GUT FLORA
YOUR GUTS HOUSE ONE OF THREE DIFFERENT POPULATIONS OF BACTERIA, ELIZABETH TRACEY REPORTS
What’s your enterotype? No, that’s not the latest twist on horoscopes, it’s a finding published in the august research magazine called Nature, showing that people have one of three different characterizable populations of bacteria in their guts, known as flora, and that these are established in the first few months of life. Gerald Mullins, a gastroenterologist at Johns Hopkins, says the clinical implications are vast.
MULLINS: There could be day when we could get a sense for how to help feed people and how to best treat people based on what we see in their flora from a functional point of view. I mean we just look at people’s flora and we say they have this pathogen or that pathogen, and we treat the pathogen and I guess what these doctors were speculating is that rather than giving antibiotics and eliminating bacteria broadly maybe we’ll be more selective here, in terms of building up certain species based on enterotypes. :28
So one day soon, you may know your enterotype. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.
