As we fill our shopping carts and pantries with the latest neatly boxed and wrapped goodies of industry, we continue down a path that began some ten thousand years ago with the emergence of agriculture - an event that would eventually, along with steel roller mills in the 1880s, farm subsidies in the 1970s and an explosion of highly processed and packaged foods, lead to one of the greatest unintended consequences in human history: The shift in how and where the human body captures much-needed energy (calories) to power our demanding bodies and modern lifestyle. This "little" book is about...

To paraphrase famed biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky, "nothing in nutrition and health makes sense except in the light of the gut microbiome." In Honor Thy Symbionts, the lens of our evolutionary past is focused on modern issues of obesity, GMO foods, diabetes, the rise in C-section births, ecology of our gut microbes, our African microbial origins, government dietary recommendations, probiotics vs. prebiotics, food poisoning, and more. This collection of 21 short essays is not organized as a single book - with a beginning and obvious end. But a collection of musings ranging from 600 to 2,000...