I’ve got a GUT feeling we know each other somehow!
This is Sandra Tsing Loh with the Loh Down on Science.
What can your digestive gut microbiome say about your social life?
Francesco Beghini and team from Yale studied nearly two thousand people across villages in Honduras. In these eighteen villages, face-to-face communication and traditional diets dominate.
They evaluated villagers’ social networks AND their microbiomes, totaling over two thousand bacterial species. People who lived together shared about fourteen percent of their gut bacteria! Microbiome sharing even extends to ‘friends of friends’.
This bacterial ‘swapping’ may occur when people are close together. Shared meals are also a likely matchmaker.
Five percent shared gut bacteria? That’s a second degree LinkedIn connection – let’s do lunch!
Reference: Beghini, F., Pullman, J., Alexander, M., Shridhar, S. V., Prinster, D., Singh, A., Matute Juárez, R., Airoldi, E. M., Brito, I. L., & Christakis, N. A. (2025). Gut microbiome strain-sharing within isolated village social networks. Nature, 637(8044), 167–175. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-08222-1