Comments on: You are what you eat – how your diet defines you in trillions of ways

By: Cedar

Cedar — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 20:04:13 +0000

Do you think that a baby who only got 10 days of breastmilk, then switched to formula supplemented with probiotics would retain enough bacteria from the initial breastmilk to populate their guts with healthy bacteria? I am not asking this hypothetically.

By: Don

Don — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 23:46:02 +0000

Great article!
I wonder what preservatives in food do to gut bacteria.

By: Ursula Ferreira

Ursula Ferreira — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 12:52:08 +0000

Thank you! More proof that breastfeeding is important for one’s lifelong health!

By: Michael Meadon

Michael Meadon — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 15:00:53 +0000

Ed, this is probably the single best science article I’ve read in a month. Well done, really.

By: Kal

Kal — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 22:22:07 +0000

@Dionigi:

Hey, if it would save my life, I don’t care WHAT they’d call it… I just hope my wife’s, er, bacteria would be up to the job.

Man that poor lady… diarrhea is never fun, but EIGHT MONTHS?!? Yikes.

By: Dionigi

Dionigi — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 11:14:11 +0000

Nice of you to call it a transplant of her husband’s gut bacteria.

By: Ahcuah

Ahcuah — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 17:08:08 +0000

I’ve occasionally wondered just how much of the “obesity epidemic” is really due to certain bacteria in our guts. Maybe a lot of folks are getting “infected” with a new strain.

For that matter, maybe the general increase in weight as we get older is related to being more likely to acquire such a strain the longer we live. I know I am just as active in my 50s as I was in my 30s (maybe moreso–more time), yet fat seems to want to stick to me. Folks call that metabolism slowing down as we age, but we might at least consider the possibility that it has something to do with our gut bacteria.

By: jez abbott

jez abbott — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 11:30:47 +0000

Hi Ed, trying to make contact with you about a book proposal for a London publisher on equations – science, maths, the universe, that kind of thing. Cannot make heads or tails of twitter or your blog and Cancer Research aren’t much help either. But I like your writing and want to make contact. Can you email me and I’ll tell all about the book, the publisher and anything else you’d like to know. 30,000 words, deadline 22 Nov. Be good to make contact and chew the fat on Schwarzschild’s black hole equation etcetc…

By: Ed Yong

Ed Yong — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 07:01:02 +0000

Sorry folks – they’re Italian kids. The researchers are Dutch. Corrected.

By: Luca

Luca — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 06:33:54 +0000

“And when he actually started eating these foods, the bacteria changed even further to include more members of the Bacteroidetes, a family that specialises in digesting plant molecules.”

This is fascinating. I had always ingenuously assumed that they were all there and would just shift in proportion, or maybe activate different metabolic pathways depending on th food ingested.