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Speaker 1: Nobody likes getting colonized by microbial invaders, Those little guys

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Speaker 1: swimming around inside you, messing up your body's normal function,

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Speaker 1: hijacking yourselves to make more themselves, meanwhile giving you headaches

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Speaker 1: or sniffles or stomach pains or even worse. No, we

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Speaker 1: want them out. We take medicine to kill them, or

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Speaker 1: we wait for our immune system to hunt them down

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Speaker 1: and root them out, leaving us with pure, unpolluted human bits.

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Speaker 2: Right.

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Speaker 1: Not really, Actually, the truth about our relationship with microbes

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Speaker 1: is much more complex. They not only fight on our side.

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Speaker 1: Sometimes most of the time we can't even tell who

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Speaker 1: is on which side, or if there are even sides.

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Speaker 1: Maybe it's more like a big microbial economy than a

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Speaker 1: black and white battle. Today in the podcast, we're gonna

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Speaker 1: dig into the life of microbes and the role they

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Speaker 1: play in keeping us healthy and sick. Do they help us,

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Speaker 1: do they hurt us? Or is the answer? As always,

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Speaker 1: it depends a word to today's parents. Today's episode is

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Speaker 1: getting a little gooey. We can't talk about microbes without

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Speaker 1: talking about pooh. It's always a conversational risk when talking

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Speaker 1: to biologists, so keep that in mind if you're playing

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Speaker 1: this episode with your little ones. I vote let them listen.

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Speaker 1: There's pooer in knowledge. See what I did there? Either way,

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's extraordinary microbial universe.

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Speaker 3: Hello. I'm kellyleener Smith. I study parasites in space, and

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Speaker 3: today we are talking about one of my favorite topics

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Speaker 3: as a biologist, which is to say, microbes and poop.

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Speaker 1: Hi. I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I have

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Speaker 1: poop in my freezer.

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Speaker 3: Oh oh, that's a little too much, all right? So

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Speaker 3: what is the most unpleasant microbe related thing that's ever

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Speaker 3: happened to you?

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Speaker 1: You want to hear about every time I had diarrhea?

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Speaker 3: Maybe the one worst time is what I was thinking.

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Speaker 1: I guess maybe not to hear about that.

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Speaker 3: Never mind, I'm backing off. For me, it was an

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Speaker 3: infection that was a healing and that was unpleasant. We

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Speaker 3: should go in a different direction. What else should I ask?

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Speaker 3: Here's my question for you? What is your favorite thing

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Speaker 3: to consume that increases the diversity of your microbiome however

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Speaker 3: temporarily well.

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Speaker 1: As you'll hear in our conversation with Katrina in a minute,

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Speaker 1: we are big fans of beans, in the whites and household.

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Speaker 1: And so we're even members of the Rancho Gordo Bean Club,

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Speaker 1: which means we have mailed to us every few weeks

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Speaker 1: a box of heirloom beans, and so we have all

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Speaker 1: sorts of crazy beans and basically we have beans at

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Speaker 1: every meal.

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Speaker 3: Wow. So you must have like the best bean recipes?

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Speaker 3: Can you send them to me?

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Speaker 1: Absolutely? Yeah, we'll share some with.

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Speaker 3: You because I got to say, after this conversation with Katrina,

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Speaker 3: I am starting to think about how beans can be

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Speaker 3: incorporated into every one of our dinners.

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Speaker 1: At least we put lentils on everything. They're in salad

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Speaker 1: and everything. They're fantastic. Yeah, we're big fans of beans.

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Speaker 1: And our son loves beans too, which is a great outcome.

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Speaker 3: You didn't mention your daughter. Does she not love beans?

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Speaker 1: She's not yet on the bean wagon. Yep.

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Speaker 3: You know it's hard to get kids on the bean wagon,

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Speaker 3: I imagine. Yeah.

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Speaker 1: Well, you know, with lots of foods, you can start

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Speaker 1: with like the easier version, you know, like if you're

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Speaker 1: gonna start drinking coffee, you put milk and sugar in it.

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Speaker 1: I'm not quite sure what the easy way is with beans.

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Speaker 1: Maybe put lots of cheese on top or something.

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Speaker 3: At tacos has got to be tacos tacos.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. Anyway, today we are talking about really fun

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Speaker 1: and really important topics, what's going on inside our bodies

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Speaker 1: and on our skin, about all those critters that are

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Speaker 1: living with us or who are part of us.

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Speaker 3: And you asked our listeners a question to gauge how

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Speaker 3: subtly they understand the importance of bacteria in our bodies.

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Speaker 3: So you ask them, do microbes hurt you or keep

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Speaker 3: you healthy? And here's what they had to say.

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Speaker 4: Microbes in your body are what allow you to function

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Speaker 4: at all, So yeah, they're helpful, although some kinds of

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Speaker 4: microbes are bad for you and they will hurt you both.

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Speaker 5: There are good microbes and bad microbes.

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Speaker 6: Providing the microbes in your body are kept under control

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Speaker 6: in their number and their type, they can definitely help you.

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Speaker 6: But if you get introduced microbes or the microbes get

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Speaker 6: to a critical number, then they can also cause harm.

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Speaker 5: Like most questions in biology, the answer is it depends.

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Speaker 5: For example, your digestive system doesn't work without microbes, but

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Speaker 5: if you have too many of the wrong ones, then

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Speaker 5: it doesn't work at all, we.

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Speaker 7: Couldn't live with the microbes in their body.

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Speaker 8: I'm onto you now with your deliberately vague questions. So

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Speaker 8: microbes in the body, I think what you wanted me

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Speaker 8: to say was in the body, but not in the bloodstream. However,

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Speaker 8: I think the research has changed on that, so I

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Speaker 8: actually think you do have microbes in the bloodstream now,

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Speaker 8: but by notche Yeah, they are good for you.

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Speaker 2: I read somewhere that our bodies are whole ecosystems, so

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Speaker 2: I would say that on the whole, the microbes are

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Speaker 2: beneficial to us. Hope they do both.

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Speaker 7: They help you and they can hurt you if they

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Speaker 7: metestasize turn to cancer.

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Speaker 9: Microbes in our body are good and help, but there

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Speaker 9: might also be bad microbes that you could get that

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Speaker 9: would make you sick.

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Speaker 1: They can help or hurt or neither, or either one,

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Speaker 1: depending on where it happens to be.

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Speaker 10: I think the general rule of thumb is that the

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Speaker 10: microbes that are in your body are there to help you,

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Speaker 10: whereas the microbes that are trying to get into your

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Speaker 10: body from the outside are the ones you gotta worry about.

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Speaker 2: I believe the great majority of them are benign and

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Speaker 2: useful microbes compared to the rare and wanted to intruders.

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Speaker 1: Help, absolutely help.

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Speaker 7: I can barely distinguish myself from my microbes.

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Speaker 9: Finally, a question I can actually answer as a nurse.

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Speaker 9: Microbes in the body can be harmful or beneficial. It

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Speaker 9: depends on the type of microbe, the quantity of that microbe,

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Speaker 9: and the location of that microbe.

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Speaker 7: Both because some are bad for your body, like germs,

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Speaker 7: and some are good for your body like good backter.

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Speaker 11: Yet, there are forty trillion microbes in your body compared

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Speaker 11: to thirty eight trillion human body cells in your body,

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Speaker 11: and the majority of the microbes are there to make

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Speaker 11: you feel better.

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Speaker 1: And then every once in a while on the balance

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Speaker 1: is out of whack. They get into stuff they're not

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Speaker 1: supposed to do and cause us a little bit of damage.

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Speaker 1: But hey, what areferens for?

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Speaker 10: Microbes span the gamut from being critical for functioning to

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Speaker 10: being lethal.

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Speaker 12: We might not exist without micro It's something like ten

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Speaker 12: times more microbes than human sells in the body. They

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Speaker 12: help with digestion and glucose metabolism, help absorb nutrients in

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Speaker 12: the body.

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Speaker 7: Classic science answer it depends, Oh, this.

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Speaker 9: Is a false dichotomy microbes both hurt and help you.

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Speaker 5: I think microbes in our body are the part of

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Speaker 5: our body.

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Speaker 1: These are great answers. Thank you very much to our

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Speaker 1: list of volunteers, and remember you can join them at

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Speaker 1: any time. Just write to us two questions at Danielandkelly

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Speaker 1: dot org and we will hit you up next time. Kelly,

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Speaker 1: what did you think of these answers?

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Speaker 3: I liked I can barely distinguish myself from my microbes.

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Speaker 3: That made me smile. I wanted to learn more about

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Speaker 3: the cancer and bacteria link. I don't know too much

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Speaker 3: about that. Yeah, what about you? What was your favorite answer?

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Speaker 1: I like the person who said that they're onto us

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Speaker 1: with our deliberately vague questions. This whole thing is some

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Speaker 1: kind of scheme. Yeah. I thought these were great, and

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Speaker 1: they show that people have, all right, a pretty nuanced

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Speaker 1: understanding of microbes. They're not just pathogens. They're part of

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Speaker 1: who we are and how we live and all of

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Speaker 1: our futures.

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Speaker 3: All right, Well, I think it's time for us to

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Speaker 3: dig in with the interview with our special guest today.

