For generations, one might say, we carpet-bombed the mouth with antiseptic mouthwash, marketed sterility as hygiene, and constructed entire health systems around the assumption that the oral cavity was a plumbing problem, disconnected from the rest of the body. The science is now telling a story so different that it borders on the embarrassing. These microbial communities regulate acidity, protect enamel, and perform a function that is only recently being understood at the mechanistic level: they convert dietary nitrate into nitric oxide, the molecule that controls blood vessel tone and blood pressure. A 2025 study from the University of Exeter, published in Free Radical Biology and Medicine, demonstrated this directly. When older adults drank nitrate-rich beetroot juice twice daily for two weeks, their oral microbiome shifted: harmful Prevotella declined, beneficial Neisseria increased, and blood pressure fell. The mechanism ran through the mouth. Destroy those bacterial communities with aggressive mouthwash and one interrupts the nitrate-nitric oxide pathway. Blood pressure rises. Periodontal dysbiosis has also been associated, in observational studies, with cardiovascular events and diabetes complications. A growing body of research is investigating possible links to neurodegenerative conditions, though causal pathways remain to be established. The mouth was never a silo. It was a sentinel. We treated it like the extremity of a tube.

And within the mouth, there is a surface that strikes me as the most overlooked diagnostic site in the human body: the tongue. Its dorsum hosts dense, structured bacterial communities organised in complex biofilms, and these communities are not passive. They are a primary site for the nitrate-nitrite-nitric oxide pathway that the Exeter study exploited. A 2026 study published in npj Biofilms and Microbiomes classified tongue microbiota from 729 individuals into three distinct orotypes, each associated with different metabolic and oral health outcomes, with temporal stability observed over six years. Separately, research has linked tongue microbiome alterations to conditions ranging from rheumatoid arthritis to gastrointestinal cancers to pneumonia in the elderly. The tongue, in other words, is a readable, persistent, individually variable biological surface that may one day function as a non-invasive diagnostic interface. And we are still telling patients to scrape it and move on.

This is changing, and faster than most clinicians appear to realise. Saliva carries over three thousand identified proteins, microbial signatures, metabolites, and immune markers. It is, if one thinks about it clearly, a liquid biopsy produced continuously without a needle. Researchers are training AI to read it: models that detect early signals of diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and kidney failure from salivary patterns alone. A team in China built an AI periodontitis screening tool with ninety-four percent accuracy on panoramic X-rays, designed not for private clinics but for underserved community health centres. The oral microbiome is becoming readable, actionable, predictive. And almost nobody in mainstream healthcare is paying attention.

At-home oral microbiome test kits already exist. One can order them today. A growing number of startups ship saliva collection devices to your door, sequence your oral bacteria, and return reports identifying the specific pathogenic species driving your cavities, your gum inflammation, your chronic bad breath. They map the ratio of beneficial to harmful organisms. They recommend targeted probiotics and dietary changes based on your actual microbial profile. Your dentist, in all likelihood, has never heard of any of them.

One must be fair. This is early. Different labs use different sequencing methods. The same saliva sample can produce meaningfully different results depending on who analyses it. Reference databases are incomplete. Standardisation is thin. The clinical evidence linking specific microbial profiles to specific interventions is growing but far from settled. This is a first generation, not a finished product. But the trajectory, I think, is obvious. As AI learns to read microbial patterns at scale, as sequencing costs continue to fall, as the science of the oral ecosystem catches up with the technology built to measure it, the precision will follow. It always does.

And the oral microbiome is not arriving alone. Biosensor patches are being developed that sit on the gum and track pH, inflammatory markers, and microbial shifts in real time. Smart toothbrushes embedded with high-definition oral scanners are entering the market, with imaging analysed by AI and reviewed by remote professionals. Hydroxyapatite toothpaste, which remineralises enamel without destroying the microbiome, has been standard in Japan since 1993, born from a NASA patent for astronaut bone loss, with over 160 million tubes sold across Asia and still virtually unknown in the West. In Japan, Dr Katsu Takahashi has begun human trials for a tooth regrowth drug, a peptide that reactivates dormant stem cells in the jawbone. At King’s College London, researchers grew early tooth-like structures in a laboratory in 2025. The liquid biopsy, the smart brush, the microbiome-compatible chemistry, the regenerative biology: these are not isolated innovations. They are converging.

Which brings us to the question that, to my mind, actually matters. What happens to the dentist? Not in the abstract. Concretely. What does the profession look like in 2035 when the mouth has become a data stream, when patients arrive already knowing their microbial profile, when AI has pre-screened their imaging before the appointment begins?

I see three scenarios. 

The first is inertia. One does nothing. Dental systems continue on a model designed decades ago: episodic, reactive, centred on repair. The microbiome stays a curiosity. The tools stay consumer gadgets. Western dental workforces keep shrinking under chronic shortages while chronic oral dysbiosis silently accelerates cardiovascular disease and cognitive decline in ageing populations. Nobody connects the dots because the microbiome was never woven into the care pathway. This is the default. It requires no decision. That is precisely what makes it dangerous.

