The microbiome is the 21st century’s Human Genome Project. People are excited about it in the way that people often are about anything new. In some ways it is a significant advancement in our understanding of nutrition and health, but as always people take it too far and honestly think this new field of nutrition is going to solve all our problems: “we don’t have to fix our living environments, transport, food systems because we just need to fix our microbiomes!” or “conventional dietary guidelines have failed because they’re not personalised to people’s microbiomes!”.
I work in microbiome research. The nuance which is often missed is that most studies looking at microbial community composition (ie looking at DNA and seeing what bugs are there and in what relative abundance) are completely missing the functional aspects of microbes (ie what are those bacteria doing, what genes are they switching on/off, what proteins/metabolites are present). We know that bacterial communities are very fluid - they share genetic material, easily mutate, share nutrients and interact with the host in a complex manner etc. For example, two people could have similar levels of a pathogenic gut bacteria but only one be afflicted by disease due to functional differences. There’s a long way to go in this field and a lot to tease out.
A man called "Tim" loves to brag about his microbiome "score" on a certain podcast. Thank you for this post, it puts alot of what is said and written about into context.
What about the fact that, as I heard someone humurously put it: "stool testing does not measure the microbiome of your gut, it measures the microbiome of your butt"?
Don't we have different colonies of bacteria in different areas of our GI tract, thus making stool analysis a poor representation of the overall gut microbiome? Thanks.
I work in microbiome research. The nuance which is often missed is that most studies looking at microbial community composition (ie looking at DNA and seeing what bugs are there and in what relative abundance) are completely missing the functional aspects of microbes (ie what are those bacteria doing, what genes are they switching on/off, what proteins/metabolites are present). We know that bacterial communities are very fluid - they share genetic material, easily mutate, share nutrients and interact with the host in a complex manner etc. For example, two people could have similar levels of a pathogenic gut bacteria but only one be afflicted by disease due to functional differences. There’s a long way to go in this field and a lot to tease out.
A man called "Tim" loves to brag about his microbiome "score" on a certain podcast. Thank you for this post, it puts alot of what is said and written about into context.
We love you Doc! Thank you!
What about the fact that, as I heard someone humurously put it: "stool testing does not measure the microbiome of your gut, it measures the microbiome of your butt"?
Don't we have different colonies of bacteria in different areas of our GI tract, thus making stool analysis a poor representation of the overall gut microbiome? Thanks.