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Speaker 1: So it's my pleasure to welcome back to the podcast,

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Speaker 1: Katrina Whitson. She's the senior editor of the whites and

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Speaker 1: Science Report quarterly journal, and she's the current holder of

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Speaker 1: the whites In and Down Fellowship for actual experimental science,

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Speaker 1: not just computer stuff. WHOA welcome to the pod.

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Speaker 7: I don't think you guys understand what a big concession

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Speaker 7: that was. There have been times at U see Irvine

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Speaker 7: where there were three whites and labs. There was Daniel Whitson,

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Speaker 7: who you all know and love, shimone Whiteson, his brother

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Speaker 7: who is a computer science professor at Oxford but came

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Speaker 7: into a sabbatical here. And then there was the actual

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Speaker 7: whites Inn Lab Katrina Whitson, where there's like a physical

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Speaker 7: lab and there's people in there growing microbes and glasswere

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Speaker 7: being autoclaimed and stuff like that. It wasn't just like

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Speaker 7: in the cloud. You know.

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Speaker 1: Well went out here today to debate the philosophical question

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Speaker 1: of whether stuff on the computer is actual answer or not.

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Speaker 1: That's just me trying to butter you up.

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Speaker 3: From the episode. I think we should bring you back

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Speaker 3: for that debate.

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Speaker 7: Though I know that what Daniel does is real science.

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Speaker 7: I don't mean that. I'm just I'm just enjoying the.

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Speaker 2: Joke, you know.

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Speaker 1: I'm just glad to get that on the air. Wow,

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Speaker 1: we have that requestion. So today we've invited you on

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Speaker 1: the podcast because we're talking about microbes and microbes in

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Speaker 1: the body and whether they help you when they hurt you,

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Speaker 1: what their role is? Are they part of us? Are

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Speaker 1: they our friend? Are their enemy? Are they our front

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Speaker 1: of me? How does it all work? And this is

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Speaker 1: your area of expertise that we're very happy to talk

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Speaker 1: to you about it, But first let's get people acquainted

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Speaker 1: and make sure everybody is talking about the same thing.

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Speaker 1: Like when I say microbe, what does that mean to you?

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Speaker 7: Well, microbes refer to life forms that are too small

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Speaker 7: to see with the naked eye, but it can refer

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Speaker 7: to like lots of different branches of the tree of life.

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Speaker 7: So microbes can be viral, which we even debate whether

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Speaker 7: they're alive or not. But they're definitely the most biologically

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Speaker 7: diverse entity on the planet. So viruses, bacteria, fungi like yeast,

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Speaker 7: other eukaryotic parasites like nightmarish ones that cause diarrhea. But

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Speaker 7: most microbes are not pathogens. Even though most of what

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Speaker 7: you hear about microbes are pathogens, most microbes actually are

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Speaker 7: living their lives. Their goal is never to cause disease.

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Speaker 7: They're out for themselves.

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Speaker 1: You know, they have goals. You mean, like if you

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Speaker 1: talk to them, they'd have like hopes and dreams.

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Speaker 7: Well, I mean, I think all life forms have a

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Speaker 7: basic goal of reproduction, whether they're like thinking about it

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Speaker 7: or not.

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Speaker 3: Could you give us a bit of our history on

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Speaker 3: the thinking about this, Like, did we always think it

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Speaker 3: was bad to have microbes in our gut? Have we

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Speaker 3: kind of gone back and forth on thinking they're good

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Speaker 3: or bad?

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Speaker 7: Yeah, I mean definitely. Well, the first time we ever

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Speaker 7: even saw microbe was when Van Lohenhook ground his own microscopes.

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Speaker 7: He was a draper in the Netherlands, and he was

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Speaker 7: grinding his own microscopes in order to look at the

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Speaker 7: threads at the edge of the curtains he was making.

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Speaker 7: But then for fun, he just took a piece of

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Speaker 7: dental plaque, like a glop out of his mouth and

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Speaker 7: looked at it, and he saw the little microbes jumping around,

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Speaker 7: and he drew pictures of them. He called them animal tules.

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Speaker 7: That's the first time we saw microbe. At that point,

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Speaker 7: I think our thinking was pretty neutral. I mean, it

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Speaker 7: took us a couple centuries to even realize that like

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Speaker 7: washing hands was a good idea to prevent disease. So yeah,

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Speaker 7: it was pretty neutral for a while. But then I'd

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Speaker 7: say by the twentieth century, once cock postulates and we

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Speaker 7: understood that microbes caused disease, then I think we were

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Speaker 7: just expecting every time we turned a corner and discovered

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Speaker 7: a new microbe that it was causing disease. And you

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Speaker 7: might have heard of like bubble boy or in the

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Speaker 7: nineteen fifties when we first developed notobiotic cultivation, we at

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Speaker 7: that time thought like, wouldn't it be great if we

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Speaker 7: could all be sterile. We really didn't imagine that the

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Speaker 7: microbes were doing too much positive with a few exceptions,

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Speaker 7: like there were people who appreciated probiotics around the year

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Speaker 7: nineteen hundred, we.

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Speaker 1: Go back, I want to understand what is nodobiotics and

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Speaker 1: who's the bubble boy great.

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Speaker 7: Noobiotics refers to cultivating animals in an intentional community of microbes.

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Speaker 7: It doesn't actually have to mean sterile. It can often

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Speaker 7: mean like intentionally cultivating say a mouse with like ten

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Speaker 7: known microbes and then like learning exactly how those microbes

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Speaker 7: affect immune development. And all other kinds of health outcomes.

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Speaker 7: So noobiotics are a really important tool in microbiome science.

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Speaker 7: Where we can intentionally cultivate mice or zebrafish or like

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Speaker 7: pick your model animal of choice. We can't really do

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Speaker 7: that with people though, With this exception of bubble Boy,

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Speaker 7: who was a boy who had severe immune deficiency, and

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Speaker 7: I mean kind of brilliantly, considering the technology available at

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Speaker 7: the time, his medical community the doctors around him figured

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Speaker 7: out how to keep him in essentially sterile conditions, like

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Speaker 7: in a plastic bubble with oxygen pumped in, so that

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Speaker 7: he was never exposed to microbes that would quickly kill him.

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Speaker 7: There's a movie about it too, So that's pretty rare

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Speaker 7: to have a human growing up with that little microbial exposure.

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Speaker 7: But at that time, we thought like, oh, the more antibiotics,

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Speaker 7: the more better. Just like pop them down, it'll probably

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Speaker 7: help you. There was not really a feeling of loss

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Speaker 7: that by taking antibiotics you were destroying something.

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Speaker 3: And I feel like since then we've gone in the

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Speaker 3: opposite direction where whenever you're listening to a podcast you

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Speaker 3: get advertisements about bacteria that are so good for you,

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Speaker 3: And have we sort of gone in the opposite direction.

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Speaker 3: Are we finding a happy medium?

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Speaker 7: That's a good question. I feel like the ads you

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Speaker 7: hear are sometimes coming from the eighty billion dollar probiotic industry,

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Speaker 7: which is not really resting upon too much evidence, to

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Speaker 7: be honest, and so the kinds of things you hear

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Speaker 7: in those ads are often not all that close to reality.

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Speaker 7: So I guess it depends a little bit about which

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Speaker 7: parts you're hearing about. I think the message that we

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Speaker 7: shouldn't just pop antibiotics without any concern for the damage

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Speaker 7: they can cause, I feel like that has gotten much better.

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Speaker 7: So yeah, I think we have come to appreciate that

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Speaker 7: taking antibiotics has a consequence that's not only positive. Although

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Speaker 7: keep in mind that eighty percent of the antibiotics used

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Speaker 7: in the United States at least are in agriculture, so

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Speaker 7: our own human consumption can only have so much impact

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Speaker 7: on avoiding the antibiotic resistance crisis.

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Speaker 1: All right, So microbes are these little critters that are

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Speaker 1: too small to see, which frankly feels to me like

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Speaker 1: a little fuzzy, like if I have terrible vision, are

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Speaker 1: there some things that are microbes to me? Like if

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Speaker 1: I can't see cats to the count's microbes because I

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Speaker 1: have like very bad eyesight. But as usual, it's biology,

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Speaker 1: so it's fuzzy, no, I mean.

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Speaker 7: It's definitely like you know, if I had a slide,

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Speaker 7: I could give you some images of the scale bar

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Speaker 7: and the sizes of viruses and bacteria. Like your average

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Speaker 7: bacterial cell is about ten times smaller than your average

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Speaker 7: eukaryotic cell. Eukaryotic cells have a nucleus. Those are the

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Speaker 7: kind of cells that make up our bodies, and there's

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Speaker 7: also unicellular versions of them. But I mean, yeah, the

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Speaker 7: point is just that they're tiny, and they tend to

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Speaker 7: be unicellular too.

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Speaker 1: I mean some dogs are tiny too. Around la fit

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Speaker 1: people's pursus dogs all.

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Speaker 7: Right, those dogs have like four thousand times as many

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Speaker 7: microbes in their guts, is what I'm saying, though, I.

