Your belly is a bacterial bonanza (and that's a good thing)

Get this: it turns out your body is analogous to a planet. A planet inhabited by trillions of microbes (bacteria, archaea, viruses, and fungi)* which add up to comprise 1-3% of your total body mass. That means if you weigh 150 pounds, you are carrying 1.5 - 4.5 pounds of bacteria (and other microorganisms) around with you everywhere you go (as a point of comparison, the average adult human brain weighs 3 pounds). In terms of mass, your cells outweigh those of your microbial inhabitants. But, don't be fooled: microbial cells are much tinier than human cells. You actually have 10 times MORE microbial cells in and on your body than you do human cells. In other words, you are 90% microbial cells. BOOM - that was the sound of my mind (and probably yours) being blown.

Now before you try to swallow a bottle of antibiotics or scrub your skin raw, you should know that you need most of these microbes to survive. Nasty bacteria that cause infection and illness have been giving friendly bacteria a bad reputation - until now! Science is just beginning to unravel the complex relationships between our bodies and the microbes that normally inhabit us. While there are commonalities in the types of bacteria that tend to colonize specific regions of the body, every person's microbial population is unique in its demographics (much like no two cities have identical census data). The types of microbes that call your body home, and the ratio of different species, can affect your health in different ways.

One of the areas of our bodies that is rife with bacteria is, no surprise, our gut.  Studies about gut microbes are beginning to pile up evidence to indicate that these bacteria are no small players. You need bacteria in your digestive tract to produce enzymes for digestion, to aid in vitamin synthesis, and to produce products for your immune system. Your metabolism depends on them! Additionally, the variety and amount of bacteria in your gut can have far-reaching implications. Your gut microbes could play a role in how much you weigh. They might positively or negatively influence your risk for cardiovascular disease. They could affect how efficient your body is at breaking down certain nutrients. Gut microbes may even shift in composition to accommodate alterations in metabolic demands, such as in pregnancy.

Not only are these new findings exciting for the future of science and medicine, they are also paradigm-shifting in how we view metabolism. As we all know, our society tends to place quite a bit of blame on individuals who struggle with obesity: but what if some obese people just have overly efficient gut microbes? Chew on that.

As if all this news isn't wonderfully mind-boggling and curiosity-piquing enough, YOU can actually contribute to the future understanding of how gut microbes affect our well-being: http://www.indiegogo.com/americangut

If that's not cool, I don't know what is.

*This post focuses on bacteria, since they are currently the main type of microbe under investigation in studies related to the human microbiome. I suspect that in time we will advance our scientific knowledge to equally understand the role of each of these microbes. It's going to be super-exciting, health and life-changing stuff. You can quote me on that.