Alanna Collen > Quotes

“If the nature-over-nurture idea that your personality is not your own hard-earned creation but a product of your genes makes you feel uneasy, how about the concept of a personality composed by the bacteria living in your gut? Mice without gut microbes are antisocial, preferring to spend time alone rather than with other mice. Whereas a mouse with a normal microbiota will choose to meet and greet any new mice added to its cage, germ-free mice stick with mice they already know. Simply having gut microbes seems to make them more friendly. Beyond friendship, it’s possible that your microbiota may even affect who you are attracted to.”
― Alanna Collen, 10% Human: How Your Body's Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness

“Rats infected by the Toxoplasma parasite lose their fears of open spaces and bright light. They become drawn to the scent of bobcat urine, effectively seeking out their main predator.”
― Alanna Collen, 10% Human: How Your Body's Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness

“the easiest way to find out what something does is to break it, and watch what happens.”
― Alanna Collen, 10% Human: How Your Body's Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness

“Each of us is a superorganism; a collective of species, living side-by-side and cooperatively running the body that sustains us all.”
― Alanna Collen, 10% Human: How Your Body's Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness

“Take a human body from 50,000 years ago and one from the 1950s, and they will look more similar to one another than either does to the average human body today.”
― Alanna Collen, 10% Human: How Your Body's Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness

“Around 75 per cent of the wet weight of faeces is bacteria; plant fibre makes up about 17 per cent.”
― Alanna Collen, 10% Human: How Your Body’s Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness

“There came a moment in my discovery of the microbes that inhabit the human body when I stopped seeing myself as an individual, and began to consider myself instead as a vessel for my microbiota. Now, I see us - myself and my microbes - as a team. But, as in any relationship, I will only get what I give. I am their provider and their protector, and in return they sustain and nourish me. I find myself thinking about my meal choices in terms of what my microbes would be grateful for, and my mental and physical health as markers of my worthiness as a host to them. They are my own personal colony, and their preservation is worth as much to me as the well-being of the cells of my own body.”
― Alanna Collen, 10% Human: How Your Body's Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness

“In the United States, the top three causes of death in 1900 were not heart disease, cancer and stroke, as they are today, but infectious diseases, caused by microbes passed between people. Between them, pneumonia, tuberculosis and infectious diarrhoea ended the lives of one-third of people.”
― Alanna Collen, 10% Human: How Your Body's Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness

“No matter that both colds and flu are the work of viruses, not bacteria, and antibiotics can’t touch them. Or that the majority of colds will burn themselves out in days or weeks, without risk to life or limb. As antibiotic resistance becomes an ever more serious problem, the pressure is on doctors to be judicious in their prescribing habits. There’s plenty of room for improvement. In the US in 1998, three-quarters of all the antibiotics doled out by primary care doctors were for five respiratory infections: ear infections, sinusitis, pharyngitis (sore throat), bronchitis and upper respiratory tract infections (URI). Of the 25 million people who went to their doctor about a URI, 30 per cent were prescribed antibiotics. Not so bad, you might think, until you realise that only 5 per cent of URIs are caused by bacteria. The same goes for sore throats; 14 million people were diagnosed with pharyngitis that year, and 62 per cent of them were given antibiotics. Only 10 per cent of them would have had bacterial infections. Overall, around 55 per cent of antibiotic prescriptions given out that year were unnecessary.”
― Alanna Collen, 10% Human: How Your Body's Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness

“They treated nine obese men with an infusion made up of stools collected from lean donors, and another nine obese men with an infusion of their own stools as a control. Remarkably, six weeks after their faecal transplants, the men who received the ‘lean’ microbiotas did indeed become more sensitive to insulin. Their cells were storing glucose nearly twice as quickly as they had been before, nearly matching the insulin sensitivity of the lean healthy donors. The obese men who had had their own stool put back into their colons stored glucose at exactly the same rate after the transplant as before – their insulin sensitivity remained as poor as it had ever been.”
― Alanna Collen, 10% Human: How Your Body's Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness

“Microbes, both viral and bacterial, are showing us that there’s more to obesity than eating too much and moving too little. The energy each of us extracts from our food, and the way in which that energy is used and stored, is intricately linked with the particular community of microbes we host. If we really want to get to the heart of the obesity epidemic, we need to look inward to the microbiota and ask what we are doing to alter the dynamic that they established with the human body in its leanest, healthiest form.”
― Alanna Collen, 10% Human: How Your Body's Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness

“At the heart of science is an essential balance between two seemingly contradictory attitudes – an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive they may be, and the most ruthless sceptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new. This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep nonsense.”
― Alanna Collen, 10% Human: How Your Body's Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness

“I used a citizen-science programme, the American Gut Project, based at the laboratory of Professor Rob Knight at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Available to anyone around the world for a donation, the AGP sequences samples of microbes from the human body to learn more about the species we harbour and their impact on our health. By sending a stool sample containing the microbes from my own gut, I received a snapshot of the ecosystem that called my body home.”
― Alanna Collen, 10% Human: How Your Body's Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness

“If your microbes are working on your behalf to extract energy from your food, it is your particular community of microbes that determines how many calories you get from what you eat, not a standard conversion table.”
― Alanna Collen, 10% Human: How Your Body's Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness