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Speaker 1: Mean toy dogs are pretty small. Anyway. You're the expert

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Speaker 1: on it, So that's a And so you've walked us

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Speaker 1: through this history where we learned about microbes. Some of

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Speaker 1: them cause disease, but now we have a more nuanced take.

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Speaker 1: So tell us, like, if microbes are part of us,

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Speaker 1: where on the body do they live? Where can I

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Speaker 1: find microbes in my body.

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Speaker 7: I mean, you can find microbes literally everywhere, whether it's

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Speaker 7: your body or not, and so that's actually a challenge.

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Speaker 7: Sometimes I start my talks out with this challenge that,

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Speaker 7: like a key postulate of microbial ecology is that nothing

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Speaker 7: is sterile, and then I try to think of maybe

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Speaker 7: exceptions to that, like places where life really can't be sustained.

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Speaker 7: But I mean you could just check out and environment

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Speaker 7: deep sea, ocean, vents, hot springs, you know, the outside

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Speaker 7: of a spaceship, like.

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Speaker 1: What about uranus is urinus sterile?

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Speaker 7: Wow, Well that depends a bit on the meeting, but

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Speaker 7: answer well, I think there are places that have very

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Speaker 7: very low microbial load and some materials that can't really

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Speaker 7: sustain microbial life so well, like maybe glass for example.

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Speaker 7: But on average, you know, on your body, which was

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Speaker 7: your question, we have really really dense microbial colonization in

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Speaker 7: our gut. Those are mostly microbes that can't survive with oxygen,

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Speaker 7: Like they're called anaerobes, so they live without oxygen. Most

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Speaker 7: of the microbes in your gut are anaerobes, which I

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Speaker 7: just think is amazing because we obviously live in a

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Speaker 7: world with oxygen, so it's kind of crazy. How all

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Speaker 7: these anaerobes colonize our bodies.

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Speaker 3: We're reversed bubble boys for the bacteria in our guts.

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Speaker 7: Yeah, exactly. Even your teeth have really strict anaerobes growing

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Speaker 7: on them, so your oral cavity is super super densely

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Speaker 7: colonized with microbes. Like the number of microbes per density

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Speaker 7: is about the same in your oral cavity and in

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Speaker 7: your gut, And like in a soil sample where they're

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Speaker 7: famous for being teeming with microbes, and in your oral

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Speaker 7: cavity there's just gradients of microbes that gobble up the

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Speaker 7: oxygen at the surface, so that shields the ones underneath

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Speaker 7: so that the anaerobs can survive.

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Speaker 1: Why do you say oral cavity instead of mouth?

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Speaker 7: Wow? I mean mouth is probably a better choice. I

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Speaker 7: see what you're saying, But I guess I just got

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Speaker 7: so used to writing papers about oral microbiomes and oral cavities,

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Speaker 7: And like in the Human Microbiome Project, there were seventeen

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Speaker 7: sampling sites in the oral cavity. There's symmetry, Like your

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Speaker 7: two back top teeth on each side of your mouth

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Speaker 7: have more similar microbial communities compared to ones closer to

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Speaker 7: the surface having to do with like nutrient access, and

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Speaker 7: so I think I'm just thinking about that.

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Speaker 3: When I say it, we've gotten a little bit farther

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Speaker 3: away from my favorite topic. So first I want to

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Speaker 3: point out that Annuel was the first one to mention

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Speaker 3: poop and butts in this episode, So I win.

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Speaker 1: I win.

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Speaker 3: You can't always blame the biologists. But I've been dying

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Speaker 3: to ask you. So I heard that our bodies have

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Speaker 3: so many microbes, that we have more microbes in our

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Speaker 3: body than we do cells. But then I heard that

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Speaker 3: the balance of power changes immediately following a bowel movement

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Speaker 3: because there's so many bacteria in our feces. What is

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Speaker 3: the truth, Katrina, I have to know.

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Speaker 7: Wow, Well, that's an awesome question, and it's been a

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Speaker 7: real topic of debate, and it's funny because it's like

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Speaker 7: the intro slide to every microbiome talk for about ten

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Speaker 7: years was all about how there's ten times as many

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Speaker 7: microbial cells as human cells and an average human body.

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Speaker 7: But then we redid our back of the envelope calculations,

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Speaker 7: so now we call it front of the envelope, and

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Speaker 7: now the ratio is estimated to be more like one

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Speaker 7: to one, but like both the numerator and the denominator

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Speaker 7: are like highly influx here. I wouldn't swear the life

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Speaker 7: of my children on these calculations or anything like that,

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Speaker 7: because it's.

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Speaker 1: Really good too, but.

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Speaker 7: Like even just estimating the number of cells in a

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Speaker 7: human body.

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Speaker 1: Wait, sorry, are there science conversations that you have that

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Speaker 1: I'm not in where you are swearing the life of

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Speaker 1: our children?

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Speaker 7: No, definitely not.

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Speaker 1: I mean, I gotta wonder now, Daniel.

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Speaker 3: I feel like you're often on the show talking about

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Speaker 3: dangerous situations you'd put the kids in for the sake

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Speaker 3: of physics. I don't feel like you need to be

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Speaker 3: high and mighty about this.

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Speaker 1: I'm mostly talking about your kids, Kelly.

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Speaker 3: Oh oh wow.

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Speaker 7: Interesting.

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Speaker 3: I'm sending my kids to their grandparents' house when you

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Speaker 3: guys come to visit next week.

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Speaker 1: All right, Sona, you're telling us there's a lot of uncertainty.

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Speaker 1: We don't really even know whether there are more human

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Speaker 1: or microbial cells in our bodies.

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Speaker 7: I'd say that balance is closer to roughly even, and

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Speaker 7: I agree that when you have a bowel movement, the

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Speaker 7: balance would shift because you would lose a lot of

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Speaker 7: microbial cells every time, depending how much fiber you eat

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Speaker 7: and if you have really big bowel movements or not.

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Speaker 7: But no matter what, despite the number of cells, what

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Speaker 7: we can always say is that the diversity of metabolisms

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Speaker 7: in our body is heavily weighted towards the microbes, because

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Speaker 7: human cells can only pull off like a pretty small

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Speaker 7: number of metabolisms. Like the number of types of genes

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Speaker 7: is pretty small in comparison to the number of types

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Speaker 7: of genes that microbes carry. Each microbe can live in

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Speaker 7: a totally different niche, Like there's microbes that live with

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Speaker 7: no oxygen or microbes that can live with a little

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Speaker 7: bit of oxygen, and they each carry very unique genes

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Speaker 7: for breaking down all kinds of molecules. So like, our

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Speaker 7: metabolomic diversity is unquestionably much more coming from our microbes

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Speaker 7: than from our human cells.

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Speaker 1: All Right, So, I feel like we're transitioning from talking

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Speaker 1: about individual microbes to talking about like communities and microbes.

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Speaker 1: And you're telling us these live here and those live there.

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Speaker 1: And you hear the word all the time these days,

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Speaker 1: the microbiome. Yeah, so microbiome just a description of like

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Speaker 1: microbial communities.

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Speaker 7: Yes, exactly. So a microbiome is a community of the

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Speaker 7: microbes we just defined in a particular environment. So the

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Speaker 7: microbiome definition includes what the environment is. So like, the

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Speaker 7: kind of microbes that live in your gut where there's

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Speaker 7: not very much oxygen is very different than the kind

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Speaker 7: of microbes that live at the surface of the ocean,

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Speaker 7: where photosynthesis is a big deal. So it's about what

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Speaker 7: type of life is sustained in that environment.

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Speaker 1: So if I see like a bunch of ladies in

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Speaker 1: LA with one hundred tiny little dogs that are so

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Speaker 1: small that I can't see them, so those are all microbes,

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Speaker 1: and together they make a little microbiome.

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Speaker 7: I mean, I can't really just say yes to that.

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Speaker 7: And you can't see the dogs. That means they're in

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Speaker 7: your imagination. So then.

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Speaker 1: They're philosophical dogs.

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Speaker 7: You need some evidence to support your claims. I thought

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Speaker 7: you were a scientist.

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Speaker 1: Wow, I just do computer stuff.

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Speaker 3: Actually, it's good to know that. Next time I'm Daniel

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Speaker 3: and I have a conversation like this, it's okay to

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Speaker 3: just say I'm not humoring that.

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Speaker 7: Oh no, in theory, I see what you're saying, And like,

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Speaker 7: only Los Angeles would support one hundred people with microscopically

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Speaker 7: tiny dogs. So that's kind of special to that environment.

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Speaker 1: I see your point, So then I want to connect

441
00:22:18,600 --> 00:22:20,440
Speaker 1: it back to something you said earlier. You were talking

442
00:22:20,440 --> 00:22:22,480
Speaker 1: about the kinds of microbes that live in different parts

443
00:22:22,480 --> 00:22:25,240
Speaker 1: of our bodies. Do we have like one microbiome, like

444
00:22:25,320 --> 00:22:28,480
Speaker 1: one community of microbes or are there different communities and

445
00:22:28,560 --> 00:22:32,000
Speaker 1: microbes that live like in my oral cavity and on

446
00:22:32,040 --> 00:22:33,600
Speaker 1: my gut or on the tip of my nose.

