Secrets of an Unseen World
Mahmoud Ghannoum,
the son of a Lebanese
plumber, is perhaps the
world’s leading authority
on the microscopic
fungi in humans.
By Joe Miller
Photographed by Angelo Merendino
He’s also an author
and businessman who
keeps reinventing himself
while saving lives
in the process.
It’s early on a chilly January morning, and Dr. Mahmoud Ghannoum –
a renowned researcher and pioneer at Case Western Reserve University’s
School of Medicine – is having one of those surreal
moments that seem to populate his life.
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His groundbreaking work on
microscopic fungi spans five decades of
lab experiments, academic conferences,
and scholarly tomes. Yet on this day,
Ghannoum is on local television
plugging Total Gut Balance – essentially
a cookbook and fitness guide.
For his first mass-marketed book,
Ghannoum and co-writer Eve Adamson
have put together a wealth of diet
advice, complete with 50 recipes,
that inextricably links personal health
to the well-being of the millions of
fungi, bacteria, and viruses living in our
digestive system.
“Our gut is teeming with these
microbes,” the 69-year-old Shaker
Heights resident tells a Channel 19
reporter on the station’s “Sunny Side
Up” show. “We need to nourish the
good ones and keep those bad ones
under control,” he says.
Our intestines are like “a garden,”
he continues with an easy smile on his
face and emphasizing each point with
his hands. “We would like to have more
roses and less weeds.”
Since the release of the book in
December, Ghannoum is suddenly
finding fame on the talk-show and
podcast circuit doing what he’s always
done best: unveiling the secrets of the
unseen world inside our bodies. His
intense focus and drive have led this
son of a Lebanese plumber from the
streets of Beirut to the labs of CWRU
and University Hospitals and now
to two Amazon best-seller lists (for
“physiology” and “abdominal disorders
& diseases”).
But for those who know him,
that journey and Ghannoum’s latest
entrepreneurial streak – he has also
launched a line of probiotics with his
son – is anything but a surprise.
“He keeps reinventing himself,”
says Dr. Ashraf Ibrahim, a professor of
medicine at the University of California,
Los Angeles, and a former student of
Ghannoum’s. “He has a vision. He can
figure out what is going to be hot and
what is going to be beneficial.”
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