It seems like a focus on the internal human biome could be a Kuhnian paradigm shift -- but like everything else about health, it also presents ripe opportunities for quackery. Let's see some more real research on this before anyone starts trying to self-infect.
I believe there was an article about how one research study was wrong about the percentage of human mass being bacteria (I think the claim was 50% of our mass is bacteria). So, I expect Mercola and company to latch onto this craze soon enough if they haven't already.
Gah - that is a bad conclusion to draw from that study. There are some 39 trillion bacterial cells in a human body, and ~30 trillion 'human' cells in our body. EXCEPT that 25 of the 30 trillion human cells in our body don't even have any human DNA in them (red blood cells lack a nucleus, cannot divide, and do not contain human genetic information).
It's hard to count human cells, and non-human cells. Counting mass, nuclei, activity, etc. are all different.
The original hypothesis still stands - a truly significant portion of you is not human.
I've never heard it stated in terms of mass, I've always heard it in terms of a human body having many more bacterial than human cells. But that is being revisited (probably the research you mention):
And prokaryotic cells are much, much smaller than eurkaryotic cells. I think the mass of a eukaryotic cell is over 1000x the mass of a prokaryotic cell.