447
00:22:33,880 --> 00:22:36,840
Speaker 7: Yeah, there's really big differences in the types of microbes

448
00:22:36,840 --> 00:22:39,680
Speaker 7: that live in your gut versus your oral cavity versus

449
00:22:39,680 --> 00:22:42,360
Speaker 7: like the dryer patches of your skin on your elbow

450
00:22:42,560 --> 00:22:46,080
Speaker 7: versus the oil ear patches of your skin in another

451
00:22:46,119 --> 00:22:48,520
Speaker 7: part of your body, like your armpits, say, and also

452
00:22:48,600 --> 00:22:51,320
Speaker 7: super interesting most of our bodies. On the skin, we

453
00:22:51,440 --> 00:22:54,679
Speaker 7: have a lot of diversity of bacteria, but on our feet,

454
00:22:54,720 --> 00:22:57,879
Speaker 7: which are more moist, we actually have more diversity of fungi.

455
00:22:58,680 --> 00:23:01,120
Speaker 7: And this is all in health anyway. If we start

456
00:23:01,119 --> 00:23:04,960
Speaker 7: talking about transplants, which I imagine we will, there's fecal transplants,

457
00:23:05,000 --> 00:23:10,200
Speaker 7: there's armpit transplants, there's ear microbiome transplants, and so getting

458
00:23:10,280 --> 00:23:14,040
Speaker 7: a healthy community of microbes going is really important to

459
00:23:14,080 --> 00:23:16,920
Speaker 7: our health. But even defining health, of course is really hard.

460
00:23:17,119 --> 00:23:18,760
Speaker 3: Well, can we try to talk a little bit more then,

461
00:23:18,760 --> 00:23:20,879
Speaker 3: about what these microbes are doing for us? So you

462
00:23:20,960 --> 00:23:23,600
Speaker 3: mentioned that a bunch of the metabolism that happens in

463
00:23:23,640 --> 00:23:27,720
Speaker 3: our body is caused by bacteria, and that sounds like

464
00:23:27,800 --> 00:23:30,159
Speaker 3: it could be helpful. So what are some things that

465
00:23:30,200 --> 00:23:31,560
Speaker 3: our bacteria do for us?

466
00:23:31,880 --> 00:23:32,080
Speaker 12: Oh?

467
00:23:32,119 --> 00:23:34,320
Speaker 7: What a great question. So I mean, to be honest,

468
00:23:34,359 --> 00:23:36,560
Speaker 7: a lot of this is still unknown. So that's what's

469
00:23:36,600 --> 00:23:38,959
Speaker 7: so fun about our field. I'd say most of the

470
00:23:38,960 --> 00:23:41,280
Speaker 7: things that microbes are doing we don't know what they

471
00:23:41,280 --> 00:23:45,000
Speaker 7: are yet. But things that they do, for example, are

472
00:23:45,119 --> 00:23:48,280
Speaker 7: they can break down fiber. So when you eat fiber

473
00:23:48,320 --> 00:23:53,040
Speaker 7: in your diet, actually human metabolism can't handle that at all,

474
00:23:53,119 --> 00:23:55,880
Speaker 7: but the anaerobes living in your gut they're really good

475
00:23:55,920 --> 00:23:59,320
Speaker 7: at breaking down fiber. And another example that I love

476
00:23:59,680 --> 00:24:02,399
Speaker 7: is the sugars in breast milk. They should actually be

477
00:24:02,400 --> 00:24:05,240
Speaker 7: called fibers as well. So in breast and milk, about

478
00:24:05,280 --> 00:24:08,000
Speaker 7: fifteen percent of the energy is in the form of

479
00:24:08,240 --> 00:24:12,639
Speaker 7: sugars or fibers that human metabolisms just can't access at all,

480
00:24:13,040 --> 00:24:15,840
Speaker 7: but the microbes can. And so this is a really

481
00:24:15,880 --> 00:24:20,240
Speaker 7: important moment in human history, Like what moment matters more

482
00:24:20,320 --> 00:24:22,560
Speaker 7: than when a baby is born. That clearly we wouldn't

483
00:24:22,600 --> 00:24:25,119
Speaker 7: just throw fifteen percent of the energy that's in breast

484
00:24:25,119 --> 00:24:28,920
Speaker 7: milk down the drain unless it was really sustaining something important.

485
00:24:29,680 --> 00:24:31,920
Speaker 7: And that fifteen percent of the energy in the breast

486
00:24:31,920 --> 00:24:36,240
Speaker 7: milk is sustaining specific microbes that can break down the

487
00:24:36,280 --> 00:24:40,160
Speaker 7: breast milk sugars. And then when a diaraleal pathogen comes

488
00:24:40,200 --> 00:24:42,880
Speaker 7: through and tries to take up residents in a baby gut,

489
00:24:42,960 --> 00:24:46,439
Speaker 7: it doesn't have access to that secret nutrient source. And

490
00:24:46,520 --> 00:24:50,080
Speaker 7: so a big protection mechanism for babies in parts of

491
00:24:50,080 --> 00:24:52,600
Speaker 7: the world where diarrheal illness is still a really big

492
00:24:52,640 --> 00:24:55,640
Speaker 7: deal is if you're breastfed and you have those microbes

493
00:24:55,640 --> 00:24:58,520
Speaker 7: that can break down the breast milk sugars, then the

494
00:24:58,720 --> 00:25:01,440
Speaker 7: when salmonilla comes through, it was just kind of like cupping,

495
00:25:01,680 --> 00:25:05,440
Speaker 7: and those special microbes like Biffido bacterias that can break

496
00:25:05,440 --> 00:25:08,680
Speaker 7: down the breast milk sugars dominate the baby gut. That's

497
00:25:08,720 --> 00:25:11,239
Speaker 7: probably how most baby guts were organized while they were

498
00:25:11,240 --> 00:25:13,439
Speaker 7: breast fed through human history.

499
00:25:13,920 --> 00:25:15,679
Speaker 1: So let me see if I understand you're telling me

500
00:25:15,720 --> 00:25:18,400
Speaker 1: that basically the first step in digestion, like I eat

501
00:25:18,400 --> 00:25:21,439
Speaker 1: a bowl of beans, it's not that my human mechanisms

502
00:25:21,480 --> 00:25:24,320
Speaker 1: get involved and break the beans down, but like microbes

503
00:25:24,320 --> 00:25:26,280
Speaker 1: are on the front line and they start the process

504
00:25:26,320 --> 00:25:28,200
Speaker 1: breaking things down because.

505
00:25:27,920 --> 00:25:31,040
Speaker 7: I can't the order of events there is a little different, Like, okay,

506
00:25:31,080 --> 00:25:33,280
Speaker 7: so you're eating your beans, they get to your stomach,

507
00:25:33,400 --> 00:25:37,160
Speaker 7: the stomach acid starts to break things down. Digestive enzymes

508
00:25:37,200 --> 00:25:41,520
Speaker 7: come in from your pancreas and small intestine area. So

509
00:25:41,680 --> 00:25:45,400
Speaker 7: actually the first chomp at most nutrients is coming from

510
00:25:45,680 --> 00:25:49,520
Speaker 7: earlier steps in your digestive tract. And actually the microbial

511
00:25:49,600 --> 00:25:51,920
Speaker 7: load is quite low, Like we do have microbes in

512
00:25:51,960 --> 00:25:55,080
Speaker 7: our stomach, but at not very high density, and same

513
00:25:55,119 --> 00:25:57,480
Speaker 7: with our small intestine. But by the time you get

514
00:25:57,480 --> 00:26:00,280
Speaker 7: to the colon, so you need to eat food that

515
00:26:00,480 --> 00:26:04,560
Speaker 7: don't get absorbed quickly earlier in your digestive tract to

516
00:26:04,640 --> 00:26:07,320
Speaker 7: give your microbes access to them. So if you just

517
00:26:07,400 --> 00:26:10,600
Speaker 7: eat white rice or processed foods, those get absorbed real

518
00:26:10,680 --> 00:26:14,199
Speaker 7: quick in your stomach and small intestine. But if you

519
00:26:14,240 --> 00:26:17,199
Speaker 7: eat things that take longer, then they get down to

520
00:26:17,240 --> 00:26:20,440
Speaker 7: where the most dense community of microbes lives, and then

521
00:26:20,480 --> 00:26:23,800
Speaker 7: you can give those microbes a chance to break down

522
00:26:23,840 --> 00:26:24,400
Speaker 7: the fibers.

523
00:26:24,720 --> 00:26:26,159
Speaker 1: I'm sure ken of these the questionbody, just want to

524
00:26:26,160 --> 00:26:28,960
Speaker 1: ask one quick follow up about the baby thing. You're

525
00:26:28,960 --> 00:26:33,640
Speaker 1: telling me that human mothers produce something that babies cannot

526
00:26:33,680 --> 00:26:37,440
Speaker 1: digest without microbes in their guts, which means, of course

527
00:26:37,480 --> 00:26:39,720
Speaker 1: that we've been doing this for a long long time. Yeah, right,

528
00:26:40,240 --> 00:26:43,280
Speaker 1: microbes probably evolved with us. But how do babies get

529
00:26:43,280 --> 00:26:45,720
Speaker 1: those microbes? Like, do they get them from the mom

530
00:26:45,880 --> 00:26:48,440
Speaker 1: Is it during the birth, is it during gestation?

