What leads a journalist or writer to publish another book about the large community of bacteria living in the gut? To answer this question, we spoke to Cristina Sáez, a science journalist who, in conjunction with Spanish organization Fundación Alicia, has recently published a book on the subject called La ciencia de la microbiota.

There is a growing interest in the role diet plays in behavior, yet current studies have yielded inconsistent results around directly linking the gut microbiome as the cause of certain behaviors such as anxiety, depression and autistic behavior. A recent study tries to tackle the question of whether the gut microbiome is directly linked to autism spectrum disorders.