The Human Superorganism: How the Microbiome Is Revolutionizing the Pursuit of a Healthy Life
Written by Rodney Dietert, PhD
Narrated by Jonathan Todd Ross
4.5/5
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About this audiobook
The origin of asthma, autism, Alzheimer's, allergies, cancer, heart disease, obesity, and even some kinds of depression is now clear. Award-winning researcher on the microbiome, professor Rodney Dietert presents a new paradigm in human biology that has emerged in the midst of the ongoing global epidemic of noncommunicable diseases.
The Human Superorganism makes a sweeping, paradigm-shifting argument. It demolishes two fundamental beliefs that have blinkered all medical thinking until very recently: 1) Humans are better off as pure organisms free of foreign microbes; and 2) the human genome is the key to future medical advances. The microorganisms that we have sought to eliminate have been there for centuries supporting our ancestors. They comprise as much as 90 percent of the cells in and on our bodies--a staggering percentage! More than a thousand species of them live inside us, on our skin, and on our very eyelashes. Yet we have now significantly reduced their power and in doing so have sparked an epidemic of noncommunicable diseases which now account for 63 percent of all human deaths.
Ultimately, this book is not just about microbes; it is about a different way to view humans. The story that Dietert tells of where the new biology comes from, how it works, and the ways in which it affects your life is fascinating, authoritative, and revolutionary. Dietert identifies foods that best serve you, the superorganism; not new fad foods but ancient foods that have made sense for millennia. He explains protective measures against unsafe chemicals and drugs. He offers an empowering self-care guide and the blueprint for a revolution in public health. We are not what we have been taught. Each of us is a superorganism. The best path to a healthy life is through recognizing that profound truth.
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Reviews for The Human Superorganism
55 ratings5 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I think this is definitely an important book, and I was torn between rating it 2 vs. 3 stars. The information in it is very prescient, considering the many things we are learning about the human microbiome, and the author knows the field well. It is about time that medicine and human biology focuses more closely on the microbiome, as it does appear that many of the diseases we are now left with, after conquering so many communicable diseases, are of a different nature. In fact, some of the modern diseases we are left with, such as obesity, diabetes, irritable bowel syndrome, etc. may in part be caused by modern practices in medicine and lifestyle choices.
In some respects this book is premature in encouraging people to become more active in caring for their own microbiome. I say this because the field is in such an early state that little is known for certain about how to modify and care for a healthy microbiome. Probiotics are available, but it is hard to know which are the best ones to use without a deeper understanding of the human microbiome. As research continues apace, we will gradually get better at knowing what to do, but for now things are a little hit and miss and we are operating somewhat in the dark.
The one thing that almost made me rank this book with 3 stars is the author's tendency to use use analogical examples to make points about the microbiome and its function, and he seems to use this approach to excess. I found myself skimming many paragraphs of that sort. They might be useful to those with little scientific background, but I found them to detract from the main points. - Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5Be wary of a person who found a hammer. Book doesn't explain any details. Makes lots of observations of correlations and implies far reaching and unsupported claims like links of autism and microbial biomes. The final chapters claim to offer advice but have zero actionable information but that's a good thing since this science is less proven than the author would have you think which should be apparent from the lack of any explanation of how the processes work to create the effects they are correlated with. Incredibly repetitive with the same central claim stated over and over trying to convince by repetition rather than argument.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The author definitely changed my way of thinking about diseases and about life itself. He made the case and made it well as to just how important our microbes really are. We literally can not live without them! As he states in the book, this is definitely a paradigm shift in modern medicine.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5As the author mentions mid-way through, the Completed Self Hypothesis is a paradigm shift.The thesis of this book: non-communicable diseases are the number one cause of death and decreased quality of life in the developed world, and across the board, their primary cause is an imbalance in our micro biome. As you might have heard in recent studies, humans are only a small part human DNA. The vast majority of other cells and DNA in our body are microbial, bacteria in particular. And yet Western medicine and Western technology has totally overlooked this fact, instead preferring to look at short-term impacts on human cells when considering safety.This spans a huge range of topics, from natural child birth, to fermented foods, to auto-immune diseases, in every case with the common thread of the human micro biome.Instead of a single organism, we're much more an ecosystem.In a roundabout way, this book makes some excellent cases for rural living, and local regenerative agriculture.
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- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Change your microbes, change your lifeOnce again, we find we never left the Garden of Eden, but have remained here only to soil and destroy it. Rodney Dietert has assembled the stunning evidence to show the microbiome already has the solutions to the many non-communicable diseases we suddenly find ourselves consumed with. He has also found that in destroying our microbiome with antibiotics and c-section births, we have ourselves to blame for them. It is no coincidence that these diseases have arisen at the same time as modern drugs and processed foods. They are co-morbid.Dietert says nature versus nurture is irrelevant. It leads nowhere. It retards our understanding of biological processes. The old biology has simply missed the greater part of us. And so it must continuously fail. Medicine is stuck on the mammalian genes paradigm. That is only a fraction of who we are and how we work. We are hybrids. We cannot stand alone and removed from other species and our environment. We are holobionts – like coral reefs – serving as host and superstructure for entire societies of microbes. We are an ecological system rather than a unit. Only 10% is the mammal we can see and touch. 90% is microbes we attract, host, and share our resources with. If allowed to live, they repay us with good health and disease-fighting tools. Unfortunately, we never look at the microbe side. We examine and treat the symptoms on the mammalian side, and destroy the microbes with our thoughtless medical system.Dietert lists seven areas where we attack our own highly tuned systems:-Antibiotic overreach-Food revolution/diet-Urbanization-Birth delivery mode-Misdirected efforts on safety-Mammalian-only human medicineSome of the takeaways: -Human breast milk contains foods exclusively for our microbes.-Babies born by caesarean section have a necessary body part missing – ie. a birth defect. Same thing if mothers took antibiotics during pregnancy. -Mothers must take antibiotics before the operation, plus the baby does not get the benefit of the bacteria in the birth canal. These babies are truly defenseless, and it shows in childhood. If we are incomplete and lacking a full set of microbial partners, we set ourselves up for immune-based dysfunction. -Our mammalian genes alone are insufficient to sustain life, which was why completing the human genome was such a letdown.-Microbes regulate our genes. They are the epigenetic managers. They switch genes on and off. Without them operating the system, the system screws up. This might be why there are hundreds of variations in the autistic spectrum. -Germ-free mice behave “eerily similar” to autistic children.-We don’t absorb vitamins; we produce them. Microbes regulate production of numerous vitamins, which might be why in every single study, taking supplements proves useless. If the regulator is missing, the vitamins go missing, and swallowing pills does not help.-Some microbes are sophisticated sensors we can employ to predict disease well in advance.-Emulsifiers are used in everything from food to textiles. They damage the biome and cause inflammation – the basis of most non communicable diseases.-We need a full microbiome at birth. We must train it by being in contact with as many, not as few, stimuli as possible, and we need to prevent damage to the microbiome as much we would avoid damage to our bodies.In Dietert’s scenario, losing part of the microbiome is like losing a leg or an organ. It cripples us. Human Superorganism is an extraordinarily powerful book, written for the general audience. It lays out the facts, if I may, in an easy to digest manner. Dietert, who lives this world, thinks it will shortly become a routine part of medicine. Doctors who do not prescribe probiotics to follow antibiotics will be accused of malpractice. Caesareans will not be a lifestyle choice. Whole new industries will develop around microbes, prebiotics and probiotics. In the meantime, Dietert says we must instruct our doctors to take the microbiome into consideration in everything they prescribe. We must eat more fermented foods. Somehow, we must stop being our own worst enemy.David Wineberg
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