Monday, 26 September 2016

Microbiological Connection to Our Food, Nutrition, Health, and Disease

With ever-increasing population, governments across the globe keep feeling the pressure of ensuring availability of food to their masses. Malnutrition has been plaguing a large part of the world population, particularly in the developing and under-developed world. Malnutrition also makes the victims more susceptible to different infections and physiological disorders.

Nutrition
There are large scale social, economic, and political implications of failure of governments in tackling the problem of malnutrition. This problem is related to both quantity as well as quality of the food.Microorganisms in the human gut are intimately associated with digestion and absorption of the food. The human gut microbiome has now been well demonstrated to have a strong connection to our health and disease.

There are approximately 1014 microbial cells inside human gut, which weigh approximately 1 kg. These organisms provide a large array of benefits to their human host, such as protection from the allocthonous pathogens, synthesis of vitamins (e.g. vitamin K), aiding the host in breakdown of complex polysaccharides, etc. The gut microbiome is also able to communicate with the brain

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