Obesity brings problems-notably heart disease, diabetes and cancer. It is not hard to understand its connection with heart disease and diabetes: excess fat clogs arteries and messes around with the metabolism. Its link with cancer is less intuitive. Shin Yoshimoto of the Japanese Foundation for Cancer Research, in Tokyo, and his colleagues suspect this is at least partly because researchers have been looking for that link in the wrong place. Most work in the field is focused on the cells of the human body. But researchers should, Dr Yoshimoto believes, be at least as interested in the cells of the micro-biome, the collection of 100 trillion bacteria that live in the gut.
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