If your gut microbiome isn’t healthy, is there anything that can be done about it? Elizabeth Tracey reports

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A recent review in the Journal of the American Medical Association asserts that the diversity of bacteria in your colon impact on the likelihood that you’ll develop cancer as well as how you may respond to treatment. William Nelson, director of the Kimmel Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins, says there’s a next logical question.

Nelson: Can you change the microbiome, those family of bacteria in your colon in some way that's productive? And people have actually done that, transplanted the microbiome from a more productive environment, more diversity. You can probably change this a little bit with the high fiber diets. That's one of the things that seems to promote the diversity of the bacteria. There are antibiotics that can change it, the broad spectrum antibiotics, may be possible to use specific antibiotics to kill only certain ones that allow the more productive ones to grow back.     :32

Nelson notes that many strategies are being investigated. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.