The Workforce
Who They Are and When They're Summoned

That sentence may read as provocation, but it is closer to a straightforward biological description than anything most people encountered in school. The human body contains somewhere in the range of 30 trillion human cells, a figure that seems immense until it is placed beside the 38 trillion bacteria cohabiting the same body, a revision confirmed in 2016 by Sender and colleagues publishing in Cell, who recalculated the ratio and found it so nearly one-to-one that the old metaphor of humans as hosts and bacteria as guests had to be retired entirely. What Sender's team was actually describing, in the careful language of cell biology, was a merger so complete that the distinction between host and inhabitant had become almost meaningless. And that was only counting cells. When the accounting shifts to genes, the picture becomes far more striking.

Aajonus Vonderplanitz spent decades tracking the evolving science of bacterial genetics and citing each revision as it appeared. The figures shifted as researchers mapped increasingly complete genomic data: 100 bacterial genes for every human gene in early estimates, then 150, then 260, then 350. By 2012, drawing on data published through the National Institutes of Health's Human Microbiome Project, Aajonus was citing the figure that had emerged from the most comprehensive genomic mapping yet undertaken. "We are 360 bacterial genes to only one human gene," he wrote. "We are predominantly bacterial." The math that follows from that ratio is not subtle. At 360 to 1, human genetic material represents something less than three-tenths of one percent of the total genetic information operating inside a human body. The remaining fraction, everything else directing, regulating, constructing, dissolving, and renewing biological function, is bacterial. Aajonus put the resulting figure at 99.997 percent bacterial, excluding water. The precise decimal matters less than the order of magnitude. The central claim holds regardless of which revision one accepts: humans are not organisms that happen to contain bacteria. Humans are bacterial organisms that happen to contain a small quantity of distinctly human genetic material.

This distinction is not semantic. It is the foundation on which everything else in this chapter depends. If the body is primarily bacterial, then the reflexive modern response to bacterial presence, whether in food, in water, or inside the body during illness, which is to kill the bacteria, is not a protective strategy. It is a form of self-destruction. Understanding why requires understanding what bacteria actually do inside a living body, at every stage of every day, in conditions of both health and crisis.

The NIH Human Microbiome Project, which concluded its initial phase in 2012, mapped microbial communities across every major surface and cavity of the human body. The project found trillions of microorganisms performing functions that the human genome alone could not perform: synthesizing vitamins, metabolizing compounds the gut would otherwise be unable to process, regulating immune response, protecting barrier surfaces from chemical and biological disruption. What the project could not fully account for, because its framework assumed microbial communities as add-ons to a fundamentally human system, was the possibility that the relationship ran the other direction. That the human apparatus, the intestinal architecture, the immune signaling, the lymphatic circulation, existed not to house bacteria but to serve them. Or more precisely, that the whole system had evolved together, inseparably, over hundreds of millions of years, and that speaking of either component as primary was a category error.

Aajonus made exactly this point in his workshops, often in terms that his audiences initially found disorienting. "The system was not made, and then all of a sudden bacteria are assisting," he explained. "Our system is assisting bacteria, and that's how we're able to survive." It is a reversal that reframes every subsequent question about health, disease, digestion, and immunity.

The most concrete illustration of what bacterial dependence looks like in practice is digestion, because digestion is the one bodily process people tend to think they understand. The conventional picture is of stomach acid breaking down food, enzymes cleaving proteins, the intestinal wall absorbing nutrients. Bacteria appear in that picture as a supporting cast, perhaps helpful, certainly not central. The actual picture is reversed. Hydrochloric acid and bile reduce large food particles to smaller molecules not because those particles are themselves the target but because bacteria need smaller particles to do their work. The digestive juices are preparatory, and the bacteria are the primary event. Depending on a person's health, between 80 and 90 percent of digestion is bacterial, from the mouth to the sigmoid colon. The 10 to 20 percent that is enzymatic exists in service of that bacterial majority.

The process begins before the food reaches the stomach. Human saliva is, according to multiple bacteriologists, richer in bacteria than the saliva of dogs or cats, a counterintuitive finding given how thoroughly the idea of "dog mouth" as contaminated has entered popular culture. The bacteria in human saliva are specifically adapted to begin the work of digesting animal tissue, not cellulose, not vegetable fiber, but meat. This is a functional signature, a clue embedded in the mouth itself about what the human digestive system is designed to process. When food reaches the stomach, hydrochloric acid reduces larger chunks to smaller molecules. When it reaches the intestines, the bacterial workforce takes over entirely.

E. coli, the single most vilified bacterium in contemporary food safety culture, is the main bacterium in the bowels, responsible for the final stages of protein and fat digestion. It breaks food matter down to the smallest proteins and fats, the finite forms required to feed the brain and nervous system. Aajonus was unequivocal on this point across every venue in which he addressed it, calling the public fear of E. coli "the most absurd and ridiculous stuff," noting that people who use colonics frequently or who eat diets heavily weighted toward vegetables and away from animal protein tend to have depleted E. coli populations, and tend accordingly to have poorly nourished nervous systems. The bacteria that process the final stages of digestion also synthesize and release 90 percent of the B vitamins contained in food, including B12. What the body absorbs as nutrition is, at the molecular level, bacterial waste: the urine, feces, and perspiration of organisms that consumed the food first. Aajonus did not present this as a rhetorical provocation. It is the mechanism. Kefir and yogurt are, by this description, milks thickened with bacterial excretion, consumed because the bacteria have already done the digestive work and what remains is concentrated, bioavailable nutrition requiring minimal additional processing by the body.

