Don’t know if anyone posted this article on germs and gut organisms yet.  Judy 

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/19/magazine/say-hello-to-the-100-trillion-bacteria-that-make-up-your-microbiome.html?pagewanted=2 <http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/19/magazine/say-hello-to-the-100-trillion-bacteria-that-make-up-your-microbiome.html?pagewanted=2&ref=general&src=me> &ref=general&src=me

“Mother’s milk, being the only mammalian food shaped by natural selection, is the Rosetta stone for all food,” says Bruce German <http://foodscience.ucdavis.edu/people/faculty/jgerman> , a food scientist at the University of California, Davis, who researches milk. “And what it’s telling us is that when natural selection creates a food, it is concerned not just with feeding the child but the child’s gut bugs too.”

Where do these all-important bifidobacteria come from and what does it mean if, like me, you were never breast-fed? Mother’s milk is not, as once was thought, sterile: it is both a “prebiotic” — a food for microbes — and a “probiotic,” a population of beneficial microbes introduced into the body. Some of them may find their way from the mother’s colon to her milk ducts and from there into the baby’s gut with its first feeding. Because designers of infant formula did not, at least until recently, take account of these findings, including neither prebiotic oligosaccharides or probiotic bacteria in their formula, the guts of bottle-fed babies are not optimally colonized.

Most of the microbes that make up a baby’s gut community are acquired during birth — a microbially rich and messy process that exposes the baby to a whole suite of maternal microbes. Babies born by Caesarean, however, a comparatively sterile procedure, do not acquire their mother’s vaginal and intestinal microbes at birth. Their initial gut communities more closely resemble that of their mother’s (and father’s) skin, which is less than ideal and may account for higher rates of allergy, asthma <http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/disease/asthma/overview.html?inline=nyt-classifier>  and autoimmune problems in C-section <http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/surgery/c-section/overview.html?inline=nyt-classifier>  babies: not having been seeded with the optimal assortment of microbes at birth, their immune systems may fail to develop properly.


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