microbiome

An Ode to Yogurt

Joe Schwarcz PhD — Wed, 18 Jun 2025 20:55:34 +0000

Many years ago, when I first started teaching about the chemistry of food, yogurt was only granted a few minutes of lecture time. It appeared as one of the first processed foods, albeit accidentally processed, dating back some 7000 years to when bacteria happened to drift into a pot of milk in Mesopotamia, thickening it and giving it a tart taste. I explained that the bacteria were likely of the Lactobacillus genus that produce lactate dehydrogenase, an enzyme that converts the milk sugar lactose into lactic acid.

Gut Worms for Immunity

Jonathan Jarry M.Sc. — Fri, 11 Apr 2025 14:59:41 +0000

I used to have hay fever but it was never bad enough that I resorted to ingesting worms.

There Are More Bacterial Cells in Your Body Than You Think

Joe Schwarcz PhD — Fri, 21 Mar 2025 18:20:56 +0000

This article was first published in The Montreal Gazette

Why the U.S. Assault on Science Is Making Me 'Sick to My Stomach'

Joe Schwarcz PhD — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 19:59:02 +0000

This article was first published in The Montreal Gazette.

“It makes me sick to my stomach.”

That’s the line I blurted out when asked by a reporter about the U.S. government’s assault on science. I hadn’t thought about the expression, it just came out automatically. Why? I hadn’t actually been sick to my stomach. Surely, I thought, there must be some foundation for this common utterance that links the mind and the gut. That needed delving into.

The Blood Microbiome Is Probably Not Real

Jonathan Jarry M.Sc. — Fri, 28 Jun 2024 01:14:28 +0000

Up until recently, if bacteria were detected in your blood you would be in a world of trouble. Blood was long considered to be sterile, meaning free of viable microorganisms like bacteria. When disease-causing bacteria spread to the blood, they can cause a life-threatening septic shock.

But the use of DNA sequencing technology has allowed researchers to more easily detect something that had been reported as early as the late 1960s: bacteria can be found in the blood and not cause disease.

Your Appendix May Not Be Useless After All

Jonathan Jarry M.Sc. — Fri, 21 Jun 2024 18:17:49 +0000

What does the appendix even do? When we think about this little finger-shaped pouch hanging off of our digestive tract, it’s often as a ticking time bomb.

The Microbiome and Its Myth-Making Machine

Jonathan Jarry M.Sc. — Fri, 11 Aug 2023 06:37:32 +0000

As promising new discoveries are made in the health sciences, the telephone game begins. Scientists put their best foot forward when presenting their results. The public relations department at their institute further digests their findings and adds a dash of hype. Journalists amplify and simplify, social media influencers garble the message, and start-ups capitalize on the hype to sell unproven health solutions. Before you know it, you’re grabbing a cup of coffee while your colleague tells you that they heard cancer was caused by bad bacteria in your gut.

The Dark Matter Inside Your Gut

Jonathan Jarry M.Sc. — Fri, 21 May 2021 19:41:42 +0000

There is a kind of dark matter inside our intestinal tract. “Dark matter” is the phrase coined for the matter that is implied to be present in the universe based on physicists’ calculations but that cannot be seen yet. Scientists who study tiny living things are facing their own type of dark matter: invisible microbes that are indirectly detected. They call it “microbial dark matter.”

Do household cleaners trigger child obesity?

Christopher Labos MD, MSc — Thu, 20 Sep 2018 16:39:31 +0000

You may have seen the headlines from a new study published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal. The study suggested that household cleaners could be contributing to obesity by disrupting the gut bacteria that make up your microbiome.

In reality though, the paper didn’t quite make that claim. What the study actually did was send questionnaires to new mothers and then measured the bacteria in their baby’s stool when they were 3 months of age. They then checked in to see if their babies were overweight or obese at 3 years of age.

Are babies born by C-section more at risk than those born vaginally?

Emily Shore, B.A — Tue, 21 Feb 2017 04:37:40 +0000

Babies who are delivered by C-section don’t go through the birth canal, and as a result they don’t get the beneficial microbes that babies born via the birth canal receive. This might help explain why C-section babies are at a higher risk for a variety of diseases. A recent study suggests, however, that this can be mitigated by slathering babies just after birth with a gauze pad that soaked up the microbes in the mothers’ birth canal right before birth. Why? Because it helps restore and normalize the baby’s microbiome.