THE HUMAN SUPERORGANISM

Award-winning researcher on the microbiome, professor Rodney Dietert presents a new paradigm in biology that explains the origin of the ongoing epidemic of non-communicable diseases—including asthma, Alzheimer’s, cancer, and obesity.

The microorganisms that we have sought to eliminate through modern medicine have been around for centuries supporting our ancestors. They comprise 90 percent of the cells in and on our bodies—a staggering percentage—and more than a thousand species of them live inside us, on our skin, and even on our eyelashes. Yet we have now significantly reduced their power and in doing so have sparked an epidemic of noncommunicable diseases—allergies, autism, Alzheimer’s, cancer, depression, obesity—which now account for 63 percent of all human deaths.

THE HUMAN SUPERORGANISM gives us a new paradigm for health: the microbiome, not the genome, is the key to unlocking the cures to these diseases and instead of ridding our bodies of microbes, we need to learn how to use them to our advantage. Rodney Dietert offers an empowering self-care guide and the blueprint for a revolution in public health, teaching us that each of us is a superorganism and the best path to a healthy life is through recognizing that profound truth.

Rodney Dietert, PhD is Professor of Immunotoxicology at Cornell University. Among his authored and edited academic books are Strategies for Protecting Your Child's Immune System and Immunotoxicity, Immune Dysfunction, and Chronic Disease. Dietert appeared in the 2014 award-winning documentary Microbirth (when you click this link, scroll to the bottom of the page to see the languages this has been subtitled in: German, Spanish, French, Greek, Croatian, Italian, Japanese, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese/Brazil, Slovenian, and the note that they will be adding more: Finnish, Estonian, etc.).gy Society for the Best Paper of Year on the microbiome.