Our gut – the wonderful world of the microbiome | documentary | ARTE

The gut flora is the totality of 100,000 billion microorganisms.

They colonise the gut and are of crucial importance for the health of the host organism. This documentary reveals how harmful antibiotics (“against life”) can be for our body.

The long-misjudged gut microbiota, also known as the microbiome, is gradually revealing its secrets and bringing about a scientific and medical revolution. The human digestive tract is home to around 100,000 billion microorganisms – ten times the number of all the body’s cells. The totality of bacteria, parasites and harmless fungi, commonly known as gut flora, weighs a good two kilos.

For a long time it was impossible to study the gut microbiota closely: almost none of the bacteria can be cultured in vitro, as light and air do not agree with them. Only now is the long-misjudged gut flora giving up its secrets – laying the foundation for a scientific and medical revolution.

The gut bacteria keep the host in good health. The key is symbiosis, that is, balance with the rest of the organism. Understanding how this works is now the subject of research by thousands of scientists worldwide.

Comparisons of the stool of sick and healthy test subjects showed that the gut flora of healthy people contains many more bacteria than that of sick people. Little by little, the scientists mapped out “star” bacteria whose absence from the gut flora is associated with diseases.

This finding could set a new course for medicine. But these bacteria are apparently threatened with extinction. For no sooner have they been discovered than it turns out that they are becoming ever fewer: almost one in four people in today’s Western world has deficient gut flora. Researchers blame modern living conditions, above all diet, hygiene, mode of delivery at birth, and the use of antibiotics or food additives. To rebuild intact gut flora, some scientists suggest a “microbiotic” diet, and for chronic bowel diseases a faecal transplant. Others are founding start-ups and culturing the most important gut bacteria to produce a new generation of probiotics from them.

Documentary by Sylvie Gilman and Thierry de Lestrade (France 2019, 59 min, German version)

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