“A Gut Reaction to Obesity: The Impact of Diet, the Microbiome, and the Environment”

We are at the confluence of three daunting yet exciting trends in the realm of food and health: a dramatic shift in our health care system which has moved away from curing acute illnesses to managing chronic ones; a problematic obesity epidemic created in part by perverse economic incentives and a lack of consumer awareness regarding what we eat; and an explosion of scholarly interest in the gut microbiome, the intestinal bacteria in each of us that represent an unexplored frontier in medicine and basic science. Recognizing that these three trends are both important and interconnected, the topic for the 2015 Health Care Symposium is “A Gut Reaction to Obesity: The Impact of Diet, the Microbiome, and the Environment.”