The Invisible Organ – Meet My Microbiota
If you asked him twenty-five years ago, just after university what the most underrated organ in the human body was, he would’ve said the fascia. The brain. No! Definitely the liver. Now? It’s not even close. It’s the microbiota – the dense, teeming ecosystem of microbes that lives mostly in the large intestine, functioning like a virtual organ. One that weighs more than the brain, metabolizes more than the liver, and talks constantly to every cell in the body. Constantly.
He first learned about it as a physician treating patients who didn’t respond to anything else. The tired, the inflamed, the chronically unwell. Some had IBS, others had SIBO that never really existed, some had no diagnosis at all. But many of them shared one thing: a gut out of balance. And when he helped them restore that balance - through diet, lifestyle, and sometimes fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) – when it worked, they got better.
But for years, he treated the microbiota like a tool for others. Not a lens for himself. Not a mirror.
Until now.
Under the microscope, the gut isn’t a passive tube. It’s a jungle. Trillions of bacteria, archaea, fungi, and even viruses that not only digest food, but train the immune system, regulate hormones, produce neurotransmitters, and manufacture short-chain fatty acids that shape how cells talk. Some microbes can even turn on or off genes in your mitochondria. They don’t just influence health. They orchestrate it.
And yet, modern life is hell for microbes. Processed food. Chronic stress. Alcohol. Antibiotics. Sleep deprivation. Night shifts. Dehydration. Everything he followed in the Food and Complaint Diary. All of them disrupt the delicate balance between beneficial species like Akkermansia, Bifidobacterium, Faecalibacterium—and inflammatory species that thrive in chaos.
He knew this academically. But at 49, he felt it viscerally. He wasn’t sick – but something was slipping. The metabolic edge. The mental clarity. The ability to go forever. The calm resilience he used to carry into runs. Could it be that his own microbiota, after decades of heroic effort, was now mismatched to his goals?
He decided it was time. He decided it was time. Not just to listen to the science—but to let it transform him. And to write a Microbiota Manipulation Handbook that contains all that he found and everything that worked.
Next week: “Would You Swallow That to Live Longer?” – Inside his athlete-to-athlete FMT experiment.