We compared these diets to those in Sub-Saharan Africa where rural communities have very high-fiber, plant-based diets. They eat meat very rarely, and when they do, it is very lean. They exercise a lot and live in social communities, where they farm together, cook together and share plates of food. So, they exchange and share microbes through lots of different routes. As a result, they have a much more diverse and resilient population of gut micro-organisms than we do. And it’s becoming ever-more urgent. “We are seeing a global rise in chronic diseases, which is typically a result of an immune system that doesn’t work very well,” warns Dr James Kinross, a consultant colorectal surgeon at Imperial College London and author of Dark Matter: The New Science of the Microbiome. “A classic example of this is a rise in allergies. By 2025, half of the European population is going to have an allergy. That is astonishing.” In this mindblowing book, scientist and surgeon James Kinross explains how the organisms that live within us have helped us evolve, shaped our biology and defined the success of our species. But just as we have discovered this delicate and complex ecosystem within us, it is being irrevocably destroyed through the globalisation of our diets and lifestyles, our addiction to antibiotics, and the destruction of our environment. More than half a century later, the Dutch gastro- enterologist Josbert Keller and his team at the Amsterdam Medical Centre randomised patients with recurrent C diff into three groups. The first group received vancomycin, a wash-out of the colon using a strong laxative, and a faecal transplant. The second had vancomycin and the colonic wash-out, and the third just received vancomycin. The FMT group did so much better than the other two groups that the study had to be stopped early, as it was deemed unethical to continue. Though there’s still much about our microbiome we don’t understand, Dr Kinross highlights how learning about our microbiome has the potential to prevent illness, to shape how we think, how we feel and even who we choose as a partner.

We eat a lot of fermented foods in our house,” says Dr Kinross, who lives in London with his wife and two children. “We have a lot of kimchi and sourdough. We try to have a meal every day with some form of fermented food. Again, this is the whole microbiome argument. It improves the richness and diversity of the gut. We really like to do that.” Do eat 30 different fruits and vegetables a weekIt’s also becoming clear that samples from some donors are much more effective than those from others. These are known as “super donors” and their faeces seems to contain a magical ingredient that makes it particularly effective. But we don’t understand why this happens, or whose poo will be most effective. Minimally invasive Component Separation Technique (CST) repair for complex abdominal hernia with mesh Dr James Kinross a Consultant surgeon specialising in the gut microbiome at Imperial College London and Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust has published a new book, Dark Matter. the book explains the role of micro-organisms in our bodies and the impact on our health of their imbalance in our system and the world around us.

I first understood what the microbiome was when I started my PhD in 2005 and it became obvious to me that this has to be an important part in the story of human health and happiness. These microbes are there for a reason, they’re not there by accident. This is an evolutionary partnership, and if we’re getting more cancer or chronic disease in the gut, they have to be part of the story. Microbes have been used as therapy and cancer treatment for hundreds of years – but they’ve been ignored by mainstream science. I knew the gut microbiome was important to our health and I wanted to focus my future career on understanding how. My general hypothesis is that we are experiencing a fundamental change in the type, number and function of micro-organisms that live within us in the developed world. That has happened over a very short timeframe and the reason for that is not just about diet and food. It's also about our rapidly changing environment, which we call the exposome, (particularly urbanized environments) and the fact that we are now taking lots of medicines, especially antibiotics. Clearly diet is a major driver too and in America and Europe, we now eat a kind of globalized, processed, white, gloopy diet which is very low in plant-based fibers and very high in animal fats and refined sugars.

Collaborators

EnteroBiotix is a UK company pioneering a new class of orally administered medicines that enable IMT to take place without an invasive procedure. Its capsules use donations from screened donors that are dried using a proprietary process, and tested using advanced pathogen-screening technology. That latter point in particular can especially be a problem when patients need a very demanding treatment, like bone marrow transplantation – haematologists are sometimes anxious about offering this or other treatments because patients are at such high risk of getting an infection which is untreatable.”