My Amazon family’s gut microbes may help us fight inflammatory disease

THE Yanomami people, based in the Amazon rainforest of southern Venezuela and northern Brazil, are one of the last Indigenous groups in the region that still live by hunter-gathering and small-scale farming. They also have the most diverse gut microbiome of any human community studied so far.

David Good is half Yanomami: his mother is a member of the Irokai-teri community and his father is from the US, where Good was brought up. After a life-changing reunion with his mother in the Amazon as an adult, Good is now doing a PhD in microbiology at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. His research involves studying the Yanomami’s unusual microbiomes – the bacteria, viruses and fungi that live on and in our bodies – with a view to developing new therapies for microbiome-associated conditions.

Here, he tells New Scientist about his work with the Yanomami, from collecting stool samples from family members and gaining first-hand experience of their diverse diet – and why he will never eat armadillo again – to what we can learn from studying their microbiomes.

Clare Wilson: Do you mind if I ask about your family? How did your parents meet?

David Good: Sure. My dad was a grad student at Pennsylvania State University and he was tasked to enter the Amazon to study the Yanomami’s protein intake. At the time, in the late 1970s, there was a debate over whether protein deficiency was causing their warfare. [The Yanomami have been falsely portrayed by anthropologists as engaging in a great deal of warfare and violence over access to resources.] He fell in love with the Yanomami way of life: …