HA! Brave New World: It Looks Like Being Too Clean Can Hurt You

Despite my flip title, this piece from Nature [this comes from the Nature News section and is not from the actual scientific report in Nature by Alejandro Reyes, Matthew Haynes Nicole Hanson, Florent E. Angly, Andrew C. Heath, Forest Rohwer, & Jeffrey I. Gordon] says there's a world of bacteria and viruses living inside us that do work for us we couldn't live without. 

These findings, preliminary as they might be, demonstrate that despite all we do know about how the human body functions, there is still so very much more to know. 

More than 10 trillion bacteria normally inhabit the gastrointestinal tract, where they synthesize essential amino acids and vitamins, produce anti-inflammatory factors and help break down starches, sugars and proteins that people could not otherwise digest. Within and among these bacteria live bacterial viruses, or bacteriophages, which affect bacterial numbers and behaviour as they either prey on bacteria or co-exist with them, shuttling genes from one bacterium to another.

This microscopic dynamic ecosystem affects our lives in ways we still do not fully understand. Indeed, the rise in the incidence of food allergies in Western societies has led to hypotheses that extreme hygiene disrupts the ability of microbes to colonize human guts, resulting in a lack of tolerance to usually harmless foods. 

. . ."This human ecosystem is quite important because it determines what we can do and what we can eat," says [Edward] DeLong [at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.] "That's why we should care about this." 

A brief NY Times editorial alerted me to this article.   Though the original Nature News article isn't that long or technical itself.  The actual scientific article requires payment if you aren't a subscriber to get more than the abstract.