The second is augmentation. Data-driven tools are layered onto the existing model. The dentist remains central but evolves into a clinician who interprets biological data, manages microbial ecosystems, and coordinates with primary care. AI pre-analyses scans. Microbiome reads inform treatment plans. Saliva-based screening flags systemic risk alongside periodontal risk. The chair stays, but what happens in it changes fundamentally. This is the pragmatic path and probably the necessary first step.

The third scenario is harder to picture but worth taking seriously. In this version, the bathroom becomes the first diagnostic room in the house. Continuous monitoring replaces periodic visits. Toothpaste is prescribed by algorithm, matched to the current state of the ecosystem. Quarterly saliva samples, analysed by AI, screen for systemic risk months before conventional symptoms appear. The dental surgery as a standalone institution dissolves into a broader oral health node integrated into primary care. The clinician still exists, but the centre of gravity shifts from the chair to the patient’s daily routine, from repair to cultivation, from the clinic to the home. Whether this is realistic in five years, fifteen, or fifty is genuinely open. But to dismiss it entirely is to ignore where every converging technology is pointing.

Whichever scenario unfolds, one principle holds. The oral microbiome is not a dental concern. It is a medical frontier. And it demands action now, not when the science is perfect, but while the systems that will deliver it can still be shaped. One must integrate microbiome screening into primary care. Subsidise microbiome-aware tools for the populations locked out of private care: saliva tests, smart brushes, AI triage deployed in pharmacies and schools. Shift the cultural narrative from sterilisation to cultivation. A healthy mouth is not a germ-free mouth. It is a balanced one. And redesign dental training now, because whichever future arrives, the clinicians who inhabit it will need fluency in microbiology, data science, and regenerative medicine, not just restorative technique.

Seven hundred species are broadcasting. They carry data about your heart, your metabolism, your brain. The tools to listen are arriving. The profession that should be listening the hardest is, so far, the quietest in the room. If dentistry does not claim this frontier, medicine will. And dentistry will have no one to blame but itself.

Et voilà.

What I want to propose here is not a refinement of this model but a replacement. Food is not fuel. Food is code. It is executable biological information: molecular instructions that interact with microbial communities, modulate immune responses, alter gene expression, and reshape metabolic pathways over time. When we eat, we are not adding energy to a furnace. We are running a programme. And like any programme, the outcome depends entirely on the operating system that interprets it.

That operating system is your microbiome.

This, I believe, is the piece most people are still missing. The oral and gut microbiomes are not supporting players in the drama of digestion. They are the operating system itself. It is in the mouth where the code first makes contact with its interpreter: the oral microbiome initiates carbohydrate breakdown, modulates the nitric oxide pathways that regulate blood pressure, and seeds the microbial populations further downstream. The gut microbiome then executes the deeper programme, metabolising what you have eaten into short-chain fatty acids, neurotransmitters, inflammatory mediators, and signalling molecules that reach your immune system, your brain, your endocrine pathways. Together, these communities do not assist digestion. They govern it. Two people eat the same banana. One spikes past 180 mg/dL. The other barely registers. Same input, radically different output. The Weizmann Institute demonstrated this in 2015 across 800 participants, and the microbiome was among the strongest predictive variables. The food did not change. The operating system did.

Once we accept this framing, everything about how we approach nutrition must change. If the microbiome is the OS, then food is the code that runs upon it. And code, unlike fuel, can be designed. It can be versioned, adapted, made conditional. One does not write the same programme for every machine, and one certainly does not write it once and expect it to remain valid as the machine changes. Yet that is precisely what a diet plan is: a static programme deployed on a system that updates itself daily.

And so we must ask the uncomfortable question. If food is code, then, what is junk food? It is not simply “unhealthy.” It is corrupted code. Ultra-processed food is engineered with extraordinary precision, but not to communicate with your biology. It is engineered to override it. The exact ratios of sugar, salt, and fat are calibrated to bypass satiety signalling, to trigger dopaminergic reward loops, to keep you eating past the point where your body asked you to stop. It degrades the operating system itself: we now have robust evidence that ultra-processed diets reduce microbial diversity, weaken gut barrier function, and promote chronic low-grade inflammation. In the language of software, this is not a bad programme. It is a programme that corrupts the OS on which it runs. And we are feeding it to entire populations, beginning in childhood.

To be fair to the field, it has not been entirely standing still. Personalised nutrition has made genuine progress. Nutrigenomics has demonstrated that genetic variation affects how individuals metabolise specific nutrients: polymorphisms in MTHFR alter folate metabolism, variants in FTO influence appetite regulation, CYP1A2 determines whether one is a fast or slow caffeine metaboliser. This is real science, and it matters. Companies working in this space have moved well beyond simple questionnaires, combining genetic data with blood biomarkers, dietary logging, and sometimes wearable data to construct meaningfully differentiated nutritional profiles. That represents a legitimate advance over the one-size-fits-all guidelines of the last century.

But here is the limitation, and it is a structural one. Nutrigenomics tells you about your hardware. It tells you what your genome predisposes you to, how your enzymes are wired, where your metabolic architecture has features worth knowing about. What it does not tell you is what your operating system is doing right now. Your genome does not change from week to week. Your microbiome does. It shifts with your diet, your sleep, your stress, your medication, your environment, your age. A nutrigenomic profile gives you a fixed map of a system that is, in reality, constantly in motion. It is necessary. It is not sufficient. To truly personalise nutrition, one needs both: the hardware specification and a live reading of the OS.

