Gut Feelings: The Microbiome and Our Health (Hardcover)

Description

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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 that is 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.

About the Author

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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.

Praise For…

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“Gut Feelings: The Microbiome and Our Health by Alessio Fasano and Susie Flaherty reveals how understanding this alien inner world will make it possible to target medicines to an individual’s needs at the molecular level.” —New Scientist

"Gut Feelings is a detailed and scientifically rigorous survey... [Fasano and Flaherty] scrupulously assess the many studies on the microbiome and human health with an echoing drumbeat of conditional terms, cautioning the reader that research in rodents may not be replicable in humans,
and that correlations found in human populations or individual patients ultimately may not prove causative. Such caveats distinguish this book from popular works on nutrition that make exaggerated claims about how manipulating the microbiome can treat a variety of illnesses. Gut Feelings, by contrast, gives readers a clearer sense of the current state of medical knowledge." —Jerome Groopman, The New York Review of Books