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Urbanization

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Contents

Historically, high-density urban environments have housed only a fraction of the global population, with the majority residing in rural areas or small villages. However, in the last two decades, this trend has reversed. Currently, 55% of the world’s population lives in urban areas
United Nations 2018 https://population.un.org/wup/Publications/Files/WUP2018-Report.pdf.
Ritchie & Roser 2020 https:// ourworldindata.org/urbanization

Urban diet, increased sanitation, and antibiotic exposure contribute to what has been termed “microbiota insufficiency syndrome” (“the loss of microbial taxa and associated [microbial] functions that have been part of our evolutionary past”)
Fragiadakis et al. 2019 Gut Microbes 10: 216-27
Sonnenburg & Sonnenburg 2019a

This has also been linked to an increase in immune and metaboli…