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Scientists suspect our intestinal community of microbes, the human microbiota, calibrates our immune and metabolic function, and that its corruption or depletion can increase the risk of chronic diseases, ranging from asthma to obesity. One might think that if we coevolved with our microbes, they’d be more or less the same in healthy humans everywhere. But that’s not what the scientists observed.

The Western microbiome, the community of microbes scientists thought of as “normal” and “healthy,” the one they used as a baseline against which to compare “diseased” microbiomes, might be considerably different than the community that prevailed during most of human evolution.

A group of Italian microbiologists compared the intestinal microbes of young villagers in Burkina Faso with those of children in Florence, Italy. The villagers, who subsisted on a diet of mostly millet and sorghum, harbored far more microbial diversity than the Florentines, who ate a variant of the refined, Western diet.

Justin Sonnenburg’s research suggests is that by failing to adequately nourish key microbes, the Western diet may also be starving them out of existence. Human microbiomes probably changed some with the transition to agriculture, which made diets less diverse. But an even more drastic shift occurred quite recently, with the advent and widespread adoption of refined foods. They suspect that these diet-driven extinctions may have fueled, at least in part, the recent rise of non-communicable diseases. The question now is this: How did the microbiome of our ancestors look before it was altered by sanitation, antibiotics, and junk food? And was it somehow healthier than the one we harbor today?

Read full, original post: How the Western Diet Has Derailed Our Evolution