New research on the sorts of microorganisms you have in your intestinal tract has made a pretty significant breakthrough. German researchers have basically found that, despite the terrific variety of intestinal microbes, every person they studied falls into one of three different gut ecosystems or “gut types” just like they have blood types. These don’t seem to be ethnic or genetic in any way, nor related to gender or weight or age or health. But instead, they seem to be acquired very early in life based, perhaps, on which sort first come to inhabit the infant. In any case, the impact of this discovery means that there may be interactions with certain drugs that make various courses of treatment better or worse. It may help explain why different patients can have such different success rates or effects with the same course of treatment. It also means that the way we use antibiotics, which tend to try to kill off everything, may be changing significantly. The difficulty of studying this stuff is immese, since there are about 10 times as many microbes living inside of us as even our entire bodies have in cells.
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