It is this convergence that makes contextual nutrition possible, and I want to be precise about what this term means, because it represents a step beyond what even the best current personalised nutrition can offer. Contextual nutrition treats your food strategy as a live query against your full biological state: your genome, yes, but also your microbial composition this week, your inflammatory load, your sleep debt, your hormonal phase, the antibiotic course you finished last month that quietly restructured your OS. The tools to support this are arriving with remarkable speed. Continuous blood glucose monitors provide real-time metabolic feedback. Wearable biosensors are beginning to capture immune markers. Microbiome sequencing is maturing from taxonomy toward functional metabolomics. Together, these form something without precedent: a live debugger for the biological programmes we run three times a day.

Where should this land first? In the consumer market? In the hospital? And here I wish to be direct, because someone should be. It is, to my mind, amazing that modern medicine can perform targeted gene therapy and robotic surgery, and then feed the recovering patient a tray of corrupted code selected by a catering contract awarded on price. If food is code, hospital food is legacy software: nobody wrote it with intent, nobody maintains it, and nobody measures what it does. Meanwhile, the clinical evidence is already substantial. Specific amino acid profiles modulate tumour metabolism. Short-chain fatty acids from microbial fermentation support gut-barrier integrity during chemotherapy. Timed protein intake accelerates post-surgical tissue repair. The code exists. It is simply not being deployed.

Within a decade, the best clinical institutions will prescribe food matched to biomarkers, microbial status, inflammatory trajectory, and recovery phase. The same logic extends to every institution that feeds people at scale: schools, care homes, workplace canteens. In Europe, roughly a third of meals are consumed in institutional settings. These are environments in which one could reprogramme population-level metabolic health without requiring anyone to change their personal behaviour. But only if one treats institutional food as executable code designed for biological outcomes, not as a line item in a procurement budget.

The food-as-code framing also rewrites, in ways not yet fully appreciated, the relationship between agriculture and health. Soil has a microbiome. Plants have a microbiome. Your gut has a microbiome. This is one stack, not three separate systems. The microbial diversity of the soil determines the phytochemical profile of the crop, which determines the biological instructions that food carries into the human OS. Montgomery and colleagues showed in PeerJ in 2022 that crops from regenerative farms carried measurably higher concentrations of anti-inflammatory phytochemicals, vitamins, and minerals compared to the same crops grown conventionally on neighbouring land. Regenerative agriculture is not a feel-good narrative about farming. It is, quite literally, an upgrade to the source code.

Regulation, it must be said, is completely unprepared. Current food law asks whether a product is safe and whether the label is honest. These are fine questions. They are also wholly insufficient. When a company engineers a prebiotic blend that demonstrably shifts microbiome composition toward reduced systemic inflammation, that product is neither a drug nor a conventional food. It is a biological programme. And we have, at present, no regulatory category for biological programmes. By 2030, we will either build frameworks capable of evaluating food as functional code, or we will have a grey market of unsubstantiated “gut health” claims with no meaningful oversight. I know which outcome the industry’s lobbying budgets favour.

I wish to finish with an observation that should be uncomfortable. The industrial food system already writes code for your body. It has been doing so for decades. It simply optimises for the wrong outputs: shelf life, margin, and the dopamine hit that ensures you buy again tomorrow. That is code too. It is “hostile” code. The question has never been whether food will be treated as a programme. It already is. The question is who writes it, what it optimises for, and whether anyone is paying attention to the operating system on which it runs.

Et voilà. Nous pensions parler de nourriture.

It certainly does feel strange when you think about it, when you consider that microbes are literally everywhere and shape the health of plants, decide the fertility of the land, build our immune systems and even influence our moods. Yet, they have no official seat at the table. No real political voice or a dedicated representative.

In recent years, we started to hear a lot more about “the microbiome.” First it was only gut health, with yogurt commercials talking about “good bacteria” and probiotics. Then came the explosion of microbiome science: gut-brain axis, soil microbiome, ocean microbiome, built environment microbiome. We also discovered that microbes are not just passive passengers; they are active architects of our lives and have been for a very long time.

At the same time, we continue to destroy them at a record speed. Over-tillage, pesticides, antibiotics, chlorine in water, ultra-processed food. Basically everything in our modern life is designed to sterilise, simplify and reduce microbial diversity. We praise “cleanliness” without asking: clean of what and for who?

The Paris Agreement in 2015 was a big step albeit symbolic. The focus is mostly on carbon and it set targets for CO₂, for methane, and plastic recycling. All very important, yes. But what about targets for microbial diversity and microbial-based health?

Imagine if tomorrow, a government opened a new ministry: A Ministry of Microbes. In 2020, the first ministry of AI was created in the UAE to position itself as a global hub for technological innovation and economic diversification. More recently, Canada and France also gave AI a seat at the top table. So what stops us from doing the same for microbes, which have been here long before us and on which we all depend? The first one would definitely create ripples across the globe.

But what would this Ministry actually do?

