Body
You can’t see them, but they’ve got you surrounded. On you, in you, from the jungle of your mouth to the metropolis of your gut, trillions of microbes call your body their home. The body’s microbes are essential to human health.
43% Human
We are more microbial than human. ​​Turns out, only about 43% of our body is composed of human cells. The rest are microbes—roughly 39 trillion taking up residence in the mouth, armpit, and essentially every nook and cranny of the body. These microbes are incredibly diverse: your hand microbes can be as different from your gut microbes as animals in a coral reef are to animals in a prairie.
A Gut Metropolis
Your gut is a bustling metropolis, teeming with a dense population of microorganisms. These microbes are essential for body processes like digestion, vitamin production, and immune function. Like any other ecosystem, a healthy gut thrives on diversity and balance. In fact, an imbalanced population of gut microbes can correlate with autoimmune diseases and obesity. Is this imbalance a cause or consequence of health conditions? It's hard to say; the human body is an ecosystem in and of itself, and scientists are still mapping the complex interactions of the thousands of species that live within you.
