WORDS RISA MERL
While you are reading this, a team of strangers is inside your gut, working to produce vitamins and chemicals that your body wouldn’t otherwise make. It’s all part of the gut microbiome, an entire ecosystem – made up of bacteria, small amounts of fungi, viruses and singlecelled organisms called protozoa – that numbers up to 100 trillion microbial cells, averages 500 species of bacteria and can weigh up to 3kg.