A Ministry of Microbes could be the guardian of the microbial and invisible life. It would track and protect soil microbial diversity as a national and strategic treasure, just like oil reserves or water sources. It could set rules to protect native strains from being patented or privatised by big biotech companies, going even further than the current Nagoya Protocol and making microbial stewardship a true national priority. It could ban or control chemicals that destroy microbial ecosystems, or give incentives to farmers and citizens to restore them. And yes, it has to be a Ministry, not just an agency or a council. The question is not about administrative convenience. The real question is: are we brave enough to give microbes a true seat at the national table?

For now, we tend to treat them as an afterthought. We talk about them in scientific papers, in marketing for probiotics, in a small line inside sustainability reports. But microbes deserve more. They are the original recyclers, the quiet engineers, the builders of soil, the healers inside us.

It would not stop at soil. A true Ministry of Microbes would work across health, food, cities, animal and the environment. It could create programs to monitor gut microbiome trends in the population. A step forward from the Human Microbiome Project (HMP) or Le French Gut . This is not to control people, but to understand collective health better. This ministry could support community fermentation projects, urban compost hubs and local probiotic makers.

And no, this is not a Ministry of One Health. Don’t get me wrong. One Health is important and the microbiome is officially part of it. It connects human, animal, environmental and soil health. (Yes, I use a model where soil is separate from the general environmental dimension because the soil needs particular attention.) But microbes deserve even more focus. They are not just a bridge; they are foundational. A Ministry of Microbes would protect them as active citizens of the biosphere, not only as helpers for human health.

Some of you are likely to say: “Ah, more bureaucracy!” Maybe you’re right. We certainly do not need more grey offices, pen pushers and sterile policy papers. But maybe we need more cultural guardians, people who see microbes not as threats or just as tools, but as partners. It would finally bring the microbiome to a true national level, moving it up from the laboratory shelf into daily life, and down from the collective imagination into real, concrete action.

Others may say: “We cannot control microbes.” And this is very true. We should not control them like machines or simple bioreactors. But we can create conditions for them to thrive. We can protect them from destruction. We can respect their role as co-designers of life.

And yes, there are risks. What if a Ministry of Microbes becomes too powerful? What if it lets private actors monopolise the best strains? What if it becomes just another fortress for big lobbies? We must be careful and put guardrails in place to avoid these pitfalls.

But the bigger risk is actually to do nothing. To let microbes disappear silently, out of sight, while we argue about carbon credits and electric cars. We already see signs of microbial extinction, with countless local strains vanishing before we even know they exist. Some eminent scientists have a mission to reverse this silent collapse. This is the case for Dr Amine Zorgani, a pioneer in microbial ecology, who works to protect and restore microbial life before it is too late. 

In France or in Italy, we love fermented food, our cheese, our sourdough and our wine. We celebrate microbes without always naming them. We talk about “terroir” as something almost magical, but actually, it is microbial. The true taste of a place is created by its living, unseen community. Imagine if this idea of “terroir” extended to cities, hospitals, schools and even to our economy itself. Imagine policies that protect microbial terroir everywhere.

Maybe the idea of a Ministry of Microbes feels radical today. But in ten or twenty years, when soils are even more depleted of microbes, when antibiotics fail more often, when we see new pandemics, it may feel like simple logic. Maybe it will already feel like we are too late for some of us.

So, do we need a Ministry of Microbes?

I think yes.

Or at least, we need a new social contract with them. A shift from domination to stewardship. A political, cultural and emotional recognition that without microbes, we are less than we think we are.

In the end, microbes will survive us. They are older than us, they will be here after us. The question is: do we want to survive with them, or against them?

Maybe it already will feel too late. And maybe in the future some of you will remember this editorial and say, Maybe Christian was not so wrong after all.

The choice is ours. And it starts now.

In the 2020s, everyone was busy arguing about offsetting carbon, mining crypto coins or speculating on digital assets. Meanwhile, our soils were slowly and quietly dying, stripped of microbes by over-tillage and chemicals, and turning into lifeless dust. By the end of the 2030s, after many climate shocks and food shortages, governments around the world finally woke up. Carbon credits became an old story. The real breakthrough? Microbial credits, where value is based on microbial diversity, abundance and ecosystem regeneration. People stopped offsetting guilt with faraway, unknown forests. They started to rebuild microbial diversity locally on balconies, in gardens, rooftops, green belts and in urban and peri-urban farms. Microbial richness became a new and different kind of wealth. Real, local, meaningful and sometimes even edible.

Nikita is not a farmer per se. She is a microbial steward. Sound familiar? Maybe no. But prehistoric men and women were as well in their time, only they did not realise it. They lived close to earth and benefited greatly and daily form microbes without ever knowing. We forgot this old wisdom for so long and now we come back to it slowly, step by step. Every week, Nikita looks after her balcony bioreactor, nurturing a diverse ecosystem of bacteria, fungi and more. These living cultures will, after some home TLC, continue their journey into neighbourhood gardens and rooftop farms. Cities introduced “Soil Ledgers” to track each citizen’s contribution: nitrogen fixed, carbon stored, biodiversity restored. Nikita’s efforts translate into microbial credits, stored in her digital wallet. Her landlord, part of the City Regenerative Housing Cooperative, accepts these credits as partial rent payment. In her district, around 70% of people now pay rent this way. Euros are still here but their use is fading and mostly reserved for imports and high-tech stuff. Daily life is an ecological transaction now.