The small intestine maintains a resident population that would alarm anyone raised on the standard public health narrative about food safety. Salmonella, in its several thousand natural varieties, lives there. So do listeria, campylobacter, and the broader bacterial communities that eat food particles and produce nutrients. None of these organisms, in their natural configurations inside a healthy human body, cause disease. They perform digestion. Aajonus described them plainly as workers: "They go in there and they eat the food and digest it for you. Their excrement is our food, is our digested food." The alarm that modern regulatory language attaches to their names reflects laboratory findings made in artificial environments, Petri dishes and isolated cell cultures, in which bacteria removed from the body's ecological context and placed in contact with isolated cells will consume those cells. But an isolated cell is not an intestinal wall. A Petri dish is not a living body with a full bacterial ecosystem in operation. The finding that bacteria consume cells in a dish tells us nothing reliable about what those bacteria do in their native context, which is to consume food particles, not healthy tissue.

Outside the intestines, salmonella in its many varieties once lived on human skin in enormous populations, consuming shed cells so that the skin could breathe and function and renew itself. Aajonus cited figures of 2,300 to 8,600 varieties of salmonella performing this role before daily bathing became standard practice in industrial societies. People who did not bathe regularly were not dirtier in any functional sense; they were bacterially intact. Their skin was being maintained by a microbial workforce that modern hygiene practices have largely eliminated.

The question of when the body deploys bacteria rather than relying on its chemical processes alone points toward the most consequential aspect of Aajonus's framework: the body calls on its microbial workforce strategically, in response to specific conditions. When industrial toxins accumulate beyond what the lymphatic system can process unaided, when cells are damaged, dying, or dead and need to be broken down and recycled, when the lymphatic system is overloaded and cannot dissolve its waste burden, the body summons bacteria to do the work. This is not accidental proliferation. It is commissioned labor. Aajonus compared the body to a mansion fully staffed with employees, noting that without those employees the mansion would fall into ruin regardless of how sound its architecture. The bacteria were not the building; they were everyone who kept the building functioning.

Sonnenburg and Bäckhed, writing in Nature in 2016, framed the relationship in terms that partially converged with this view. Their analysis demonstrated that the gut microbiome directly regulates immune function, nutrient metabolism, and protection against pathogens, and that when microbial diversity is disrupted, these functions do not simply degrade, they collapse. The mechanism Sonnenburg and Bäckhed described was one of active dependence: the immune system does not function as an independent entity that happens to benefit from microbial assistance; it requires microbial input to function at all. The body's ability to distinguish between tissue to be defended and tissue to be broken down, between foreign chemical threat and native biological activity, depends on bacterial communication and signaling that antibiotics, processed diets, and sterilization practices routinely interrupt.

The historical record on this question is not ambiguous. Every food culture that maintained the health of its population across generations cultivated bacterially rich food as a staple. Sauerkraut, kimchi, miso, kefir, yogurt, high meat prepared through deliberate fermentation, all of these were not curiosities or acquired tastes but nutritional infrastructure. The bacteria in fermented foods were the point, not a byproduct. Traditional cultures did not understand this in the language of microbiology, but they understood it empirically: food that had undergone bacterial transformation fed the body differently, more effectively, with less digestive effort and more sustained nourishment, than food that had not. The modern treatment of fermented foods as a specialty health product, something to be measured in careful probiotic doses, represents a profound narrowing of a much older and broader practice.

Before Pasteurization became regulatory orthodoxy, dairy products consumed across Europe, Asia, and the Americas were raw, alive with bacterial culture, and had been so for millennia. The diseases subsequently attributed to raw dairy by regulatory agencies arose not from raw consumption per se but from industrialized production: crowded feedlots, unsanitary facilities, long-distance transport, and cross-contamination at scale. These were terrain problems, failures of the conditions in which food was produced, not indictments of bacteria themselves. Pasteurization resolved the industrial hygiene failure by killing the bacteria, which also killed the nutritional and digestive value of the dairy. The solution addressed the symptom while institutionalizing a deeper problem.

Here is where the standard objection arises, the one that appears to settle the argument before it begins: bacteria cause food poisoning. People eat contaminated food, they vomit, they develop diarrhea, and bacteria are found at the scene. The conclusion, drawn reflexively for more than a century of public health practice, is that the bacteria caused the illness. Aajonus's framework inverts this causality entirely. When someone eats food that contains industrial contaminants, pesticide residues, processing chemicals, or compromised animal products from stressed and medicated animals, the body responds by deploying bacteria to process and expel the contamination. The vomiting and diarrhea that follow are efficient elimination, the body moving toxic material out through the fastest available routes, and bacteria are the mechanism of that elimination, not the origin of the crisis. Attributing the illness to the bacteria is, in Aajonus's phrase, like blaming firefighters for the fire. The firefighters are present at every fire. That is not evidence that they started it.

