The Proof with Simon Hill cover image

Food, politics, and the environment | George Monbiot

The Proof with Simon Hill

CHAPTER

Soil Biology Is Even More Important Than Soil Chemistry

The relationship between plants and the microbes in the soil is a remarkable symbiotic one. The rhizosphere, this little zone of soil surrounding the root is a plant's external gut. And we call that ring the rhizosphere and it includes some of the densest bacterial communities on earth. In return for the sugars the plant gives them, they extract minerals from the soil. All those people are happening in the human gut. You have these incredibly dense bacterial communities. They defend you against infection, fighting off pathogens which might invade the gut wall and they fire up your immune system.

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