Alongside soil credits, new systems appeared: gut credits, based on stool donations. People with strong, diverse microbiomes can donate to hospitals and biotech labs. Contributions help to restore patients’ health and build national microbial banks. By 2045, FMT (faecal microbiota transplant) has become mainstream, no only reserved for severe C. difficile infections. It is now used for metabolic troubles, mental health, immune disorders or even preventive care. But not only gut! VMT (vaginal microbiota transplant), NMT (nasal microbiota transplant), and SMT (skin microbiota transplant) also became normal. New treatments use community microbial diversity to restore full-body health. Instead of chemical-only approaches, we trust the collective power of microbes to rebalance us. Nikita donates sometimes too and she trades her gut credits, skin credits, or vaginal credits earned for health services, local veggies or community benefits.

While drinking her coffee, Nikita checks the neighbourhood microbiome leaderboard. Her building is in the top ten again, unlocking bonus credits she can redeem to buy fresh tomatoes, rooftop honey, wild mushrooms or fermented tofu. Later, she goes to visit her old neighbour to fix his worm compost and earns community resilience points, which will increase her future microbial credit multiplier. Wealth now means strong gardens, healthy guts/skins trusted neighbours and not just numbers on a banking app. In 2045, euros are still here, but microbial credits are the daily life currency. The more you nurture, the “richer” you become.

Gamification, already big in the 2020s and 2030s, played a central role in the transition from destruction to regeneration. It helped transform small eco acts into shared adventures, making compost piles as exciting as video games once were.

We did not just wake up one day with this new way of living. It came slowly, step by step, through small acts and also big failures. It was born from a global need to come back together and reconnecting humans with nature. In the 2020s and 2030s, each country tried to fight alone. Carbon taxes here, beaches and oceans cleanup there, bioeconomy slogans elsewhere. But these fragmented approaches failed. We had the Paris Agreement in 2015 but it was too focused on carbon and too fragmented to truly reconnect us to the soil, the gut and all the small living cycles.

Of course, the bioeconomy was important and certainly a step forward. We needed it to rethink materials, chemicals and fuels. And alternative proteins and lab-grown foods tried to answer our addiction to meat, fish and big monocultures. It helped us to see new possibilities and helped us feel a bit less guilty but it did not really reconnect us to soil health, to gut health and to the living cycles around us. But alone they could not rebuild the deep interconnected webs of life as we stayed stuck in the same logic of extraction and disconnection.

Finally, humanity had to face an uncomfortable truth. Every other organism regenerates, enriches, or at least coexists. Only humans degrade everything around them while calling it “progress”. By 2040, we understood that small fixes cannot heal systemic collapse. We needed a collective convergence, a global movement reconnecting economic value with biological reality and demanding individual responsibility at the same time.

And the big irony: the richest countries of the 2020s, so proud of their GDP and digital economies, have performed badly by 2100 because they ignored their soils, their microbes and their local living wealth. Euros, dollars or crypto tokens. All were disconnected from life. Microbes show us another logic. They teach us that value is more than cold metal held in a vault but warm life you can feel in your hands. It is simply something you cultivate, share and let naturally evolve. In 2045, the shift started. Wealth is no longer extracted and hidden. It is grown and multiplied. Wealth is the fertility of your soil, the diversity of your gut, the strength of your rooftop garden or forest, the life in your neighbour’s balcony compost bin. Microbes become the currency of relationships, not the currency of transactions anymore. When you share microbes, you don’t lose them, they multiply somewhere else. You create more nutrients, more resilience and more life.

By 2100, soil credits, organ (gut, skin, etc…) credits as well as water credits merge into a complete living value system. Euros and dollars still exist, but mostly as museum artefacts. Daily life runs on cycles you nurture: compost, seedlings, fungal teas, clean water and community health. In every quartier, microbial councils meet to discuss rooftop compost hubs, seed exchanges and local fermentation libraries. These small assemblies became the new local parliaments of life. National microbial councils were checking the health of their microbial vaults.

And you, reading this when did you last touch real soil? When did you feed your gut with living food, not just sterile, calorie-less Ultra Processed Food (UPF)? How do you measure your wealth today? Is it simply numbers on your bank statement? Or is it the strength in your gut, the trust in your community, the colour of your garden tomatoes? Starts with one small act: a compost pile, a community seed swap, a home-fermented miso. It starts today and it starts with you.

In Nikita’s world, this new economy doesn’t just buy things; it builds community, heals bodies, regenerates ecosystems. It reconnects each individual to a global convergence, turning micro-actions into planetary change.

Tomorrow’s vaults are seed libraries and fermentation cellars. Tomorrow’s stock markets will be healthy rooftop forests shining at sunset.

Bon courage, bon appétit and may your microbes always pay your rent.

That’s where we are now with the microbiome. The science has advanced. The applications are multiplying. The impact is becoming systemic. And yet, there is no word to describe the movement that is unfolding around it. Because it is no longer just about the science. It is something bigger.

So we coined Microbiolisation.