Aajonus reinforced this point through his own biography, which he cited not as anecdote but as empirical data. He had consumed more bacterially rich food, including raw and fermented meats at advanced stages of bacterial activity, than virtually any other person in the contemporary Western world, and had done so deliberately and repeatedly across decades. He was alive, functional, and healthy into his sixties when, by his own accounting, the medical model's predictions should have killed him many times over. He cited this not to suggest everyone should immediately begin eating high meat, but to demonstrate that the premise, that natural bacteria in food constitutes a biological threat, had been tested in his own body and failed to hold.

The second objection is harder to dismiss casually: if bacteria are essential and benign, why do people sometimes die of bacterial infections? The answer, in Aajonus's framework, is that they die from the toxicity the bacteria were attempting to address, not from the bacteria themselves. When a body's toxic burden is extreme, the bacterial workforce may be managing a crisis beyond the body's capacity to survive. When antibiotics are introduced mid-process, they destroy the bacterial workforce at the moment it is most critically engaged, eliminating the body's primary mechanism for managing the crisis. What follows is not a defeat of the infection but a collapse of the cleanup operation, with the toxic damage remaining and the bacterial workforce gone. The patient deteriorates not because the bacteria were winning but because the bacteria were the last line of functional response and have been removed. This reframing does not resolve every clinical case, and Aajonus did not claim it did. What it does is provide a coherent alternative to the model in which bacteria, having mysteriously decided to attack a body they have co-evolved with for hundreds of millions of years, succeed in killing it.

The third objection comes from people who have absorbed the microbiome research and concluded it supports targeted probiotic supplementation rather than anything as blunt as eating bacterially rich raw food indiscriminately. The research, in this reading, validates the importance of bacterial diversity while providing a more precise and controlled method for maintaining it. Aajonus would have rejected this framing on its foundation. Probiotic supplements are industrially processed: they contain limited strains, often in configurations that do not reflect the ecological relationships those strains maintain inside a living body, and they are typically delivered in media that have been sterilized, dehydrated, or otherwise altered. The bacteria in a probiotic capsule are not the same bacteria, functioning in the same way, as the bacteria in a glass of raw kefir or a piece of properly fermented meat. The supplement model treats the microbiome as a machine to be tuned with specific inputs. Aajonus treated it as an ecology, one that evolved alongside the full spectrum of bacterial diversity present in raw animal foods, unwashed produce, fermented preparations, and the environment itself, and that requires that full spectrum to function as designed.

The bacteriologists who have moved closest to this position, including those cited by Aajonus from TED talks and academic publications, have done so while still holding to the belief that some bacteria are dangerous. Aajonus found this position internally inconsistent. If the body is 99 percent bacterial, if every smiling and breathing and running and thinking is bacterial in its mechanism, then the idea that a few strains among the hundreds of millions of varieties present in the human body could turn against the whole system and cause disease requires believing that a small fraction of the workforce has decided to destroy the enterprise they are part of. The only bacteria Aajonus was willing to identify as genuinely dangerous were man-made: laboratory-engineered strains like E. coli O157:H7, which he noted he had never found in soil samples taken in the field, only in samples provided by universities that had received it from the FDA and the CDC. Natural bacteria, evolved alongside the human body, functioning in their ecological context, were not pathogens in any meaningful sense. They were, as he returned to again and again, janitors: appearing at the scene of cellular damage because that was their job, consuming dead and damaged tissue because that was their function, and being blamed for the damage they were cleaning up because the investigators who named them as culprits did not pause to ask what condition the tissue was in before the bacteria arrived.

Every traditional culture that maintained health across generations knew this, not in theory but in practice. They ate bacterially rich food. They did not sterilize their hands before handling it. They allowed their children to put dirt in their mouths, to lick the same surfaces that animals licked, to develop the full spectrum of microbial relationships that a healthy immune and digestive system requires. The modern obsession with sterilization is, in the broadest historical context, an aberration of roughly a century's duration being measured against a biological relationship that stretches back millions of years. Its consequences are visible in the chronic disease rates of the populations that adopted it most thoroughly. The experiment has been run. The results are in.

Bacteria are not passengers. They are not guests. They are not a separate system that the body manages and occasionally tolerates. At 360 bacterial genes for every one human gene, they are the body's operating system, the mechanism through which digestion, immunity, repair, synthesis, and elimination are performed. The body calls on them when the work is difficult, summons specific populations for specific tasks, and depends on their presence for every process that keeps a human organism alive. Killing them is not cleaning the body. It is disabling it.

If bacteria are the body's primary workforce, they are not the only workers. The body maintains a full hierarchy of microbial agents, bacteria, parasites, fungi, and viruses, each with a specific role, specific efficiency, and specific conditions under which it is deployed. Understanding this hierarchy reveals why the body sometimes chooses a cold and sometimes chooses cancer.