Thursday, 21 August 2014 – 8pm on ABC
In the second part of this two-part special, Catalyst asks – could our food be making us sick – very sick?
New research has linked the Western diet to asthma, autism, multiple sclerosis, diabetes, emphysema, cancer, and the list goes on. The reason a healthy diet could be even more important than previously thought is because food affects the bacteria deep inside our gut. Unbeknownst to most of us, we each carry about 1.5 kg of bacteria – that’s trillions of tiny microbes that contribute 100 times as many genes as our genomes do.
In the last ten years, a technological revolution means scientists are now beginning to discover just how crucial these microscopic creatures are to our overall health … and what they’re learning is shaking the very foundations of medicine and nutrition. Our food, it turns out, might be making us sick…. but the good news is, it could also be our medicine.
Reporter Dr Graham Phillips investigates whether what we feed these bacteria could be contributing to a whole litany of diseases.
