The most important dinner guests at your table tonight won’t pull up a chair or engage in chitchat. They are your gut microbes and there are trillions of them eating with you.

A few decades ago, “microbiome” drew blank stares outside research labs. Now the word pops up in startup pitches, with everyone from wellness influencers to venture capitalists convinced that gut bacteria hold the keys to health, happiness, and maybe immortality. Some of it is hype that is not backed by science but rather by an insatiable need to sell probiotics and supplements.

But behind the hype, science has been assembling real evidence on how gut microbes really do influence human health.

A sweeping review published in Nature Reviews Gastroenterology & Hepatology has sifted through hundreds of studies and delivered the clearest verdict yet: your gut microbes aren’t just along for the digestive ride. They’re finicky co-eaters of every meal, transforming food into biological signals that ripple out to your immune system, metabolism, and brain. “The gut microbiome has an undeniable role in mediating the health effects of the diet,” the authors of the review conclude, in the declarative tone that science reserves for accepted wisdom.

Why is microbiome having a moment right now? Technology is part of the answer. Sequencing costs have collapsed dramatically; analyzing your gut microbiome now often runs in the low thousands of rupees, down from lakhs just a decade ago.

Failed drug trials have also nudged pharmaceutical companies to focus on the microbes inside us, while the “food as medicine” industry has exploded with startups promising microbiome-tailored diets and investors betting on personalized nutrition as the next gold rush.........

© hindustantimes