M e e t Your Microbiome Y ou might think you’re alone but you’re not Ever Wherever you go tiny hitchhikers tag along for the ride Some have been hanging around your body since before you were born and some are climbing aboard right now maybe even from the pages of this book But don’t panic Most of them are harmless The hitchhikers are actually microbes tiny living things so small that you need a microscope to see them And every person carries around trillions and trillions of these critters They are part of what scientists call your microbiome MY-croh-BY-ome A biome is a group of plants animals and other organisms living things that all live in a similar kind of place The tropical rainforest and the arctic tundra are examples of different biomes A microbiome is much the same except the organisms are microscopic and the place is a lot smaller too It might even be a living creature such as a dog a mouse or you 6
Where will you find your collection of microbes Everywhere They’re inside and outside of you in your nose and mouth in your lungs between your toes in your hair and eyelashes and snuggled in the warm hollow behind your ears And a huge number of microbes live in your gut Just as in the rainforest where some kinds of organisms live in the treetops and others down in the tree roots different kinds of microbes settle in the places that suit them best In some ways you might even be more microbe than you are human Scientists estimate that for every human cell in your body there’s at least one microbe cell and maybe as many as ten But those microbes aren’t alien invaders The truth is you need them and they need you Microbes and humans have been together for so long that we depend on each other to survive So in a way microbes are us 7 Did You Know It’s not really possible to count the microbes or the cells in a human body You can only take an educated guess Currently the best guesses place the number of microbes in the average adult human between 100 trillion and 200 trillion That’s a lot If you counted all day and all night every day it would take you more than 3000 years just to get to 100 trillion
