political mischief-makers may generate, have confidence 2017 will be a happier and healthier year
By today, thousands in Hong Kong and millions around the world will more-or-less seriously have made New Year Resolutions. Most will not be kept, but so what.
I’m sure we are healthier, happier and generally nicer people for making them. For 2017, my own resolution is simple: I am going to take better care of my “microbiome”.
This time a year ago I don’t think I had ever heard of the word. But then two marvellous books filled the void. They are not for the squeamish. Did you know that we humans on average boast about 10 trillion cells – and 100 trillion tinier microbial cells – yeasty volatile stuff that digests our food, gobbles up nasty bacteria, and generally wages war inside our immune system?
Most of these good bacteria live in our gut, but they also keep busy in our mouth, our armpits and all the other smelly and better-not-talked-about parts of our body. In all, they weigh around 3lb – about the same as our brain.
The two books – The Diet Myth by Prof Tim Spector at Kings College London who heads the British Gut Project, and Follow Your Gut co-authored by Prof Robert Knight, head of the American Gut Project, with journalist Brendan Buhler – made two things shockingly clear: first, that the state of our health depends more heavily on the balance and vigour of the bacteria populating our microbiome than we had ever realised; and second, that modern diet and lifestyle are putting healthy microbiomes under unprecedented stress.
Apparently, many of our modern-day ailments, ranging from obesity, heart conditions and diabetes to eczema, asthma, and even depression, are the result of bacterial imbalances in our gut and elsewhere. Studies comparing Americans and Europeans with tribespeople living in Papua New Guinea and the Amazon rainforest show that we in the industrialised world have lost a huge variety of beneficial bacteria that have for millions of years evolved together with us and protected us from bad bacteria and an often-hostile external environment.