The 2% Gut Health Guide
The 2% Gut Health Guide
Six ways to improve your microbiome, plus insights into our evolving understanding of the microbiome.
Post summary
A deep dive into gut health and the human microbiome, with six practices that can enhance your microbiome and help you avoid chronic disease.
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On Monday, we covered nine good, bad, and ugly health trends of 2024.
Gut health was one of those trends. One report noted:
More than 80 percent of consumers in China, the United Kingdom, and the United States consider gut health to be important, and over 50 percent anticipate making it a higher priority in the next two to three years.
But the way we think about gut health is like our guts: Often full of sh*t.
As we pointed out on Monday, there is no good definition of gut health.
When we talk about gut health, we often talk about stomach problems. So having a “healthy gut” often means “I don’t have any stomach issues.”
What we think we know about our guts and their health is constantly shifting.
Yet getting to the bottom of “gut health” and what we mean by it is critical. You may not have digestion issues but consider colon cancer.
It’s already the third most common cancer.
But it’s increasingly becoming a cancer of young, seemingly healthy people.
A person born in 1990, for example, has double the risk of colon cancer and quadruple the risk of rectal cancer compared to someone born in 1950.
With this in mind, I spoke to Stephanie Schnorr.
She’s like Indiana Jones. Except that instead of rescuing artifacts from hidden temples, she coaxes germs from forgotten tribes.
Schnorr is a leading expert on the human microbiome, the 4.5 pounds of germs, bacteria, fungi, protozoa, and viruses that live on and in you and what they do for your health.1
She works with hunter-gatherers, and her work upended what we know about the gut microbiome.
I met her at a coffee shop on a 110-degree day in Las Vegas to discuss her research and how it’s changed how she lives in the modern world.
Today’s post covers:
Upsides and downsides of sanitizing.
The benefits of “germs.”
A groundbreaking hunter-gatherer gut health study that revealed our limited understanding of the human microbiome.
The truth about probiotic supplements.
Why modern life gives us “weaker armor” against disease.
Six practical ways to protect your gut and enhance your microbiome, which can lead to a reduced risk of disease.
Let’s roll ..
The war on germs
Section summary: Killing germs saves lives, but we also kill beneficial germs, and that comes with downsides.
The West began its all-out war on germs in the 1800s. This is when we realized that some germs are the source of infectious disease. And the fight saved millions upon millions of human lives.
But this battle has had some unintended consequences. Schnorr told me this:
“We have this notion that germs cause disease. But we’ve given this blanket term of ‘germs’ to all microorganisms. We think that we should therefor kill them all. We’ve dramatically increased the ways we sanitize our lives. We sterilize the surfaces we come in contact with. We sterilize all our food by washing it excessively and then cooking it. We sterilize ourselves because we bathe all the time. We use antibiotics so we sterilize the inside of our body. We avoid getting dirty outside. So this means we now have far less exposure to all microorganisms.”
Except not all germs or microorganisms are bad.
The vast majority are benign and many are beneficial.
As the science writer Ed Yong points out in his book I Contain Multitudes, “There are more bacteria in your gut than there are stars in our galaxy.” And scientists estimate that fewer than 100 of these species could hurt your health.
The benefit of (many) microorganisms
Section summary: Our microbiome is almost like a separate organ that keeps us alive and well.
As we evolved, we developed a mutually beneficial alliance with many of these microscopic living organisms. And they aren’t just in our gut—they’re in our mouth, lungs, skin, etc.
We gave them a home, and they built our immune system and stress tolerance, helping us avoid sickness and be more robust and resilient.
This is no revolutionary idea. It’s how vaccines work. Your body builds immunity by experiencing an imitation of a bug.
These microorganisms also seem to be involved regulating weight gain and mood because the gut may be “wired” to the brain.
In the past, our constant, low-level exposures to a wide variety of microorganisms made us tougher creatures.
But we’ve since gone scorched earth on those organisms and removed ourselves from the environments where we’d experience them.
Without exposure, our bodies seem to have a harder time fighting formerly powerless microbes and even mistake the benign ones as bad guys, Schnorr told me.
The hunter-gatherer gut health study
Section summary: Research on hunter-gatherers made us realize we still have a lot to learn about gut health.
To understand how our gut health and how it’s changed, Schnorr visited a group who live like humans did for most of time.
She lived among the Hadza in Tanzania in 2013.
The tribe forages for wild plants, bugs, and tubers that “look like a bark-covered stick.”
They hunt for baboons, birds, antelope, and wildebeests.
They carry all that food back to camp and eat it while sitting in the dirt.
Sometimes that food is cooked. Other times it’s raw.
They’re outside always.
The Hadza also bathe and wash their hands in muddy puddles.
From a Western point of view, this lifestyle seems like a quick way to contract some heinous germ-related disease and die.
But the Hadza are seemingly impervious to some of the diseases that take down many of us Westerners. They don’t seem to get Chron’s, colitis, IBD, and even colon cancer.
The first three diseases have been increasing rapidly in people in the developed world and are now spreading into developing countries as they westernize.