“As adults, the responsibility of caring for all the cells in our bodies, both human and microbial, falls to us. As mothers, women pass on not only their own genes, but the genes of hundreds of bacteria. The genetic lottery of life has an element of chance, but also one of choice. The more insight we gather into the importance and the consequences of a natural birth, and extended, exclusive breast-feeding, the more empowered we will be to give both ourselves and our children the best chance of lives of health and happiness.”
― Alanna Collen, 10% Human: How Your Body's Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness

“Perhaps because of its special place in our sense of self and free will, the brain did not receive the scrutiny of microbiologists again until the final years of the twentieth century. At this point, many microbes were soon linked to mental illness, but it is the Toxoplasma parasite that has proved to be the most compelling suspect for many conditions. Occasionally, when people are first infected with the parasite they develop psychiatric symptoms, such as hallucinations and delusions, that lead to an initial misdiagnosis of schizophrenia. In fact, amongst those with schizophrenia, the presence of Toxoplasma is three times more common than in the general population – a far more telling association than any genetic connections so far revealed. Intriguingly, schizophrenics are not the only mental health patients in whom Toxoplasma infection is rife. It has also been found to be involved in obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD), attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and Tourette’s syndrome, all of which have become increasingly common over the past several decades.”
― Alanna Collen, 10% Human: How Your Body's Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness

“waft”
― Alanna Collen, 10% Human: How Your Body's Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness

“When any other organ breaks down, we look for external causes, but when the brain – the mind! – misbehaves, we assume it’s the fault of the individual, their parents or their lifestyle.”
― Alanna Collen, 10% Human: How Your Body's Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness

“When they stressed the mice by placing them in a tube, both groups produced stress hormones, but in the germ-free mice the hormone concentrations were twice as high. Without their microbiota, the mice had found the situation much more stressful.”
― Alanna Collen, 10% Human: How Your Body's Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness

“And, most extraordinarily, could conditions that were apparently far removed from microbial epicentres, such as allergies, autoimmune diseases and even mental health conditions, be brought on by a damaged microbiota?”
― Alanna Collen, 10% Human: How Your Body’s Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness

“The American food writer Michael Pollan famously said that we should ‘eat food, not too much, mostly plants’. Though he wrote it before the revolution in our understanding of the microbiota, we now know it to be truer than ever before.”
― Alanna Collen, 10% Human: How Your Body's Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness

“Predictably enough, not all of this drug-taking is strictly necessary. America’s public health institute – the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – estimates that half of the antibiotics prescribed in the US are unnecessary or inappropriate. Many of these prescriptions are for people suffering from colds and flu, desperate for a cure, and granted by doctors too weary to deny them a placatory offering. No matter that both colds and flu are the work of viruses, not bacteria, and antibiotics can’t touch them. Or that the majority of colds will burn themselves out in days or weeks, without risk to life or limb.”
― Alanna Collen, 10% Human: How Your Body's Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness

“eat food, not too much, mostly plants’.”
― Alanna Collen, 10% Human: How Your Body's Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness

“It’s clear that in the developed world, we take vast quantities of antibiotics, and most of them are unnecessary. The contrast”
― Alanna Collen, 10% Human: How Your Body's Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness

“Given the futility of talking the kidneys out of failing, or the heart out of stopping, it’s amazing to think of the effort that has gone into curing the brain of its ailments primarily through discussion.”
― Alanna Collen, 10% Human: How Your Body's Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness

“Because faeces are not drugs, and all you need is a kitchen blender, some saline and a sieve, with a little help from YouTube videos, anyone can administer their own faecal transplant, and many thousands do. Among those giving it a go, not surprisingly, are the parents of autistic children. Dr Borody himself has seen improvements in autistic children following both faecal transplants and after repeatedly delivering faecal microbes via a flavoured drink. His intention was to relieve the gastrointestinal symptoms, not the psychiatric ones, but Borody says several of the children improved following their treatment. The most encouraging was a young child with a vocabulary of just over twenty words, which shot up to around 800 in the weeks after the microbial therapy. For now, all this is anecdotal. As yet not a single clinical trial has been carried out to test the effects of faecal transplant on autistic patients, though some are planned. The lack of evidence won’t stop the parents though – for many, anything is worth a try.”
― Alanna Collen, 10% Human: How Your Body's Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness

“It is not only microbes that are benefiting from sharing our bodies, but us too. Our relationship with them is not just one of tolerance, but encouragement. This realisation, combined with the technical power of DNA sequencing and germ-free mouse studies, began a revolution in science. The Human Microbiome Project, run by the United States’ National Institutes for Health, alongside many other studies in laboratories around the world, has revealed that we utterly depend on our microbes for health and happiness.”
― Alanna Collen, 10% Human: How Your Body’s Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness

“Our twenty-first-century lives are a kind of sterile ceasefire, with infections held at bay through vaccinations, antibiotics, water sanitation and hygienic medical practice.”
― Alanna Collen, 10% Human: How Your Body's Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness

“Study after study has shown that obesity is associated with low fibre intake”
― Alanna Collen, 10% Human: How Your Body's Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness

“In fact, gastrointestinal symptoms are surprisingly common in people with mental health and neurological conditions, though they are usually seen as unimportant compared with the altered behaviour.”
― Alanna Collen, 10% Human: How Your Body's Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness