Education is Freedom
Paulo Friere
10% Human: How Your Body’s Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness
by Alanna Collen
“It’s amazing to think that simply having a different community of microbes living in your gut can make the difference between being healthy and having a condition that carries an 80 percent chance of death from heart disease.”
On the underside of a leaf in the forests of Papua New Guinea you can find the hollow carapace an ant, it’s jaws tightly clamped into a central vein of the leaf with a hardened stalk of fungal spores growing from its lifeless body. The microbe, Cordyceps, has taken over the mind of the ant, compelling it to climb the tree, lock itself into position and become energy for the germination and spread of more microbes.
The power of microbia over life is beyond what most of us understand, and they make up 90% of our bodies. We are only 10% human.
The vital importance of bacteria in every part of our bodies to maintain a healthy state of mind/body is thoroughly explored within these pages, and a must read for anyone wanting to expand their health consciousness. With an acknowledgment of an ancient pearl of wisdom that all disease begins in the gut, Alanna delves deep into the connection between microbia and environment, the psychological and biological influence they wield over us from our first breath to our last, and ways in which we can restore optimal microbial health within the confines of our modern society.
We are not one organism, but a community. Our seemingly independent choices are not entirely, “our own”, and we are not just what we eat; we are what “they” eat.