The gut microbiome in the industrialized world may be adapted to current lifestyles or deteriorating due to factors like antibiotic use and Western diets, potentially predisposing individuals to inflammatory and metabolic diseases.

“But another possibility is that this is a microbiome that's gone off the rails that it is um you know deteriorating in the face of antibiotic use and um uh all the um problems associated with a um industrialized diet, western diet um and that even though the human microbiome um project documented the microbiome of healthy people, healthy Americans, that what they really may have been documenting there is a perturb herbed microbiota that's uh really predisposing people to a variety of inflammatory and metabolic diseases.”