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A diet rich in meat, refined foods, sugars, and fats damages the internal habitat, reducing the diversity of gut bacteria. Start eating more plants and diversity blossoms.
While people constantly pick up and share microbes, one person’s biome varies from another depending upon genotype, age, sex, diet, hygiene practices, health, clothing, occupation, and climate. But variance is by degrees. Family members tend to have similar gut microbes, which is likely attributable to a shared diet. Not much research has been devoted yet to characterizing microbiomes among different cultures or baseline genetic makeup.
The distinct advantage of human-microbial interdependence comes from evolution. Microbes may live short lives, but that is to our advantage. Microbes selectively pick up genetic bits they consider valuable. Those same bits commonly prove helpful to their human hosts.
Regardless of scale, different organisms in ecosystems pass information and metabolic capabilities to each other. For a human and its microbiome that’s sharing the wealth. Considering that microbes live life in the fast line, they are the ones doing almost all the giving.
Our existence is an intertwined dance among trillions of cells, only a tiny fraction of which are human in the classical sense. That dance is to an ever-changing tune of environmental conditions, with diet a most important choice.
