Dr. Justin Sonnenburg

So what microbes you're colonized with early in life

can really change your biology.

How do I know if my microbiome is healthy or unhealthy?

Context matters a lot.

What's healthy for one person or one population may not be healthy for another person or population.

And I will say that there's no single answer to this, but there's some really important considerations.

Perhaps the best way to start talking about this is to go back to...

the inception of the Human Microbiome Project, which was this program that NIH started.

They invested a lot of money in 2008, 2009 for really propelling the field of gut microbiome research.

It was becoming evident at that point that this was not just a curiosity of human biology, that it was probably really important for our health.

Through those studies, we really started to get the image that there is this tremendous individuality in the gut microbiome and

And so it's really hard to start drawing conclusions after initial pass of that project of what is a healthy microbiome.

But the other thing that we started to realize at the same time, there were studies going on documenting the gut microbiome of traditional populations of humans, hunter-gatherers, rural agricultural populations.

And those studies were really mind blowing from the perspective of, you know, all these people are healthy, they're living very different lifestyles and their microbiome doesn't look anything like a healthy American microbiome.

And so one possibility is that in the industrialized world, we have a different microbiome from traditional populations and that microbiome is well adapted to our current lifestyle and therefore

healthy in the context of an industrialized society.

And there probably are elements of that that are true.

But another possibility is that this is a microbiome that's gone off the rails, that it is deteriorating in the face of antibiotic use and all the

problems associated with industrialized diet, Western diet.

And that even though the Human Microbiome Project documented the microbiome of healthy people, healthy Americans, that what they really may have been documenting there is a perturbed microbiota that's really predisposing people to a variety of inflammatory and metabolic diseases.