Gut Feelings: The Microbiome and Our Health

Alessio Fasano · Susie Flaherty

Mac 2021 · MIT Press

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Discover why the gut microbiome holds the keys to human health—and can change the way we understand, treat, and prevent disease.

“A detailed and scientifically rigorous survey . . . gives readers a clearer sense of the current state of medical knowledge.” —The New York Review of Books

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. 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.

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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.