Who you live with has a major impact on your gut health even if you have different diets

Even if you’re not swapping spit, you’re definitely swapping microorganisms.Researchers in a new study found that people who lived together shared 26% of the same oral microbes.This was regardless of the relationship — participants included siblings, parents and children.

Romantic partners shared even more oral microbes (44%), likely due to kissing.“Your microbiome is not just yours as an isolated entity, it is partly a reflection of the people you live with, and theirs is partly a reflection of you,” lead author Vitor Heidrich told The Post.“This also means that the health benefits and disease risks linked to specific microbiome members may themselves be transferable between people, which is something we are only beginning to understand.”Microbes are a diverse range of bacteria and other microscopic organisms, both beneficial and harmful, that are too small to be seen without a microscope.

Generally, the more diverse these microbes are, the better suited the environment (the microbiome) will be to disturbances, and better for your health.Eating the same foods and lifestyle habits, like being physically active, have important effects on the microbiome in the gut and mouth.But in terms of specific shared microbes, these factors aren’t actually as significant compared to living together, Heidrich said.“Unless my strains physically travel from me to you, the same diet alone will not necessarily make us share more of our strains,” said Heidrich, a researcher at the University of Trento, Italy.

“It’s more that if I pass one of my strains to you and we eat the same diet, that strain will find a similar nutritional environment in your gut to the one it was thriving in before, making it more likely to successfully colonize your gut.”If you’re passing microbes between others that live with you, what about others in your community? The answer is yes — that too.“People living in different households but from the same community, like the same ...