531
00:26:48,840 --> 00:26:53,720
Speaker 7: It happens after birth, But actually there's probably many opportunities.

532
00:26:53,760 --> 00:26:56,080
Speaker 7: When something's really important, it's good to have a lot

533
00:26:56,080 --> 00:26:58,920
Speaker 7: of ways for it to happen, and so it's not

534
00:26:59,080 --> 00:27:01,919
Speaker 7: just only at birth. It could be at birth, but

535
00:27:02,200 --> 00:27:05,360
Speaker 7: I would imagine that in a village or a community

536
00:27:05,400 --> 00:27:08,040
Speaker 7: in human histories past, where there were a lot of

537
00:27:08,080 --> 00:27:12,280
Speaker 7: young children, that this would be passed between siblings and friends.

538
00:27:12,359 --> 00:27:14,720
Speaker 7: I mean, you just need to be in an environment

539
00:27:14,720 --> 00:27:18,000
Speaker 7: where that microbe exists. So it doesn't only have to

540
00:27:18,000 --> 00:27:19,639
Speaker 7: be at the moment of birth. It could be at

541
00:27:19,640 --> 00:27:22,120
Speaker 7: the moment of birth, but it could also be really

542
00:27:22,160 --> 00:27:24,280
Speaker 7: at any time in the beginning of life.

543
00:27:24,600 --> 00:27:26,480
Speaker 1: All right, Well, that takes us all the way back

544
00:27:26,520 --> 00:27:29,000
Speaker 1: into prehistory and the understanding of microbes. And we're going

545
00:27:29,080 --> 00:27:30,199
Speaker 1: to take a break and we're going to come back

546
00:27:30,200 --> 00:27:32,280
Speaker 1: and we're going to talk about the present and the

547
00:27:32,320 --> 00:27:49,760
Speaker 1: future of microbes.

548
00:27:51,119 --> 00:27:53,800
Speaker 3: And we're back, and okay, Katrina, I have a question

549
00:27:53,920 --> 00:27:55,760
Speaker 3: for you that I get asked a lot, and I

550
00:27:55,760 --> 00:27:57,640
Speaker 3: would love to know what the answer should be. So

551
00:27:58,080 --> 00:28:00,760
Speaker 3: I study parasites that manipulate the behavior of their house

552
00:28:01,560 --> 00:28:04,880
Speaker 3: and often people will say, Okay, I've heard that our

553
00:28:04,960 --> 00:28:07,760
Speaker 3: brains have nerves that go down to our stomach, and

554
00:28:07,800 --> 00:28:11,600
Speaker 3: that bacteria do things like release serotonin and dopamine that

555
00:28:11,680 --> 00:28:17,200
Speaker 3: can communicate with our brains. So are our behaviors controlled

556
00:28:17,640 --> 00:28:20,640
Speaker 3: by our microbiome? Can our microbiome be like you need

557
00:28:20,680 --> 00:28:24,280
Speaker 3: to eat more beans or something? So to what extent

558
00:28:25,240 --> 00:28:27,480
Speaker 3: are our microbes influencing our behavior?

559
00:28:27,800 --> 00:28:31,320
Speaker 7: Well, I mean a lot. For sure. There's definitely a

560
00:28:31,440 --> 00:28:35,600
Speaker 7: very strong gut brain axis, and we've known that for

561
00:28:35,640 --> 00:28:38,520
Speaker 7: a long time. Even independent of the microbes, we know

562
00:28:38,680 --> 00:28:42,080
Speaker 7: that a lot of our nervous and immune system is

563
00:28:42,160 --> 00:28:45,480
Speaker 7: in our gut, and so ninety percent of the serotonin

564
00:28:45,520 --> 00:28:48,040
Speaker 7: in your body is produced in your gut, for example,

565
00:28:48,560 --> 00:28:53,000
Speaker 7: and it's with the help of neuroendocrine cells in our guts,

566
00:28:53,480 --> 00:28:57,120
Speaker 7: but those cells are being manipulated by the microbes. So

567
00:28:57,160 --> 00:29:00,920
Speaker 7: there's a really strong connection between the dense community of

568
00:29:01,000 --> 00:29:04,720
Speaker 7: microbes in our guts and all of the different types

569
00:29:04,760 --> 00:29:08,200
Speaker 7: of cells lining our guts that are interacting with our

570
00:29:08,200 --> 00:29:12,200
Speaker 7: nervous system. So there is a very strong gut brain connection,

571
00:29:12,560 --> 00:29:15,840
Speaker 7: no question. And there's so much interesting evidence which is

572
00:29:16,240 --> 00:29:18,720
Speaker 7: hard to sort through about how if you improve your

573
00:29:18,760 --> 00:29:22,760
Speaker 7: diet you can improve symptoms of depression, or if you

574
00:29:22,840 --> 00:29:27,120
Speaker 7: meditate regularly you can improve your inflammatory state and your

575
00:29:27,120 --> 00:29:28,520
Speaker 7: microbiome composition.

576
00:29:29,000 --> 00:29:31,400
Speaker 1: Where you're saying, it goes both directions, not just microbes

577
00:29:31,480 --> 00:29:33,560
Speaker 1: or influencing how we think. But your brain can like

578
00:29:33,680 --> 00:29:35,120
Speaker 1: control the microbe somehow.

579
00:29:35,440 --> 00:29:38,920
Speaker 7: I mean when you say it like that, it sounds fantastical,

580
00:29:39,160 --> 00:29:42,400
Speaker 7: but I mean I literally just watched Joe Handlesman give

581
00:29:42,400 --> 00:29:45,120
Speaker 7: a talk last week about how people who were meditating

582
00:29:45,160 --> 00:29:49,640
Speaker 7: regularly had improvements in their microbiome, and defining an improvement

583
00:29:49,680 --> 00:29:51,320
Speaker 7: is a really hard thing to do in our field.

584
00:29:51,400 --> 00:29:54,040
Speaker 7: So you know, ask more questions if you want, but yes,

585
00:29:54,120 --> 00:29:58,280
Speaker 7: it goes in every direction. Because our microbe composition is

586
00:29:58,400 --> 00:30:02,120
Speaker 7: influenced by the environment, and if you do things that

587
00:30:02,280 --> 00:30:07,000
Speaker 7: helped to change your stress levels and the types of

588
00:30:07,040 --> 00:30:10,800
Speaker 7: inflammatory cells that your body is inhabited by, then that

589
00:30:10,920 --> 00:30:15,440
Speaker 7: changes the environment, and it changes which microbes are winning

590
00:30:15,480 --> 00:30:18,240
Speaker 7: the battle of survival in your gut at that moment,

591
00:30:18,480 --> 00:30:21,880
Speaker 7: and which microbes are there to break down the foods

592
00:30:21,920 --> 00:30:25,000
Speaker 7: that you're eating. So, yeah, there's a very tight connection

593
00:30:25,160 --> 00:30:28,960
Speaker 7: between our guts and our minds. But we're really at

594
00:30:28,960 --> 00:30:32,480
Speaker 7: the beginning of figuring that out. There's a few conditions

595
00:30:32,480 --> 00:30:35,000
Speaker 7: that we are starting to have really good evidence, like

596
00:30:35,360 --> 00:30:39,520
Speaker 7: for Parkinson's disease, there's symptoms in the gut arising well

597
00:30:39,520 --> 00:30:43,560
Speaker 7: before other symptoms like constipation, and that was one of

598
00:30:43,560 --> 00:30:46,640
Speaker 7: the clues that helped us try to disentangle how the

599
00:30:46,680 --> 00:30:51,320
Speaker 7: microbiome is involved in Parkinson's disease development. I'm so curious

600
00:30:51,360 --> 00:30:53,600
Speaker 7: in ten years, like what we're going to understand better.

601
00:30:54,120 --> 00:30:56,800
Speaker 7: But there's really cool evidence emerging all the time.

602
00:30:57,120 --> 00:30:59,840
Speaker 1: So you've mentioned several times that the microbe was played

603
00:31:00,360 --> 00:31:03,440
Speaker 1: roles in digestion, et cetera. Do we know what like

604
00:31:03,640 --> 00:31:07,720
Speaker 1: a good microbiome is, Like, do we understand what your

605
00:31:07,720 --> 00:31:10,920
Speaker 1: microbiome should be doing and what its composition should be,

606
00:31:11,560 --> 00:31:14,000
Speaker 1: and is that true in the gut or am my

607
00:31:14,160 --> 00:31:15,440
Speaker 1: nose or my ear.

608
00:31:16,000 --> 00:31:18,520
Speaker 7: That is still a science question, and I think it's

609
00:31:18,760 --> 00:31:22,320
Speaker 7: also maybe a philosophy question. Even just to define health

610
00:31:22,640 --> 00:31:24,920
Speaker 7: is really interesting, and our field has had a lot

611
00:31:24,960 --> 00:31:28,320
Speaker 7: of interaction with philosophers through the years to try to

612
00:31:28,360 --> 00:31:33,960
Speaker 7: define what health is. For example, at the operation nearby

613
00:31:34,080 --> 00:31:37,960
Speaker 7: in Testine for the product to VOUST, where they harvest

614
00:31:38,160 --> 00:31:41,840
Speaker 7: so called healthy fecal spores from so called healthy donors

615
00:31:42,440 --> 00:31:46,840
Speaker 7: in order to treat the diarrheal pathogen c DIFF. They

616
00:31:46,880 --> 00:31:49,440
Speaker 7: have to decide who can be a healthy donor and

617
00:31:49,480 --> 00:31:52,680
Speaker 7: they screen people and only one percent are considered eligible.

