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For the microbiologist Justin Sonnenburg, that career-defining moment—the discovery that changed the trajectory of his research, inspiring him to study how diet and native microbes shape our risk for disease—came from a village in the African hinterlands. A group of Italian microbiologists had compared the intestinal microbes of young villagers in Burkina Faso with those of children in Florence, Italy. The villagers,

I have a piece in the NYT Sunday Review exploring the question: Should we bank our own stool for microbial reconstitution? A few notes and interesting tidbits that didn’t make it into the piece. First, an interesting study linking early-life microbial disturbances with the later development of asthma was just published in Science Translational Medicine. Unlike other studies, which look backward in time to make

A few years before Super Size Me hit theaters in 2004, Dr. Paresh Dandona, a diabetes specialist in Buffalo, New York, set out to measure the body’s response to McDonald’s—specifically breakfast. Over several mornings, he fed nine normal-weight volunteers an egg sandwich with cheese and ham, a sausage muffin sandwich, and two hash brown patties. Dandona is a professor at the State University of New York-B