World Health Day 2022: how our gut bacteria are affected by modern diets and medicines, and the couple who study jungle tribes’ poo looking for solutions
- Maria Gloria Dominguez-Bello and husband Martin Blaser look for answers to fixing our gut health in remote places untouched by Western diets and antibiotics
- Their new film covers their race to identify bacteria essential to human health, and how they might be restored through probiotics and other treatments
When Maria Gloria Dominguez-Bello travels to the Amazon jungle and tells villagers the reason for her visit, their first response is often laughter.
“Did you come all this way just to see my poop?” they ask.
She did – no humour intended – and she has been doing it for more than 20 years.
She and husband Martin Blaser, both scientists at Rutgers University in the US state of New Jersey, are the stars of a new documentary called The Invisible Extinction, describing their years of research on how modern diet and medicine are disrupting our internal colonies of bacteria and other microbes: the human microbiome.
The microbiome has been a hot topic for well over a decade as researchers continue to identify connections between the loss of “good” bacteria and a variety of human diseases, such as obesity, certain cancers and autoimmune disorders. Yet the science of how to reverse these problems remains in its infancy.
That’s the message that the Rutgers couple hopes to convey in the film, which premiered March 24 at a Copenhagen film festival. It ties in with the World Health Organization’s theme for World Health Day – April 7 – the urgent actions needed to keep humans and the planet healthy.