618
00:31:53,080 --> 00:31:55,880
Speaker 1: To be clear, what we're donating here, are bms right?

619
00:31:56,000 --> 00:31:58,320
Speaker 7: Yes, So they get volunteers to come and poop on

620
00:31:58,400 --> 00:32:00,479
Speaker 7: site four to six times per week and then they

621
00:32:00,520 --> 00:32:03,360
Speaker 7: harvest the spores out of their poop and that is

622
00:32:03,400 --> 00:32:06,240
Speaker 7: the product VOUST, which is being used to treat se DIFF.

623
00:32:06,240 --> 00:32:09,240
Speaker 7: It's one of two FDA approved microbiome therapies in the

624
00:32:09,240 --> 00:32:10,000
Speaker 7: country right now.

625
00:32:10,080 --> 00:32:12,480
Speaker 3: It's got to be hard to schedule, like you can't

626
00:32:12,520 --> 00:32:14,680
Speaker 3: just do that on cue. My son seems to be

627
00:32:14,720 --> 00:32:16,400
Speaker 3: able to. But he's the only one I've ever met

628
00:32:16,400 --> 00:32:17,000
Speaker 3: who can do that.

629
00:32:17,120 --> 00:32:19,560
Speaker 7: Yeah, I think they have like a big line in

630
00:32:19,600 --> 00:32:22,800
Speaker 7: the morning. So people who can do that regularly. I

631
00:32:22,880 --> 00:32:25,680
Speaker 7: remember asking in one of my classes ones like, who

632
00:32:25,760 --> 00:32:27,719
Speaker 7: knows when they're gonna poop every day? Like, is it

633
00:32:27,800 --> 00:32:29,960
Speaker 7: like something you know when it's gonna happen, or is.

634
00:32:29,880 --> 00:32:31,920
Speaker 1: It like you're asking people about this in class and

635
00:32:31,960 --> 00:32:33,840
Speaker 1: public that like raise their hand to talk about their

636
00:32:33,880 --> 00:32:34,560
Speaker 1: poop schedule.

637
00:32:34,880 --> 00:32:37,080
Speaker 7: Well, it was when I had somebody from the company

638
00:32:37,160 --> 00:32:39,600
Speaker 7: Voused visiting to speak and she had exactly the question

639
00:32:39,680 --> 00:32:42,280
Speaker 7: you just had, Kelly. Anyway, there were some people who

640
00:32:42,280 --> 00:32:44,200
Speaker 7: were like, how could you not know when you're gonna poop?

641
00:32:44,240 --> 00:32:46,000
Speaker 7: I always know when? And other people who were like,

642
00:32:46,080 --> 00:32:48,160
Speaker 7: I would never be able to guess that. That's clearly

643
00:32:48,360 --> 00:32:50,080
Speaker 7: like something that's different about each person.

644
00:32:50,320 --> 00:32:50,640
Speaker 2: Huh.

645
00:32:50,680 --> 00:32:53,400
Speaker 7: But you know, one percent of people are not the

646
00:32:53,440 --> 00:32:56,080
Speaker 7: only healthy people. And I think that we need to

647
00:32:56,080 --> 00:32:58,200
Speaker 7: think about what we mean by health differently. When I'm

648
00:32:58,200 --> 00:33:02,760
Speaker 7: writing my ethics view approval documents for the studies that

649
00:33:02,800 --> 00:33:05,640
Speaker 7: I do, I have a very expansive definition of what

650
00:33:05,680 --> 00:33:08,240
Speaker 7: I think health is, And to me, health is someone

651
00:33:08,240 --> 00:33:11,320
Speaker 7: who's out and about living their life, like a student

652
00:33:11,360 --> 00:33:14,440
Speaker 7: in my class is definitely considered healthy that otherwise they

653
00:33:14,480 --> 00:33:16,440
Speaker 7: couldn't like show up and be a college student if

654
00:33:16,440 --> 00:33:19,920
Speaker 7: they have some allergy or some other kind of defined

655
00:33:20,000 --> 00:33:22,600
Speaker 7: disease it's been diagnosed. In my mind, that doesn't like

656
00:33:22,680 --> 00:33:25,080
Speaker 7: knock them out of the category of being a healthy person.

657
00:33:25,720 --> 00:33:28,920
Speaker 7: And so that's a really difficult question to answer. But

658
00:33:29,000 --> 00:33:31,680
Speaker 7: your question was do we know what a healthy microbiome is?

659
00:33:31,840 --> 00:33:34,400
Speaker 7: And that was actually what the goal of the Human

660
00:33:34,440 --> 00:33:37,280
Speaker 7: Microbiome Project was. It started in two thousand and six

661
00:33:37,360 --> 00:33:39,480
Speaker 7: and they got three hundred healthy donors in the United

662
00:33:39,520 --> 00:33:45,040
Speaker 7: States to give samples, and healthy was defined somewhat more inclusively,

663
00:33:45,080 --> 00:33:47,600
Speaker 7: I think than the one percent that were accepted in

664
00:33:47,640 --> 00:33:51,760
Speaker 7: that other donation context. And the goal was, like, what's

665
00:33:51,800 --> 00:33:54,440
Speaker 7: the core human microbiome? Like, what are microbes that are

666
00:33:54,480 --> 00:33:58,640
Speaker 7: shared between everyone? And the fascinating thing was that every

667
00:33:58,680 --> 00:34:01,480
Speaker 7: time you added one more to the study, the then

668
00:34:01,520 --> 00:34:05,440
Speaker 7: diagram overlap got smaller and smaller until there was nothing left.

669
00:34:05,480 --> 00:34:08,640
Speaker 7: So there were no core human microbes. Everybody is different

670
00:34:08,760 --> 00:34:11,640
Speaker 7: enough that there just really isn't a core human microbiome,

671
00:34:11,960 --> 00:34:13,200
Speaker 7: depending how you define it.

672
00:34:13,600 --> 00:34:17,200
Speaker 1: So you're saying, for example, person A is totally healthy

673
00:34:17,239 --> 00:34:20,360
Speaker 1: and living their lives and having great poops and doesn't

674
00:34:20,400 --> 00:34:23,400
Speaker 1: have anything in common gut bacteria wise with person B,

675
00:34:23,520 --> 00:34:26,960
Speaker 1: who's also healthy and can eat beans and doesn't have

676
00:34:27,160 --> 00:34:28,240
Speaker 1: terrible digestive problem.

677
00:34:28,640 --> 00:34:31,160
Speaker 7: Yeah, people are extremely different from each other. If you

678
00:34:31,200 --> 00:34:33,760
Speaker 7: only had two people, I bet you would find some overlap.

679
00:34:33,840 --> 00:34:35,840
Speaker 7: But by the time you get to about ten people,

680
00:34:36,000 --> 00:34:39,000
Speaker 7: you probably don't have much overlap left anymore. And then

681
00:34:39,400 --> 00:34:41,960
Speaker 7: really big differences occur when you look around the world,

682
00:34:42,239 --> 00:34:45,399
Speaker 7: and so there's really cool patterns of people who live

683
00:34:45,600 --> 00:34:49,000
Speaker 7: in less industrialized places, where they eat more plants and

684
00:34:49,120 --> 00:34:52,640
Speaker 7: less processed food, their guts tend to be dominated by

685
00:34:52,719 --> 00:34:56,360
Speaker 7: plant breakdown microbes that are good at breaking down fiber

686
00:34:56,440 --> 00:34:59,319
Speaker 7: and probably have other properties too, Whereas if you look

687
00:34:59,360 --> 00:35:02,120
Speaker 7: in the industry world, and this is like so scary

688
00:35:02,120 --> 00:35:05,759
Speaker 7: to meet that most people in the industrialized world have

689
00:35:05,840 --> 00:35:08,719
Speaker 7: a lot of mucus breakdown bugs in their gut. So

690
00:35:08,840 --> 00:35:12,600
Speaker 7: basically we're starving our guts of fiber, and as a result,

691
00:35:12,719 --> 00:35:15,239
Speaker 7: the microbes are like turning to us and just like

692
00:35:15,360 --> 00:35:18,440
Speaker 7: eating the mucus that's produced by the cells lining our gut.

