10% Human: How Your Body's Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness

There's more to being human than you think: in this groundbreaking book Allana Collen explores the extraordinary world of the powerful microbes that make up 90% of the human body. You are just 10% human. For every one of the cells that make your body, there are nine impostor cells. You are not just flesh and blood, muscle and bone, brain and skin, but bacteria and fungi. You are not an individual, but a colony. Far from being passive, the trillions of microbes that live on and in you are intimately involved in running your body. As Alanna Collen explores, the modern epidemics of 'Western' diseases - obesity, mental health problems, gut disorders, allergies, autoimmunity, and even cancer - have their root in our failure to cherish our most fundamental and enduring relationship: that with our personal colony of microbes. Antibiotics, antibacterial cleaners, rapidly changing diets and our obsession with hygiene vastly reduced the microbe community we carry. Unlike our human cells, though, we can change our microbes for the better. '10% Human' provides a revelatory guide to the role of your body's microbes in health and happiness. This is popular science at its most relevant: life will never seem the same again.