10% Human: How Your Body's Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness

After the small intestine has digested and absorbed as much as it can from what we’ve eaten, the leftovers move into the large intestine, where most of our microbes live. Here, they function like factory workers, each breaking down its own preferred molecules and absorbing what it can. The rest is left in a simple enough form for us to absorb throu

Metabolic rates do vary from person to person, but it is actually overweight people who have the faster metabolisms, not lean people. It simply takes more energy to run a big body than a small one.

disruptions to the body’s microbes were behind gastrointestinal disorders, allergies, autoimmune diseases, and even obesity. And it wasn’t just physical health that could be affected, but mental health as well, from anxiety and depression to obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD) and autism. Many of the illnesses we accept as part of life were not, it

You are just 10 per cent human. For every one of the cells that make up the vessel that you call your body, there are nine impostor cells hitching a ride. You are not just flesh and blood, muscle and bone, brain and skin, but also bacteria and fungi. You are more ‘them’ than you are ‘you’. Your gut alone hosts 100 trillion of them, like a coral ree

Each of us contains communities of microbes as unique as our fingerprints.

It’s easy to think of the skin as the barrier between us and the outside world, but for every square centimetre of skin, you have two square metres of gut. Though it’s on the ‘inside’, the gut has just a single layer of cells between what’s essentially the outside world, and the blood.

Acquiring the genes to do this is quick and easy for microbes, as their generation times, and therefore opportunities for mutations and evolution, are often less than a day.

A story in which our lives are intertwined with those of our hitchhikers, where our microbes run our bodies, and becoming a healthy human is impossible without them.

Together, the microbes living on the human body contain 4.4 million genes – this is the microbiome: the collective genomes of the microbiota. These genes collaborate in running our bodies alongside our 21,000 human genes. By that count, you are just half a per cent human.