This is a good book if you are at all interested in microbiome research, consider this book your first microbiome introduction read. It will not teach you anything a single research article can teach you in one single introduction, but if what you are after is getting a overall introduction on the science behind the microbiome we interact with, this is the book.

Asking better questions about our health starts with having a deeper knowledge of how we work. Ed Yong nails that exploration in this book. A readily accessible scientific journey into the microscopic inner worlds of our bodies. Simultaneously, it is a macro level look at how everything works by way of its tiniest building blocks. Ed Yong’s narrative style is the pull that keeps the pages turning. You can’t help but wonder how much more of your science classes you would have enjoyed had the texts been written so engagingly as this one. Beautiful anecdotal examples break down complex scientific principles for the Everyman. A careful build up interspersed with beautifully descriptive imagery, gives the book a novelistic tone that you won’t find in any AP Bio course. And what you learn is truly powerful. You will finish this book and end up with a whole new relationship with the food you intake, gut health, and your relationship to the complex yet invisible bacterial universe around you. A key takeaway for me was that I need to learn to reach for the opposite of whatever my default craving is.