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Why the microbiome--our rich inner ecosystem of microorganisms--may hold the keys to human health.

Table of Contents

Preface vii
I The Wisdom of a Microscopic Species
1 Evolutionary Biology Explains Bacterial
Adaptability 3
2 The Ancestral Microbiome 21
3 Early Factors Influencing the Microbiome 49
4 Cracking the Codes: From the Human Genome
to the Human Microbiome 81
5 Beyond Bacteria: Those Other “Omes” 103
6 The Microbiome Hypothesis: The Epigenetic Role
of the Microbiome 131
II The Microbiome’s Role in Disease
7 The Microbiome and Gut Inflammatory
Disorders 165
8 The Microbiome and Obesity 187
9 The Microbiome and Autoimmunity 207
10 The Microbiome and Neurological and Behavioral
Disorders 237
11 The Microbiome and Environmental
Enteropathy 259
12 The Microbiome and Cancer 273
III Manipulating the Microbiome to Maintain Health
13 From Association to Causation: A New Approach
to Microbiome Composition and Function in
Disease Development 293
14 Preventive Medicine: Monitoring the Microbiome
for Disease Prediction and Interception 313
15 Treatments for Disease: Prebiotics, Probiotics,
Synbiotics, and Postbiotics 345
16 Microbiome Research in Gut-Brain Axis Diseases:
Psychobiotics 381
17 Artificial Intelligence, Synthetic Biology,
and the Microbiome 391
18 Maintaining a Resilient Microbiome through
Old Age 411
 Epilogue: Why Studying Our Microbiome Is
Important for Our Future 425
Acknowledgments 443
Notes 445

About the Author

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.

Reviews

“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