10 AMAZING THINGS about your gut bacteria

1 OUR CELLS ARE OUTNUMBERED!

We’re crawling with bacteria – though perhaps we’d feel better about that if we called them by one of their other names: microbes (which also take in the viruses and fungi present in the gastrointestinal tract). They’re in our guts, in our mouths, on our skin…

In 2012, using advanced DNA sequencing, 200 researchers on the Human Microbiome Project concluded that microbes colonise our bodies to use the available sugars. The researchers also catalogued all the bacteria that hang out with us, and found that there are about 500 to 1000 species, most of them in the large intestine. And when you count them cell by cell, the number becomes impossible to pin down to any degree of accuracy. It’s estimated that the number of our cells runs to 10 trillion and that of the bacteria we host, to 100 trillion (a trillion being 12 zeros). So we’re outnumbered