So Schnorr wanted to know what the microbes living inside the guts of the “unhygienic” Hadza look like compared to those of “hygienic” Westerners.
The best way to measure gut bacteria is to analyze fecal samples.
So Schnorr and her team compared samples from the Hadza to those from modern Italians who live in cities, sanitize their world, don’t spend much time outside, and buy their food from grocery stores rather than harvesting it from the earth.
“The Hadza’s microbiome was much more diverse,” said Schnorr. Tribe members had all sorts of bacteria that were missing from the Italian guts.
This wasn’t shocking. It makes sense that people who expose themselves to more microorganisms have more of them.
“But we did have a real shock,” said Schnorr.
The truth about probiotics
Section summary: Research on the Hadza shows we have a limited understanding of the microbiome and probiotics.
We know from Monday that gut health is big business. And it’s primarily fueled by the probiotic market, which is worth billions. Companies hustle probiotic pills, powder supplements, yogurts, soda, candy, and more.
The vast majority of these products have bifidobacterium added to them. Bifidobacterium is the “good” bacteria we hear about. Bifido is mainly found in and derived from dairy products.
It’s the most common bacteria found in the guts of Westerners. “But the Hadza had no bifidobacterium,” said Schnorr.
What’s more, the Hadza guts were teeming with a bacteria called Treponema. “We thought of these as ‘disruptors,’” or the ‘bad news” bacteria, said Schnorr.
Treponema has been linked to diseases like lupus, periodontitis, YAS, and syphilis. Except that the Hazda don’t get lupus, periodontitis, YAS, and syphilis.
The Hadza also had a bacteria called proteo. “Proteo are also seen as being bad,” said Schnorr.
She and her team tested and retested the samples but the results always came back the same. The Hadza had no “good” bacteria and lots of “bad” bacteria. But, paradoxically, less disease.
“The Hadza microbiome shows a direct connection with their environment, and they benefit from that connection,” said Schnorr. “They are much more robust, they get sick less, and basically don’t get non-communicable diseases.”
The results of her study upended the microbiology community and were so groundbreaking that they were published in the prestigious journal Nature.
The findings don’t suggest probiotic supplements are useless, but they do suggest our knowledge about gut health supplementation is limited and evolving.
Our weaker armor
Section summary: Our modern, sanitized lifestyles seem to have removed us from beneficial bacteria.
Meanwhile, she said, our guts, the products of our sanitary lives and diets, factor into our massive rates of chronic disease.
She compared our hygienic, uniform microbiomes to having “weaker armor.”
Schnorr told me, “Our health gets perturbed much easier, and we’re in a physiological state that’s more likely to induce sickness and cause harm. It’s small, subtle, and chronic, pushing us in the direction of sickness.”
Compare that to someone who hasn’t live their life sanitized, who’s had more opportunity to develop beneficial relationships with the microorganisms around them.
“Maybe that person can sustain a few more hits to their health and not be as susceptible to disease,” said Schnorr. “Or maybe they’re more responsive to therapies and bounce back quicker if they get sick.”
Our lack of exposure seems to put us in a state of chronic inflammation, according to scientists at University College London. “(In the) USA and other high-income countries,” wrote the researchers. “There is often constant low-grade inflammation which tends to be stable across individuals … in the absence of any clinically apparent inflammatory stimulus.”
Then we throw “a lifetime of stress and sleep deprivation compounded with a poor diet and low activity, and it seems to bring on chronic disease rather quickly,” said Schnorr.
Scientists at Northwestern wrote, “All major diseases, including cardiovascular disease, diabetes, neurodegenerative disorders, arthritis, and cancers involve chronic inflammation.” A lack of exposure has even been linked to depression2.
It’s also led some of our immune systems to go “haywire” and mount a massive defense against something safe—like a peanut.
Food allergies disproportionately affect people in the most sanitary nations and they’re growing.
This is something scientists noticed in the 1960s. A study in Frontiers in Immunology pointed out:
A Swedish study described differences in the prevalence of asthma and socio-medical conditions between populations living in urban or rural sites. A few years later, in a population-based study conducted in Saskatchewan, Canada, showed that allergies were less frequent in native tribes living traditionally in rural sites compared to Caucasian Canadians living in urban habitats.
“I mean, it’s not like we’re all walking around on the verge of death,” said Schnorr. “There are plenty of healthy people in Western industrial societies. But I think on average we’re more susceptible to chronic diseases.”
It’s also not the single ingredient of Hadza health—but it’s undoubtedly a factor.
“So what should people be doing?” I asked.
Six ways to protect your gut
Section summary: These six practices seem to improve your microbiome and health. They also come with many powerful side effects that are not related to gut health.
Unfortunately, no pill can alter your gut microbiome to be more Hadza-like.
Schnorr told me, “The Hazda take in microbes from food they pull from the dirt, as well as air and land. Westerners don’t have Treponema and proteo because we’re so removed from the land. You really need continuous exposure to outside microbes.”3
But that doesn’t mean there aren’t simple practices we can do that can help.
These six have been shown to lead to beneficial changes that can help your microbiome and health. They’re also linked to a healthier weight and greater happiness.