Crowdsourcing help needed: how many microbes are brought into human GI tract via food? #microbiome

Quick but somewhat complex question here that came up at a recent meeting I went to – someone wanted to know:

How many microbes come into the human GI tract from outside sources (e.g., food)?

Other related questions:

  • How many cells /day?
  • How many are alive?
  • How many kinds come in?
  • How much flow through is there vs. digestion vs. colonization?

Note – I know there have been many studies of pathogens on food and how they get into the GI tract, but what about non pathogens?

Any references or #s would be very helpful.

Thanks

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This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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Author: Jonathan Eisen

I am an evolutionary biologist and a Professor at U. C. Davis. (see my lab site here). My research focuses on the origin of novelty (how new processes and functions originate). To study this I focus on sequencing and analyzing genomes of organisms, especially microbes and using phylogenomic analysis

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