Gut Feelings The Microbiome and Our Health

Why the microbiome--our rich inner ecosystem of microorganisms--may hold the keys to human health.

We are at the dawn of a new scientific revolution. Our understanding of how to treat and prevent diseases has been transformed by knowledge of the microbiome—the rich ecosystem of microorganisms in and on every human. These microbial hitchhikers may hold the keys to human health. In Gut Feelings, Alessio Fasano and Susie Flaherty show why we must go beyond the older, myopic view of microorganisms as our enemies to a broader understanding of the microbiome as a parallel civilization that we need to understand, respect, and engage with for the benefit of our own health.
Recent advances in understanding the microbiome and its role in human health dovetail with the development of personalized or “precision” medicine to create treatments and prevention programs targeted to the molecular imprint of an individual. Fasano and Flaherty explore the microbiome's part in such diseases as gut inflammatory disorders, obesity, neurological conditions, and cancer, and they explain new research in prebiotics, probiotics, synbiotics, and psychobiotics. They also discuss the microbiome and immune function, including a possible role in COVID-19 treatment.
By simultaneously expanding our perspective to encompass large datasets and multiple factors in human health, and narrowing our focus to identify the individual communities in the human microbiome, we will enlarge—and perhaps reinvent—our understanding of how to combat disease and maintain health.
 

Alessio Fasano is the W. Allan Walker Chair of Pediatric Gastroenterology and Nutrition and Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. He is also Founder and Director of the Center for Celiac Research and Treatment at Massachusetts General Hospital. Award-winning writer and editor Susie Flaherty is Director of Communications at the Center for Celiac Research and Treatment at Massachusetts General Hospital. Fasano and Flaherty are the authors of Gluten Freedom.

Preface vii
I The Wisdom of a Microscopic Species
1 Evolutionary Biology Explains Bacterial
Adaptability 3
2 The Ancestral Microbiome 21
3 Early Factors Influencing the Microbiome 49
4 Cracking the Codes: From the Human Genome
to the Human Microbiome 81
5 Beyond Bacteria: Those Other “Omes” 103
6 The Microbiome Hypothesis: The Epigenetic Role
of the Microbiome 131
II The Microbiome’s Role in Disease
7 The Microbiome and Gut Inflammatory
Disorders 165
8 The Microbiome and Obesity 187
9 The Microbiome and Autoimmunity 207
10 The Microbiome and Neurological and Behavioral
Disorders 237
11 The Microbiome and Environmental
Enteropathy 259
12 The Microbiome and Cancer 273
III Manipulating the Microbiome to Maintain Health
13 From Association to Causation: A New Approach
to Microbiome Composition and Function in
Disease Development 293
14 Preventive Medicine: Monitoring the Microbiome
for Disease Prediction and Interception 313
15 Treatments for Disease: Prebiotics, Probiotics,
Synbiotics, and Postbiotics 345
16 Microbiome Research in Gut-Brain Axis Diseases:
Psychobiotics 381
17 Artificial Intelligence, Synthetic Biology,
and the Microbiome 391
18 Maintaining a Resilient Microbiome through
Old Age 411
 Epilogue: Why Studying Our Microbiome Is
Important for Our Future 425
Acknowledgments 443
Notes 445