It’s a new word, bold, slightly rebellious and maybe even provocative but born out of necessity. A term big enough to capture the profound transformation underway as microbial intelligence moves from fringe fascination to fundamental force. Microbiolisation is the process and the movement of integrating microbial thinking into the fabric of our lives: from healthcare and food to agriculture, sustainability and even our understanding of the self. It’s not a product trend. It’s a worldview shift. Like digitalisation before it, microbiolisation reframes how we organise knowledge, design systems and imagine the future.

The Microbiome finally in the spotlight

For a long time, the microbiome was there in the background of biology. Important and admired, yes but rarely centre stage. Now it’s becoming clear: microbes are not just passengers in the human body or decomposers of the soil. They are active agents shaping health, disease, productivity, climate resilience and more. They basically co-create with us.

We see this in healthcare, with the discovery of links between the gut microbiota and everything from mood disorders to cancer immunotherapy outcomes. In agriculture, microbial soil health is now being recognised as essential to sustainable yield and carbon sequestration. In nutrition, we’re seeing a shift from calorie counting to fibre diversity, from macronutrients to microbial feeding. And in personal care, the skin microbiome is blurring the boundary between cosmetology and dermatology.

This is not an isolated evolution in each sector. It’s a wave. And microbiolisation is the name for that wave.

Why the word matters?

Because naming a movement is how we help people see it. Microbiolisation gives us something to:

• Connect and unify disparate efforts across industries that are moving in the same direction, even if they don’t realise it yet.
• Invite new ideas and inspire new strategies that treat the microbiome as a foundational layer, not an add-on. The health OS.
• Challenge the old and legacy systems that ignore microbes or worse remain blind to the power of microbial thinking.
• Makes visible a movement that, until now, has been too fragmented or too scientific for broader uptake.

Microbiolisation is a tool. A tool for changing mindsets. With it people can talk about it. Build on it. Fund it. Share it. Simple as that.

Systems shift and not a product pivot

Let’s be clear. Microbiolisation isn’t just about launching new probiotic products or adding microbiome tests to clinics. It’s a systems-level shift in how we understand relationships between organisms, between humans and the environment, between inputs and outcomes.

It means thinking in terms of ecosystems. It means looking at relationships, not just ingredients.

Therefore, a microbiolised system:

• Works with nature, not against it, by cultivating microbial diversity instead of sterilising it.
• Thinks in networks, not silos. Microbes don’t act alone neither should we. Recognising that microbial interactions are dynamic and context dependent.
• Designs for resilience, not short-term control and by using microbiome-informed interventions to stabilise systems over time.

In this context, a microbiolised food system would support or even prioritise regenerative farming, fermented foods, probiotic-rich ingredients and ingredients that feed the microbiota. A microbiolised healthcare might integrate microbiome data to guide prevention, treatment and long-term microbial health tracking. A microbiolised digital world might develop new biosensors, data standards, platforms and infrastructures to make microbial intelligence accessible, usable and actionable.

This is the operating system we did not know we needed.

Where is microbiolisation already happening?

Microbiolisation is not a future scenario. It’s happening unevenly, but unmistakably across multiple fronts:

• Small and big companies are building platforms for gut health, vaginal health, oral health, soil health and everything in between.
• Big Pharma is investing in microbiome therapeutics, particularly in immunology, oncology and rare diseases.
• Agri-tech is developing biofertilisers, microbial seed coatings and precision soil health monitoring.
• Food giants are quietly reformulating products to include postbiotics and fibre blends.
• Governments and regulators are exploring how to integrate microbiome data into public health and sustainability frameworks.

Still, many of these developments are isolated. Microbiolisation offers a chance to connect the dots, foster ecosystems and drive collective intelligence.

Barriers to microbiolisation

Of course, no paradigm shift is smooth. Microbiolisation faces several challenges:

1. The science is complex and the evidence base is fragmented.
   The science is progressing fast but often outpaces clinical validation or practical application. We must embrace adaptive evidence, including real-world data and system-level metrics. In other words, pragmatic experimentation.
2. Data chaos.
   Microbiome data is vast, complex and still lacks standardisation. We need interoperable platforms, common ontologies and strong data governance to unlock its power.
3. Overhype and greenwashing
   The microbiome is trendy which means it’s also vulnerable to buzzword abuse. Microbiolisation must be rooted inrigor, responsibility andreal value creation.
4. Cultural and structural inertia
   Institutions aren’t designed to think microbially. Whether in medicine, policy or food systems, shifting mental models takes time and bold storytelling.

And yet, despite these barriers, the trajectory is clear. We’re not going back to a pre-microbial worldview. The only question is how fast, how deep and how smart we go.

The role of bridge-builders

Microbiolisation doesn’t just need scientists. It needs strategists, designers, educators, policymakers and storytellers. People who can translate between silos. People who can weave microbiome intelligence into real-world systems. People who can imagine not just better products, but better futures.

Whether you’re a startup founder, a health practitioner, a policymaker or a food innovator you’re part of this shift. The microbiome is already touching your domain. The question is: are you ready to microbiolise your thinking? I certainly have.

If you are already working on something related even if you didn’t call it microbiolisation yet you’re already part of it.