693
00:35:19,000 --> 00:35:21,920
Speaker 7: So there's this bug called Acromancia that's very common in

694
00:35:21,960 --> 00:35:26,279
Speaker 7: the industrialized world, and bizarrely, it's even marketed as a

695
00:35:26,280 --> 00:35:30,680
Speaker 7: probiotic because it has been associated with positive outcomes. But

696
00:35:30,760 --> 00:35:33,719
Speaker 7: it's breaking down the mucus, which is the only thing

697
00:35:33,960 --> 00:35:37,560
Speaker 7: between you and sepsis. You have like literally millions of

698
00:35:37,600 --> 00:35:40,759
Speaker 7: cells of microbes in your colon and there's one layer

699
00:35:40,880 --> 00:35:45,239
Speaker 7: of cells, this epithelial lining of cells lining your gut,

700
00:35:45,320 --> 00:35:48,040
Speaker 7: and if that barrier breaks down, the microbes get into

701
00:35:48,040 --> 00:35:50,640
Speaker 7: your blood and that's the blood infection that's called sepsis.

702
00:35:50,640 --> 00:35:54,400
Speaker 7: That's deadly. And so your mucus lining, that one layer

703
00:35:54,440 --> 00:35:57,040
Speaker 7: of cells is a really important part of the barrier

704
00:35:57,800 --> 00:36:01,080
Speaker 7: protecting you. And so we're we have a lot of

705
00:36:01,160 --> 00:36:04,279
Speaker 7: bugs that are breaking down that mucus. Maybe there's some

706
00:36:04,400 --> 00:36:07,200
Speaker 7: kind of feedback there. I mean, these are all science questions. Maybe,

707
00:36:07,239 --> 00:36:10,200
Speaker 7: like the bugs breaking down the mucus stimulate its production,

708
00:36:10,320 --> 00:36:13,520
Speaker 7: and maybe that's not all bad. But just the fact

709
00:36:13,560 --> 00:36:16,880
Speaker 7: that it's so common in the industrialized world and missing

710
00:36:17,520 --> 00:36:19,480
Speaker 7: in the parts of the world where people eat more plants,

711
00:36:19,480 --> 00:36:21,040
Speaker 7: it kind of makes me want to have the plant

712
00:36:21,080 --> 00:36:24,400
Speaker 7: type of microbiome, not the mucus breakdown one.

713
00:36:24,680 --> 00:36:27,960
Speaker 1: So then where can we expect similarities between microbiomes? Like

714
00:36:28,239 --> 00:36:29,759
Speaker 1: you and I live in the same house, you mostly

715
00:36:29,800 --> 00:36:32,160
Speaker 1: use similar foods, use the same toilets. Do we have

716
00:36:32,239 --> 00:36:34,280
Speaker 1: similar microbiomes? Do we expect them to be similar?

717
00:36:34,640 --> 00:36:38,440
Speaker 7: Definitely. That's one of the biggest signatures in every microbiome study,

718
00:36:38,520 --> 00:36:41,279
Speaker 7: after the individual, is the household and the family. So

719
00:36:41,320 --> 00:36:44,960
Speaker 7: when you collect samples from people who live together, they

720
00:36:44,960 --> 00:36:48,200
Speaker 7: have so much in common, and so that's a really

721
00:36:48,280 --> 00:36:50,560
Speaker 7: really cool way to do a study. Like my favorite

722
00:36:50,560 --> 00:36:52,960
Speaker 7: way to do a study is with household controls, so

723
00:36:53,040 --> 00:36:56,840
Speaker 7: you can compare people with the same background, and otherwise

724
00:36:56,840 --> 00:36:59,319
Speaker 7: to do longitudinal studies where you take samples from the

725
00:36:59,360 --> 00:37:02,200
Speaker 7: same person through an intervention and then use their starting

726
00:37:02,239 --> 00:37:05,080
Speaker 7: point samples as the baseline, because if you try to

727
00:37:05,080 --> 00:37:07,480
Speaker 7: do it cross sectionally where everyone is so different, it

728
00:37:07,600 --> 00:37:10,720
Speaker 7: just doesn't work at all. And back to the household question.

729
00:37:10,800 --> 00:37:14,040
Speaker 7: I mean, I really love studies that get into that.

730
00:37:14,239 --> 00:37:17,160
Speaker 7: And I have a friend down in San Diego, David Pride,

731
00:37:17,800 --> 00:37:20,640
Speaker 7: and he did a study once where he compared married

732
00:37:20,680 --> 00:37:23,160
Speaker 7: couples who'd been living together for a long time with

733
00:37:23,280 --> 00:37:26,800
Speaker 7: Craigslist roommates who moved in together, and after six weeks

734
00:37:27,280 --> 00:37:31,480
Speaker 7: they shared a quarter of the viruses in their gut communities.

735
00:37:31,520 --> 00:37:34,000
Speaker 7: So sharing a kitchen and a bathroom is enough to

736
00:37:34,040 --> 00:37:36,040
Speaker 7: share a lot, huh.

737
00:37:35,560 --> 00:37:37,279
Speaker 1: The Craigslist connection, Yeah, yep.

738
00:37:37,960 --> 00:37:41,479
Speaker 3: How much do our own individual microbiomes change over time?

739
00:37:41,520 --> 00:37:43,719
Speaker 3: So if you looked at a family now or five

740
00:37:43,840 --> 00:37:46,880
Speaker 3: years down the road, how consistent would their microbiome be.

741
00:37:47,440 --> 00:37:51,560
Speaker 7: They're quite consistent through time in families and households, but

742
00:37:51,760 --> 00:37:56,280
Speaker 7: they're evolving because you know, microbes have high mutation rates.

743
00:37:56,480 --> 00:38:00,400
Speaker 7: They don't correct themselves as much as ourselves do. So

744
00:38:00,840 --> 00:38:03,520
Speaker 7: in a virus community, for example, there was one grad

745
00:38:03,560 --> 00:38:06,560
Speaker 7: student who took samples from himself throughout grad school, which

746
00:38:06,560 --> 00:38:09,319
Speaker 7: took a couple of years, and between the beginning and

747
00:38:09,440 --> 00:38:12,919
Speaker 7: end of grad school, some of the viruses in their gut.

748
00:38:12,960 --> 00:38:14,960
Speaker 7: I'm sure it was anonymous, so maybe I shouldn't say

749
00:38:14,960 --> 00:38:17,279
Speaker 7: the name of this dadue. But anyway, some of the

750
00:38:17,360 --> 00:38:21,040
Speaker 7: viruses had mutated more than three percent in their genomes,

751
00:38:21,200 --> 00:38:23,719
Speaker 7: which is the definition of a new virus. Each of

752
00:38:23,719 --> 00:38:25,520
Speaker 7: our guts is kind of like its own little chema

753
00:38:25,560 --> 00:38:29,879
Speaker 7: stat where evolution can keep happening, and so through time,

754
00:38:30,320 --> 00:38:32,840
Speaker 7: enough mutations arise that it could even be considered a

755
00:38:32,880 --> 00:38:36,160
Speaker 7: new species of virus that's emerging. The other thing that

756
00:38:36,200 --> 00:38:38,920
Speaker 7: happens is like say you travel and get diarrhea and

757
00:38:38,960 --> 00:38:41,640
Speaker 7: really shake things up, or you take antibiotics, you can

758
00:38:41,760 --> 00:38:45,960
Speaker 7: kind of like get your community steering to take a

759
00:38:46,000 --> 00:38:48,319
Speaker 7: sharp turn after things like that.

760
00:38:48,880 --> 00:38:50,840
Speaker 1: Wait, walk us through what's happening there, Like when you

761
00:38:50,880 --> 00:38:53,399
Speaker 1: get diarrhea or you get seedp what's going on there?

762
00:38:53,440 --> 00:38:56,400
Speaker 1: Something is coming in and out competing the microbes in

763
00:38:56,440 --> 00:38:58,080
Speaker 1: our guts or what's going on?

764
00:38:58,560 --> 00:39:03,880
Speaker 7: Yeah, exactly. So oftentimes a diarrheal pathogen, what will happen

765
00:39:03,960 --> 00:39:06,160
Speaker 7: is that they'll come in with some toxin or some

766
00:39:06,360 --> 00:39:09,760
Speaker 7: like really big hammer that causes big.

767
00:39:09,680 --> 00:39:13,160
Speaker 1: Changes, meaning that it kills the other microbes.

768
00:39:12,920 --> 00:39:16,280
Speaker 7: Or that it just triggers an enormous immune response, which

769
00:39:16,400 --> 00:39:19,400
Speaker 7: brings in a lot of oxidative stress. And I was

770
00:39:19,440 --> 00:39:22,480
Speaker 7: just telling you how the microbes in our colon's hate oxygen.

771
00:39:22,960 --> 00:39:27,360
Speaker 7: Well inflammation is basically a pile of oxygen. So bringing

772
00:39:27,400 --> 00:39:32,360
Speaker 7: in all those inflammatory cells and molecules, that's a tough

773
00:39:32,440 --> 00:39:34,400
Speaker 7: condition for a lot of the bugs that live in

774
00:39:34,440 --> 00:39:38,040
Speaker 7: our gut. And then you'll have an outgrowth of the

775
00:39:38,160 --> 00:39:41,480
Speaker 7: kinds of bugs that can tolerate oxygen. In fact, when

776
00:39:41,560 --> 00:39:44,880
Speaker 7: you study the microbiomes of people who have a terrible

777
00:39:44,880 --> 00:39:48,640
Speaker 7: gut infection, you don't often find that the bug causing

778
00:39:48,680 --> 00:39:51,960
Speaker 7: the infection is the most numerous. This really surprised me. Actually,

779
00:39:51,960 --> 00:39:54,759
Speaker 7: I've done a few studies like this with lustratia deficial

780
00:39:54,880 --> 00:39:58,400
Speaker 7: infections here at the CI Medical Center, and my naive

781
00:39:58,440 --> 00:40:01,440
Speaker 7: expectation was that you I see like, oh, it's ninety

782
00:40:01,480 --> 00:40:03,520
Speaker 7: percent seed difts, so they have a sea diff infection.

