“You are more microbes than human.”
It is possible you have had this factoid thrown at you, with the thrower claiming that the microbes in our bodies outnumber our own cells 10 to one.
But according to an assessment published in Nature Microbiology, this is a myth. In a 2016 study the assessment’s authors cited, researchers from Israel and Canada estimated a 70 kg “reference man” to have 38 trillion bacterial cells and 30 trillion human cells. Most current estimates of the size of the gut microbiome are also based on adults living in the urban areas of high-income countries, they added.
