It turns out that we are only 10 percent human: for every human cell that is intrinsic to our body, there are about 10 resident microbes. Some researchers believe that the alarming increase in autoimmune diseases in the West may owe to a disruption in the ancient relationship between our bodies and their “old friends” — the microbial symbionts with whom we coevolved.NYT: Some of My Best Friends Are Germs
Where do these all-important bifidobacteria come from and what does it mean if, like me, you were never breast-fed? Mother’s milk is not, as once was thought, sterile: it is both a “prebiotic” — a food for microbes — and a “probiotic,” a population of beneficial microbes introduced into the body. Some of them may find their way from the mother’s colon to her milk ducts and from there into the baby’s gut with its first feeding. Because designers of infant formula did not, at least until recently, take account of these findings, the guts of bottle-fed babies are not optimally colonized.
Most of the microbes that make up a baby’s gut community are acquired during birth — a microbially rich and messy process that exposes the baby to a whole suite of maternal microbes. Babies born by Caesarean, however, a comparatively sterile procedure, do not acquire their mother’s vaginal and intestinal microbes at birth.
Friday, May 17, 2013
First Person Plural: Microbiome
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just listened to an interview of michael pollan on kqed forum. good stuff. he's a great food writer. his latest, 'cooked', doesn't seem to be as interesting as earlier works like 'the omnivore's dilemma' etc. but 'cooked' does suggest that cooking is elemental, with the influence of fire, water, air (baking) and earth (fermentation) all combining to make food edible, tasty, and more nutritious. it is a clarion call to all to actually cook more or their own meals, rather than depending on commercially made 'food' or food-like substances.
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