A call to microbiolise

To be honest, microbiolisation is not about idolising microbes. It’s about embracing complexity, co-dependence and contextual intelligence. It’s about understanding that we are ecosystems and so is everything we build.

So let’s microbiolise:

• Our healthcare from symptom suppression to systems support.
• Our agriculture from extraction to regeneration.
• Our innovation from techno-solutionism to ecological intelligence.
• Our economy from linear growth to ecosystem resilience.

Let’s build tools, products, systems and policies that protect and nourish the microbial infrastructures we depend on. Let’s stop thinking of the microbiome as an accessory and start seeing it as an infrastructure.

Because the 21^st century is not going to be only digital. It will also be microbial.

Welcome to the age of microbiolisation.

In the relentless pursuit of peak performance, athletes are known for chasing every possible edge: physical, psychological and increasingly, nutritional. In recent years, a new player has quietly entered the field: the gut microbiome. This complex ecosystem of bacteria, fungi and other microbes living in our digestive system is now being explored not only for its role in health and immunity, but more and more for how it might improve performance.

So, what happens when the gut becomes a tool to push human limits?

A growing number of athletes, researchers and biohackers are asking exactly that question. And with it comes an uncomfortable possibility. Could tuning the microbiome one day be considered a form of doping?

From food to fecal transplants: performance from the inside

Most people understand that the gut microbiome affects digestion and immunity. But in the last decade, this view has expanded a lot. Research now links the gut to energy metabolism, recovery, inflammation, cognition and even mental resilience. All of these matter in high-level sport.

Some interventions are simple and already well known: high-fibre diets, fermented foods, prebiotics, regular probiotics. But others go further. A well-known study (Scheiman et al., 2019¹) found that after a marathon, athletes had increased levels of a specific microbe, Veillonella. These bacteria feed on lactate, a byproduct of intense effort and convert it into propionate, a compound that might help with endurance. When scientists gave these microbes to mice, the mice could run noticeably longer.

This kind of result opens the door to more targeted interventions. Imagine a probiotic designed specifically to recycle lactate faster. Or, maybe one day, a fecal transplant from a top endurance athlete to someone looking to boost their own performance. For now, this may sound extreme. But honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if it has been already considered.

Nutrition, enhancement… or something else?

If you eat more fibre and your performance improves, nobody sees a problem. If you take a probiotic to recover faster, that’s still pretty normal. But what if the supplement is custom-made to improve your VO2 max? Is that still nutrition? Or are we starting to cross into something else?

It’s definitely a grey zone. And in the case of the microbiome, it gets even blurrier. Why? Because your gut is something you can change, but also something that constantly changes itself. It’s part of you, but it’s also shaped by your environment, your diet, your training. So where is the line between boosting health and boosting performance?

Some people argue that if an intervention is healthy, it should be allowed. Others believe that if the goal is strictly performance and the tools are highly engineered, then we are not far from enhancement, even if it appears natural.

The Enhanced Games: A future test case?

This all arrives at a time when the debate around enhancement is heating up. A recent example is the Enhanced Games², a new project proposing Olympic-style events where athletes can openly use performance-enhancing drugs. No bans, no illusions. Just enhanced competition.

In that context, the microbiome becomes even more fascinating. Changing your gut doesn’t involve illegal substances. There is no injection or gene editing. But the effects, like better energy use, faster recovery and improved focus, could resemble what banned substances do. And because microbes are living, their impact could last longer and be harder to detect.

Would something like this be allowed in a no-limits event like the Enhanced Games? Probably. But in traditional sport? That’s a much harder question.

The paradox of invisible enhancement

If we want to call this “microbe-doping,” it doesn’t follow the usual rules. There is often no trace in the blood, no chemical residue. Just a shift in your internal ecosystem. Yet this shift could influence oxygen use, muscle function, or stress response.

Some interventions might leave small metabolic clues, but most will not. A custom probiotic might look exactly like a regular one. A fecal transplant done in private? Impossible to know.

This raises a new kind of dilemma. Not just what is fair, but what is even testable. If we cannot measure it, do we ignore it? Or are we heading toward a new kind of arms race, this time inside the gut?

What comes next?

The science is still young. The microbiome is complex and no two people have the same microbial profile. Even if certain patterns are linked to performance, turning that into something reliable is difficult.

But commercial interest is growing fast. Some companies already offer gut tests for athletes. Others are developing probiotics designed for sport, energy, or recovery. As the tech improves, we might soon see gut-based training plans, personalised supplements and maybe even microbiome “coaches” for elite teams.

At some point, regulators like the World Anti-Doping Agency will have to weigh in. If the goal is performance and the intervention is precise, does that count as doping? Or is it simply the future of legal enhancement?

Training the body, tuning the gut

This isn’t just about elite athletes. It may be a glimpse of something bigger. A future where performance comes not just from muscle and discipline, but from what is happening inside our bodies.

Tomorrow’s athletes may still train harder. But they will also eat smarter, sleep better and yes, maybe fine-tune their microbes.

And in that world, the key question may no longer be how hard have you trained, but what have you trained within?

