Dark Matter: The New Science of the Microbiome

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As a result, they have a much more diverse and resilient population of gut micro-organisms than we do. it not only helps us digest and absorb our food and metabolise vitamins, minerals and medicines, but it also has a key role to play in our immune system. It’s for anyone who is interested in how we can improve our health and who wants to understand why we get disease and how to prevent it, so I have tried to make it easy to understand.

That has happened over a very short timeframe and the reason for that is not just about diet and food.We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Dietary and lifestyle changes in westernised societies which seemed a good, convenient, palatable (and, boy oh boy, profitable) idea at the time now emerge as causes of a mass of chronic diseases and damaging health conditions. We are going to need to understand more of the importance of microbiome to our health as the looming future of antibiotics becoming redundant is fast approaching. They are more preoccupied with things like how to feed their children, how to not die of malaria, or even how to manage day-to-day, and where their next meal will come from. The book serves as a much-needed, up-to-date summary of what is going on in this rapidly developing area of study.

Despite the complexity of the subject matter, the book is extremely well-written and easy to understand. Much as some microbes do cause illness and death, we cannot live healthy lives without an extraordinarily diverse and changing personal biosphere of microbial companions which we influence and which influence us. I’m saying that we are currently experiencing an internal climate crisis and we’ve got to change society.Now, I am a huge proponent of human progress, civilization, and modernity; however, all this progress has not come without its costs. This involves following two cohorts of children from birth and studying how their gut microbiome evolves as they grow up in varying circumstances. We compared these diets to those in Sub-Saharan Africa where rural communities have very high-fibre, plant-based diets.

He first talks about how men suffer from certain diseases at much higher rates than women, but then goes on to tell the reader about how women are the real victims, because of "socioeconomic and gender-based social inequalities. He highlights how hyperglobalization and our addiction to antibiotics has transformed our internal ecosystems and why this matters so much to our future health and happiness. As I lay debilitated and miserable in hospital, I told myself the surgeon hadn’t removed anything vital, just a functionless relic.

Yet it is only now, as we are beginning to discover the microbiome's enormous potential, that we are realising it is in grave danger, being irrevocably destroyed through the globalisation of our diets, the war on bugs and the industrialised world. Today, I am driven by the idea that the rise in the collection of disabling chronic diseases has been caused, over just eight decades, by the radical disruption to the colonies of microorganisms that live in and around us. Fascinating throughout, on occasions a little complex to get your head around but a comprehensive wealth of well explained info around the importance of and interactions between the trillions of microbiota in the gut. However, there's a lot of great information in here that really helped me better understand the microbiome and how to keep it healthy, and for that reason it's absolutely worth a read. So, if I eat meat, for example, I want to know about its provenance and that no antibiotics were used in its production.

So, for example, our planet has a microbiome and we have microbiomes on our skin, in our lungs and in our gut. The result is that although we are living longer than ever before in history, we are not living happier. I first understood what the microbiome was when I started my PhD in 2005 and it became obvious to me that this has to be an important part in the story of human health and happiness.In summary, "Dark Matter: The New Science of the Microbiome" is an enlightening and invaluable resource that I would highly recommend. Clearly, diet is a major driver too and in America and Europe, we now eat a kind of globalised, processed, white, gloopy diet which is very low in plant-based fibres and very high in animal fats and refined sugars.