Your Apple Has 100 Million Microorganisms Living On It. Should You Care?

Fruit and vegetables are among the healthiest foods around, packed with plenty of vitamins, minerals and nutrients. But have you ever wondered about what else you might be eating when you bite into an apple? Gabriela Berg did. The head of the Institute of Environmental Biotechnology at Graz University of Technology in Austria has been studying the microbes that inhabit fruit for most of her professional career. This seemingly esoteric curiosity has recently taken on more practical health implications, as research into the human microbiome has uncovered the key role bacteria, viruses and other microorganisms that live on our skin and in our bodies have in keeping our guts healthy and our immune system functioning. And understanding the micro-organisms in the food we eat could reveal further details of how the human microbiome is created and maintained. For a study published recently in Frontiers in Microbiology, Berg and her team—which included local high school students learning about the microbiome—did thorough analyses of the microbes living inside and on the skin of one of the most popular fruits: apples. They looked at four apples, two grown under conventional conditions and two grown organically, and ran genetic analyses on six different parts of each fruit to identify which microbes were present. Conventional and organic apples contained the same number of total micro-organisms—about 100 million—distributed between the peel, pulp, seeds, stem, a...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Diet/Nutrition microbiome Source Type: news