All roads lead to the gut–brain microbiome network

“The whole is something besides the parts”, wrote the Greek philosopher Aristotle more than 2000 years ago. Author and gastroenterologist Emeran Mayer (Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, Los Angeles, CA, USA), gives us a renewed appreciation of this phrase in the context of our understanding of the body and the brain. In The Gut-Immune Connection, Mayer takes us back to a holistic way of thinking that accounts for the full complexity of the interconnection between our gut, our mind, and the trillions of microbes that live in our gastrointestinal tract.