Maybe it’s just me, but when I hear a story like this I just can’t help but get excited. After all, I’ve been telling folks for years how important a healthy gut is, and this is just one more reason to keep your insides in good shape!

Thanks to science and those high-powered microscopes, we’ve known for a while now that the number of microorganisms in the human gut outnumbers the total number of cells in the body by twenty times. (That’s twenty times 100 trillion, by the way…whoa!)

But what’s even more fascinating is that scientists have recently discovered that the genes of those microbes also outnumber the genes in our own bodies—and that the impact those microbial genes have on our health is more than the impact of our own DNA. Translation: your gut is in control. 

Exactly how this all works is still being studied, and little by little researchers are starting to put the pieces together. But the bottom line? Gut function truly plays a vital role in human health, and our microbial balance is at the center of it all. If that’s not a good reason to make gut health a top priority, I don’t know what is!