From: drarwingnuttephd@gmail.com   
      
   Some of My Best Friends Are Germs   
   Michael Pollan   
   The New York Times Magazine, May 15, 2013   
      
   I can tell you the exact date that I began to think of myself in the   
   first-person plural -- as a superorganism, that is, rather than a plain old   
   individual human being. It happened on March 7. That's when I opened my e-mail   
   to find a huge, processor-   
   choking file of charts and raw data from a laboratory located at the   
   BioFrontiers Institute at the University of Colorado, Boulder. As part of a   
   new citizen-science initiative called the American Gut project, the lab   
   sequenced my microbiome -- that is,    
   the genes not of "me," exactly, but of the several hundred microbial species   
   with whom I share this body. These bacteria, which number around 100 trillion,   
   are living (and dying) right now on the surface of my skin, on my tongue and   
   deep in the coils of    
   my intestines, where the largest contingent of them will be found, a pound or   
   two of microbes together forming a vast, largely uncharted interior wilderness   
   that scientists are just beginning to map.   
      
   I clicked open a file called Taxa Tables, and a colorful bar chart popped up   
   on my screen. Each bar represented a sample taken (with a swab) from my skin,   
   mouth and feces. For purposes of comparison, these were juxtaposed with bars   
   representing the    
   microbiomes of about 100 "average" Americans previously sequenced.   
      
   Here were the names of the hundreds of bacterial species that call me home. In   
   sheer numbers, these microbes and their genes dwarf us. 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 -- including commensals (generally harmless freeloaders) and   
   mutualists (favor traders) and, in only a tiny number of cases, pathogens. To   
   the extent that we are bearers of genetic information, more than 99 percent of   
   it is microbial.    
   And it appears increasingly likely that this "second genome," as it is   
   sometimes called, exerts an influence on our health as great and possibly even   
   greater than the genes we inherit from our parents. But while your inherited   
   genes are more or less    
   fixed, it may be possible to reshape, even cultivate, your second genome.   
      
   Justin Sonnenburg, a microbiologist at Stanford, suggests that we would do   
   well to begin regarding the human body as "an elaborate vessel optimized for   
   the growth and spread of our microbial inhabitants." This humbling new way of   
   thinking about the self    
   has large implications for human and microbial health, which turn out to be   
   inextricably linked. Disorders in our internal ecosystem -- a loss of   
   diversity, say, or a proliferation of the "wrong" kind of microbes -- may   
   predispose us to obesity and a    
   whole range of chronic diseases, as well as some infections. "Fecal   
   transplants," which involve installing a healthy person's microbiota into a   
   sick person's gut, have been shown to effectively treat an antib   
   otic-resistant intestinal pathogen named C.    
   difficile, which kills 14,000 Americans each year. (Researchers use the word   
   "microbiota" to refer to all the microbes in a community and "microbiome" to   
   refer to their collective genes.) We've known for a few years that obese mice   
   transplanted with the    
   intestinal community of lean mice lose weight and vice versa. (We don't know   
   why.) A similar experiment was performed recently on humans by researchers in   
   the Netherlands: when the contents of a lean donor's microbiota were   
   transferred to the guts of    
   male patients with metabolic syndrome, the researchers found striking   
   improvements in the recipients' sensitivity to insulin, an important marker   
   for metabolic health. Somehow, the gut microbes were influencing the patients'   
   metabolisms.   
      
   Our resident microbes also appear to play a critical role in training and   
   modulating our immune system, helping it to accurately distinguish between   
   friend and foe and not go nuts on, well, nuts and all sorts of other potential   
   allergens. 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.   
      
   These claims sound extravagant, and in fact many microbiome researchers are   
   careful not to make the mistake that scientists working on the human genome   
   did a decade or so ago, when they promised they were on the trail of cures to   
   many diseases. We're    
   still waiting. Yet whether any cures emerge from the exploration of the second   
   genome, the implications of what has already been learned -- for our sense of   
   self, for our definition of health and for our attitude toward bacteria in   
   general -- are    
   difficult to overstate. Human health should now "be thought of as a collective   
   property of the human-associated microbiota," as one group of researchers   
   recently concluded in a landmark review article on microbial ecology -- that   
   is, as a function of the    
   community, not the individual.   
      
   Such a paradigm shift comes not a moment too soon, because as a civilization,   
   we've just spent the better part of a century doing our unwitting best to   
   wreck the human-associated microbiota with a multifronted war on bacteria and   
   a diet notably    
   detrimental to its well-being. Researchers now speak of an impoverished   
   "Westernized microbiome" and ask whether the time has come to embark on a   
   project of "restoration ecology" -- not in the rain forest or on the prairie   
   but right here at home, in the    
   human gut.   
      
      
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   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)