IIRC there are several of the "Blue Zones" where just bad government records. (People who had incorrect birth dates, or had already died and the government just didn't know about it)

Jose DeSanquin Demarco of Bolivia is now the world’s oldest man at 117, he attributes his health to 10 hours daily in the sun and fields farming quinoa.

Photographed here, Jose’s 90 year old wife holds their newborn twins.

Some of the blue zones were disproven, due to falsified documentation or lack of it.

> We are what we eat.

putting together a theory on how bacteria organized multicellular life to exploit our macro-movements and proliferate between damp spots

Do you mean you work in this domain and are working on the above theory?

my only credential is a bio-eng degree, but i read a lot and hope to put together a novel or something to get ppl thinking about it, until we can find a way to test the hypothesis

The symbiotic relationship between Humans and their resident Microbiome (especially the gut microbiome) is already a well-studied subject. But it can certainly do with more popularization :-)

Some References:

1) Role of the Microbiome in Human Development - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6580755/

2) Human Microbiome Project - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Microbiome_Project

3) The Human Microbiome Project: Exploring the microbial part of ourselves in a changing world - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3709439/

4) The Human Microbiome: From Symbiosis to Pathogenesis - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3731629/

5) The Second Brain: A Groundbreaking New Understanding of Nervous Disorders of the Stomach and Intestine by Michael Gershon. This is a must-read neuro-psychology book.

6) Gut: The inside story of our body’s most under-rated organ by Giulia Enders. Another must-read book.

yes! i'm hoping to understand more about the beginning of this co-existence, to maybe better work out ways to make their metabolism interact with ours in more helpful ways, will start that list from 7 backwards :) ty!

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8061703/ is around where i started, some time after learning about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-brewery_syndrome

The Fundamentals of Microbiome Science by Angela Douglas seems to be the definitive/authoritative work on the subject by a recognized expert (will be getting this book :-) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angela_E._Douglas

Checkout her other books too. They all seem fascinating.

The three things i find most fascinating in Biology are 1) Neuroscience, 2) Immune Systems and 3) Microbiome on our bodies. Together; they literally define who we are (mentally and physically), how we survive and how we coexist with our environment and yet there is no one book which brings everything together.

As a kid, i had read two classic books from the Soviet-era Mir Publishers Science for Everyone series which fired my imagination and sparked a lifelong interest in the Life Sciences. You might also find these (and others from the series) interesting (though old);

Science for Everyone – Ethology What Animals Do and Why? - https://mirtitles.org/2013/10/08/science-for-everyone-etholo...

Science for Everyone – Me Or Not Me - https://mirtitles.org/2011/12/22/science-for-everyone-me-or-...

Addendum to my above thought,

Roseburia also seems to correlate with longevity;

The Gut Microbiome, Aging, and Longevity: A Systematic Review - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7762384/

Deep insights into the gut microbial community of extreme longevity in south Chinese centenarians by ultra-deep metagenomics and large-scale culturomics - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41522-022-00282-3