Trillions of bacteria surround us, permeate us, and bind our bodies together. They affect our immune systems and our brains, they shift and change with our diet, and some researchers suspect that these microbial multitudes may be an important link between our modern lifestyle and ongoing epidemics of diseases such as asthma, obesity, and diabetes.
Leading microbiome researchers recently came to UC San Francisco to share the newest insights about how improving our relationship with our bodies’ microbial ecosystems could be the next big breakthrough in treating metabolic disease. One major theme of the symposium – hosted by theUniversity of California Sugar, Stress, Environment, and Weight (SSEW) Center – was the question of whether the troubling modern epidemic of metabolic disease may arise in part because our civilization has not been kind to our microbes.
“In Western industrialized nations, we have dramatically changed our interaction with microbes in last several decades,” said Susan Lynch, PhD, who studies links between the microbiome and chronic inflammatory diseases at UCSF. “Particularly in urbanized areas, we have less contact with the soil and with animals. We have changed our diets dramatically and waged war on our microbes with antibiotics.”
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