Did Industrialization Gut Our Microbiomes? A New Study on Rural Foraging Communities in South America and Africa Hints the Answer Is Yes
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Sixty percent is a big number to swallow. That's more than half of the microbial species these two distant groups share, and we've apparently lost them somewhere between the hunter-gatherer campfire and the drive-thru window. I'd want to know whether those missing microbes are actually doing something we need, or whether they're just passengers that our modern diet no longer feeds.
The study doesn't say we're all doomed, and I'm not going to pretend it does. But it does make me wonder about all the things we've traded away for convenience. The Tsimane and Hadza live on opposite sides of the planet, yet their guts look more alike than either looks like ours. That suggests there's a baseline human microbiome we've drifted from, and we don't fully understand what we lost.
I'd like to see follow-up work on whether reintroducing some of these species changes anything measurable, like inflammation or digestion. Until then, I'll keep eating my vegetables and trying not to think about the 1,200 species that might be missing from my own gut.