Even though we all seem to settle into a similar pattern of microbiota after we start eating solid foods, it doesn’t mean that we are healthy. Just as early man’s farming practices left the soil progressively more salty over the years, eventually affecting agriculture in that area centuries later, our earliest gut homesteaders could shape … Continue reading →

Using metagenomic analysis[1] to look at 16S rRNA signatures, we know that our internal residents are either in the phylum Bacteriodetes or Firmicutes.  And many studies have been done to determine if there is a magic ratio between these types that confers more (or less) health to the host[i]. The logic here is that if … Continue reading →

It isn’t as neat and tidy to say breastfeeding gives infants (better) microbes for their gut marketplace and formula feeding gives infants (terrible) ones. Studies tend to contradict each other even as formula companies work harder and harder to produce a formula more like human milk, but one thing is clear: the microbes that thrive … Continue reading →

In the land race for niches in our guts, what we eat often determines who wins and who loses, and breast milk seems to have the added value of being both a vehicle for those initial colonizers as well as a nutrient source. We see it as a train that brings in new colonizers who … Continue reading →

Almost simultaneously as the skills of aerobes and anaerobes dictating niches and stratification, the second necessary step of successful colonization occurs as the infant begins pumping nutrient energy into the gut ecosystem. We know what we eat matters for both the adult and infant microbiota, and scientists are working hard at figuring out exactly why. … Continue reading →