Reference

1. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31235964/
2. https://www.enhanced.com

The microbiome, the vast community of microbes living in and on our bodies, isn’t just a scientific breakthrough. It’s more like a new operating system for human health. Think of it as la base de tout, the foundation beneath everything from our metabolism to our mood. And yet, most companies treat it like a niche, a wellness add-on, a probiotic here or a gut cleanse there. In truth, the microbiome should be front and centre in how we think about health in the 21st century.

The microbiome as an operating system

Let’s be clear, the microbiome is not a trend. It’s a biological infrastructure. It touches nearly every system in the body, from our immune function to our digestion, inflammation or our cognition, even how we respond to medication. You could say it’s the middleware between what we eat, how we live and how our bodies behave.

What’s fascinating is how interconnected it is. You tweak the gut and the brain responds. You change your diet and the microbiome shifts in hours. This isn’t speculation. It’s backed by an avalanche of peer-reviewed research. For example, scientists have found links between microbial imbalances and conditions like depression, anxiety, type 2 diabetes and even Parkinson’s disease or Alzheimer’s. The gut isn’t just the second brain, it’s the control tower.

Still, despite all this complexity and potential, most of the public conversation remains surface-level. Many people still think “microbiome” means “take a probiotic.” It’s like seeing the word “cloud” and thinking only of the weather.

Why doesn’t the market get it?

There’s a kind of cognitive dissonance in the industry. On one side, research journals are lighting up with groundbreaking findings. On the other, the market is flooded with oversimplified, commodified products. It’s dommage, really — a missed opportunity so far.

Most companies are stuck in old models. Supplement brands want to sell capsules. Pharmaceutical companies are hesitant to invest in something they cannot easily patent. Healthcare systems aren’t built to measure or monitor microbiome data, so they ignore it. The result is fragmentation or innovation without integration.

Part of the problem is legacy thinking. Western medicine is still largely reductionist. Diagnose, prescribe, repeat. The microbiome doesn’t fit well in that box. It’s dynamic, contextual and incredibly individual. In short, it’s messy. But that mess holds the key to solving some of our biggest health problems.

The opportunity: shift from product to platform

Here is where it gets exciting. What if we stopped treating the microbiome as a product category and started treating it like a platform?

The companies that will lead the next wave of healthcare aren’t just building new drugs. They are building new frameworks. They’re integrating microbiome insights into diagnostics, nutrition plans, mental health protocols and chronic disease management.

Already, some players are stepping up. Startups are using AI to analyse gut samples and generate personalised dietary guidance. One could think of “smart probiotics” that release targeted compounds based on internal signals. Research into faecal microbiota transplants—yes, exactly what it sounds like—is showing promising results for a growing number of conditions.

We’re on the edge of a paradigm shift, but only if businesses are ready to start building systems.

Where this is heading?

Make no mistake, the future of medicine will be deeply microbial.

Imagine routine gut testing as common as a cholesterol check. Imagine mental health treatments that go beyond talk therapy or Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs) to include microbial interventions. Imagine oncologists adjusting chemotherapy based on gut profiles.

Some of this is already happening. Researchers are exploring how the microbiome affects drug metabolism. Two people can receive the same prescription, but their responses might be totally different depending on their gut. Clinical trials are starting to include microbiome data. Insurance companies are probably watching this space closely. The momentum is real.

In the not-too-distant future, we’ll likely see personalised health recommendations based on a mix of DNA, lifestyle data and gut microbiota. C’est logique, because health is no longer only about our human cells. It’s about the ecosystem we live with.

What needs to change?

If this shift is going to happen at scale, a few things must evolve:

• More education. Consumers and clinicians need to understand that the microbiome isn’t a luxury topic. It’s a foundation of modern health.
• Better tools. Gut tests need to be accurate, affordable and give real insight. Too many still offer vague “eat more kale” advice.
• Stronger regulation. The market is still the Wild West. We need better standards for testing, labelling and claims.
• Interdisciplinary thinking. This is not just a biology problem. It’s a systems problem. We need scientists, psychologists, nutritionists, doctors and health professionals from different disciplines working together to build real solutions.

Final word

The microbiome isn’t a niche. It’s not a trend. It’s not a fad product to place next to collagen powders or plant-based substances. It’s the new operating system of health and the companies who understand that will shape the future.

Those who don’t will look back and realise they missed the biggest health tech shift since the genome. Ignoring the microbiome now is like ignoring the internet in 1995. It’s not just risky. It’s dangerously shortsighted.

Alors voilà. The revolution isn’t coming. It’s already here and it’s microbial.

Christian Roghi – PhD, MBA, DipMC trained as a molecular biologist and went on to research cancer progression at prestigious academic institutions across the EU, US and UK. During that time, he also started his first business.

He later moved fully into the business side, leading business development at the Institute of Food Research and the Quadram Institute Bioscience, the UK’s first and still the only microbiome research institute with an embedded gastroenterology unit. Christian has since worked within some of the most innovative microbiome companies including EnteroBiotix (Biotech, FMT), CosmosID (Next-Gen Sequencing, bioinformatics) and Eagle Genomics (SaaS, microbiome network science), where he helped shape strategy, commercial direction and ecosystem positioning across the microbiome space.

Today, through Big Bold Bridges, he catalyses strategy, drives execution and accelerates adoption across the microbiome space.