Dark Matter: The New Science of the Microbiome

Product Information

Once the faecal cocktail was mixed (shaken, not stirred), the transplant was administered to Ray during a colonoscopy.

Dark Matter: The New Science of the Microbiome : Kinross

In the future, we might actually prescribe certain types of fibres for certain mental health conditions’: Kimberley Wilson. If you do that, it will look after you,” says Professor Tim Spector, an epidemiologist at King’s College London, author of two books on dietary and gut health, and co-founder of the ZOE app, initially developed as a gut health programme, but temporarily re-engineered as a Covid symptom tracker early in the pandemic. This procedure involves a flexible telescope that is passed into the colon through the bottom, and the bowel is gently coated in the soothing balm of microbes, which are passed through the colonoscope using a syringe. We are only now beginning to understand the importance of the gut microbiome: could this be the start of a golden age for gut-health science?According to a study in 2020 by the European Bioinformatics Institute, which pooled more than 200,000 gut genomes to create a genetic database of human gut microbes, 70% of the microbial populations it listed – 2,000 species – hadn’t yet been cultured in a lab and were previously unknown. The microbiome is like a convergent science – you have to be an ecologist, a geneticist, a bioinformatician, a clinician and an epidemiologist, to try to make sense of it.

Dark Matter: The New Science of the Microbiome : Kinross Dark Matter: The New Science of the Microbiome : Kinross

More than half a century later, the Dutch gastro- enterologist Josbert Keller and his team at the Amsterdam Medical Centre randomised patients with recurrent C diff into three groups. For now, she simply prescribes a lot more fibre to feed what many scientists now consider our second – much larger – brain.In other words, it’s an ecosystem made up of trillions of microbial life forms going about their business inside us, as we go about ours. The “gut microbiome” is the name we have used to describe not only the wildly diverse collection of microbes that live there, but also what happens when they interact with each other and with our bodies. When he talks about junk food, Spector means most prepared and packaged foods – including things such as vegetarian lasagne.

Dark Matter - Penguin Books UK

As a result, at the time of writing in the UK and the US, recurrent C diff is the only clinical condition for which regulatory bodies have approved the use of FMT. If you want to be the first to know about scientific developments in the field or to join our citizen science projects, than subscribe here! I try to have at least 30 different fruits and vegetables a week and I try to make sure that every meal I have is vegetable-based.Yet it is only now, as we are beginning to discover the microbiome's enormous potential, that we are realising it is in grave danger, being irrevocably destroyed through the globalisation of our diets, the war on bugs and the industrialised world. Though there’s still much about our microbiome we don’t understand, Dr Kinross highlights how learning about our microbiome has the potential to prevent illness, to shape how we think, how we feel and even who we choose as a partner. At the risk of sounding like the late Donald Rumsfeld, there’s what we know, what we think we know, and an awful lot that we don’t yet have a clue about.

Dark Matter by James Kinross | Goodreads

The theory behind ZOE is that our varying gut microbes explain, at least partially, the big differences in individual responses to food: why one person who eats a lot of fat or sugar doesn’t put on weight, while another does, or why some of us can tolerate particular foods better than others, even why particular people become obese. For breakfast, he has high-fibre bran flakes, sometimes supplemented with inulin, a prebiotic fibre.That’s a good way of improving gut microbial diversity and richness, which will help your gut stay healthy. To do this, microbes need about 30g of fibre a day, but the average intake in the UK is just 10-15g. We at Penguin Random House Australia acknowledge that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are the Traditional Custodians and the first storytellers of the lands on which we live and work. However, there's a lot of great information in here that really helped me better understand the microbiome and how to keep it healthy, and for that reason it's absolutely worth a read. James Kinross is a Senior Lecturer in Colorectal Surgery and a Consultant Surgeon at Imperial College London.