10% Human: How Your Body's Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness

By: Alanna Collen

Narrated by: Robyn Addison

Length: 10 hrs and 43 mins

Publisher's summary

In this groundbreaking book, Alanna Collen explores the extraordinary world of the powerful microbes that make up 90 percent of the human body.

You are just 10 percent human. For every one of the cells that make your body, there are nine impostor cells. You are not just flesh and blood, muscle and bone, brain and skin, but bacteria and fungi. You are not an individual but a colony of microbes. Far from being passive, the trillions of microbes that live on and in you are intimately involved in running your body. Even aspects that you think of entirely as ‘you' turn out to be run by ‘them' - like your immune system.

In this riveting, shocking, and beautifully written book, Alanna Collen explores the modern epidemics of ‘Western' diseases - obesity, autism, mental health problems, gut disorders, allergies, autoimmunity, and even cancer - and argues that most have their roots in our failure to cherish our most fundamental and enduring relationship: that with our personal colony of microbes. Antibiotics, antibacterial cleaners, rapidly changing diets, and our obsession with hygiene alter the microbe community we carry. Unlike our human cells, though, we can change our microbes for the better.

10% Human provides a revelatory guide to the role of your body's microbes in health and happiness. This is popular science at its most relevant: life - and your body - will never seem the same again.

©2015 Alanna Collen (P)2015 HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

Outstanding and worthy of the highest praise !!

I've read dozens of very fine books regarding health and how our food choices affect us, but this book ranks at the very top in terms of the extraordinary depth it offers and the absolutely wonderful performance by the narrator. As I was reading it, I was unable to keep from telling all my closest friends that they should procure a copy, in particular those friends with young children or health issues such a IBS.
This book deserves a wide audience and hopefully it will get the recognition it deserves to make that happen autonomously.
Compliments to the author for her fine work.

thought provoking

I surely will give a go at the informed choices regarding diet, medication and lifestyle this book suggests.

To a hammer everything looks like a nail

Would you say that listening to this book was time well-spent? Why or why not?

The writer is obsessed with the microbes in the human gut, which are apparently responsible for everything from autism to acne. Gets a little wearying at times.

Were the concepts of this book easy to follow, or were they too technical?

Concepts well described if occasionally a little twee (or maybe that was just the reader - see below).

How did the narrator detract from the book?

100%. Amongst the many mispronunciations, she seems to believe that the word 'aitch' starts with the letter 'h', The accent grates from go to woe.

Do you think 10% Human: How Your Body's Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness needs a follow-up book? Why or why not?

Maybe needs a book by someone who can provide counter-arguments.

Any additional comments?

Probably better read than listened to.