A really engaging overview of our little microbial friends; what they do for us and, importantly, what we need to do for them. Much as some microbes do cause illness and death, we cannot live healthy lives without an extraordinarily diverse and changing personal biosphere of microbial companions which we influence and which influence us. Biography: Dr James Kinross is a senior lecturer in colorectal surgery and consultant surgeon at Imperial College London and a visiting professor at the Royal College of Surgeons of Ireland. He first talks about how men suffer from certain diseases at much higher rates than women, but then goes on to tell the reader about how women are the real victims, because of "socioeconomic and gender-based social inequalities. The gut microbiome plays a significant role in the health of young children, and Kinross provides actionable insights on what can be done to ensure better health for our children in the future.

Highly recommend this to anyone fascinated with the human body, gut health or generally wants to read about something fascinating. In this ground-breaking book, surgeon and expert on the microbiome, James Kinross, takes us on a guided tour of our extraordinary inner universe, showing how our relationship with microbes may hold the key to why we are increasingly succumbing to diseases and conditions such as cancer, Alzheimer's, autoimmune conditions and allergies. He highlights how hyperglobalization and our addiction to antibiotics has transformed our internal ecosystems and why this matters so much to our future health and happiness. In the developing world, millions of women still don’t have access to basic health services and modern contraceptives.This book is my way of sharing my own journey to these conclusions, and my hope is that this will start a conversation about how we can provide a different type of medicine.

In just one day, the gut will have to deal with more antigens than the rest of the immune system will deal with in an entire lifetime. Twenty-first-century living is causing our airways to close, our skin to flake, our joints to swell, our guts to bleed, our arteries to clot and our brains to seize up. A large proportion of our immune system is located within the gut because it has to process a huge number of environmental antigens.

As I lay debilitated and miserable in hospital, I told myself the surgeon hadn’t removed anything vital, just a functionless relic. And an antibiotic drip was cleansing me of my foes, bacteria – after all, they had inflamed my appendix.