There’s more and more content these days talking about “the new science of gut bacteria” and talking about how important it is to our health and wellbeing.
Gut bacteria in the large intestine are generally considered (including by me) important for human health although again you would not starve to death or die of malnutrition if they all went away because the vast majority of the calories a person in the developed world gets are from foods that bacteria is not needed at all to digest and make use of those calories. Our ancestors 1000s of years ago however probably went through lean periods in which most of their nutrition came from very fibrous plant material with very little starches and free sugars in them, and in that situation, the calories from the SCFAs produced by gut bacteria might have often made the difference between survival and starving to death.
Do you think all that is bunk / pseudoscience?