783
00:40:03,600 --> 00:40:04,960
Speaker 7: But that's not what you see at all. You just

784
00:40:05,000 --> 00:40:08,120
Speaker 7: see a bunch of bugs that can handle oxygen basically,

785
00:40:08,760 --> 00:40:11,359
Speaker 7: and then there's probably a small number of sea diff

786
00:40:11,440 --> 00:40:14,759
Speaker 7: cells that are just dumping toxin that's causing all that inflammation.

787
00:40:15,560 --> 00:40:18,880
Speaker 1: That's really mind blowing, I mean, especially if you start

788
00:40:18,920 --> 00:40:21,960
Speaker 1: from the point of view of like, diseases are microbes

789
00:40:22,000 --> 00:40:24,920
Speaker 1: that come in, pathogens come in and colonize the humans.

790
00:40:25,400 --> 00:40:26,960
Speaker 1: Now you're giving us a whole new way to think

791
00:40:27,000 --> 00:40:31,520
Speaker 1: about what disease is. Now it's like microbial war where

792
00:40:31,560 --> 00:40:33,719
Speaker 1: what's really being damaged are not the human cells, but

793
00:40:33,800 --> 00:40:36,600
Speaker 1: like the microbes on our side that were doing their

794
00:40:36,680 --> 00:40:37,479
Speaker 1: job for us.

795
00:40:37,800 --> 00:40:38,040
Speaker 7: Yep.

796
00:40:38,120 --> 00:40:39,960
Speaker 1: So it's really we're sort of like a host. We're

797
00:40:40,040 --> 00:40:42,840
Speaker 1: just like the battleground for this microbial confrontation.

798
00:40:43,480 --> 00:40:46,880
Speaker 7: Yeah, exactly. I really like the concept of a holo biome,

799
00:40:47,520 --> 00:40:51,040
Speaker 7: which is the idea that you know, you are your

800
00:40:51,080 --> 00:40:54,920
Speaker 7: own genome and cells, and then you are host to

801
00:40:55,239 --> 00:40:59,279
Speaker 7: a community of microbes which comes from the environment that

802
00:40:59,320 --> 00:41:02,080
Speaker 7: you live in. So all the microbes in the environment

803
00:41:02,120 --> 00:41:04,440
Speaker 7: that you live in, and then some subset of them

804
00:41:04,560 --> 00:41:08,280
Speaker 7: colonizes you. And so part of your environment is your diet,

805
00:41:08,400 --> 00:41:10,279
Speaker 7: and part of it is like how much time you

806
00:41:10,320 --> 00:41:13,680
Speaker 7: spend playing with dirt, so like your exposure to microbes.

807
00:41:13,680 --> 00:41:16,279
Speaker 7: Who your roommates are, you know, stuff like that. Like

808
00:41:16,280 --> 00:41:18,040
Speaker 7: sometimes people ask me, well, how can I get a

809
00:41:18,080 --> 00:41:20,400
Speaker 7: healthy microbiome if I don't have one yet, And like

810
00:41:20,480 --> 00:41:22,760
Speaker 7: one piece of advice would be to get a really

811
00:41:22,800 --> 00:41:24,520
Speaker 7: healthy roommate who you knew how to help.

812
00:41:28,120 --> 00:41:29,680
Speaker 1: You didn't cause a lot of stress here. People are

813
00:41:29,680 --> 00:41:32,880
Speaker 1: gonna blame their diarrhea on their roommates. Now, if you

814
00:41:33,000 --> 00:41:39,160
Speaker 1: only did the dishes, then I wouldn't have diarrhea.

815
00:41:37,480 --> 00:41:39,600
Speaker 3: Or maybe you cleaned the bathroom too much. I needed

816
00:41:39,600 --> 00:41:42,440
Speaker 3: your good microbes submand at them for that. So I've

817
00:41:42,440 --> 00:41:46,640
Speaker 3: got a question about how we even quantify microbiome. So bacteria,

818
00:41:47,120 --> 00:41:49,640
Speaker 3: you know, they can undergo conjugation, so they swap genetic

819
00:41:49,680 --> 00:41:51,840
Speaker 3: material with each other. In just the course of a

820
00:41:51,880 --> 00:41:54,520
Speaker 3: couple of years, viruses are becoming new species because they're

821
00:41:54,600 --> 00:41:59,080
Speaker 3: mutating so much. How do you define a species when

822
00:41:59,080 --> 00:42:01,280
Speaker 3: things are changing so quickly, and how do you compare

823
00:42:01,800 --> 00:42:04,719
Speaker 3: between individuals when there's all this variability.

824
00:42:05,880 --> 00:42:08,160
Speaker 7: Yeah, what a great question. And like I've been in

825
00:42:08,160 --> 00:42:10,600
Speaker 7: this field long enough that I've watched the pendulum swing

826
00:42:10,640 --> 00:42:13,440
Speaker 7: back and forth on how we make those definitions. Sometimes

827
00:42:13,440 --> 00:42:16,640
Speaker 7: it's driven a little bit by technology, but you know,

828
00:42:16,760 --> 00:42:21,160
Speaker 7: basically there have been people thinking about microbial communities for

829
00:42:21,760 --> 00:42:24,839
Speaker 7: more than a century. So it goes back to there

830
00:42:24,920 --> 00:42:29,120
Speaker 7: was a Ukrainian microbial ecologist who was studying pond scum

831
00:42:29,200 --> 00:42:32,640
Speaker 7: in Switzerland and he made these columns called Winnegradsky columns,

832
00:42:32,640 --> 00:42:34,680
Speaker 7: which had you know, just what I was talking about

833
00:42:34,680 --> 00:42:38,720
Speaker 7: with the oxygen gradients, where you'd have oxygen loving bugs

834
00:42:38,719 --> 00:42:41,440
Speaker 7: at the top and then their waste products become the

835
00:42:41,480 --> 00:42:44,200
Speaker 7: treasure of the next layer of microbes which need less

836
00:42:44,200 --> 00:42:49,760
Speaker 7: oxygen and have different strategies for metabolism. So those layers

837
00:42:49,800 --> 00:42:52,600
Speaker 7: of microbes, you could even consider them to be the

838
00:42:52,719 --> 00:42:55,560
Speaker 7: unit of selection that matters, and so it could be

839
00:42:55,600 --> 00:43:00,600
Speaker 7: defined functionally. Almost since the mid twentieth century started having

840
00:43:00,640 --> 00:43:04,520
Speaker 7: molecular techniques for probing all of the microbes in a community,

841
00:43:04,520 --> 00:43:07,720
Speaker 7: and this all started with environmental microbiologists. All the human

842
00:43:07,800 --> 00:43:11,120
Speaker 7: clinical microbiology people were too busy isolating one pathogen at

843
00:43:11,160 --> 00:43:13,960
Speaker 7: a time and throwing anything that they didn't define as

844
00:43:13,960 --> 00:43:17,440
Speaker 7: a pathogen down the drain as like unrelevant normal flora

845
00:43:17,520 --> 00:43:20,719
Speaker 7: or something like that. So the environmental microbiologists got really

846
00:43:20,760 --> 00:43:25,600
Speaker 7: good at these really cool molecular techniques, starting with less resolution,

847
00:43:25,960 --> 00:43:28,839
Speaker 7: so they had to define a species based on the

848
00:43:28,840 --> 00:43:32,720
Speaker 7: information they could get. So we started like digesting common

849
00:43:32,800 --> 00:43:37,960
Speaker 7: genes like ribosomal genes, and using restriction enzymes that we

850
00:43:38,040 --> 00:43:41,440
Speaker 7: got out of hot springs and putting them on gels,

851
00:43:41,480 --> 00:43:44,240
Speaker 7: and then like if the bands on the gel looked different,

852
00:43:44,280 --> 00:43:46,600
Speaker 7: then that would be defined as a different species. So

853
00:43:46,719 --> 00:43:50,560
Speaker 7: probably we're talking like a few percent difference in genome

854
00:43:50,600 --> 00:43:53,080
Speaker 7: because we were only looking at one gene. Even if

855
00:43:53,080 --> 00:43:55,480
Speaker 7: that one gene is exactly the same, there could still

856
00:43:55,520 --> 00:43:59,360
Speaker 7: be millions of years of evolution separating those two organisms.

857
00:44:00,120 --> 00:44:03,160
Speaker 7: Then we got much better. Now we can sequence everything.

858
00:44:03,640 --> 00:44:06,520
Speaker 7: And so when I first started in this field around

859
00:44:06,560 --> 00:44:09,680
Speaker 7: two thousand and eight or so, we defined a bacterial

860
00:44:09,719 --> 00:44:13,560
Speaker 7: species as being three percent different from the next in

861
00:44:13,600 --> 00:44:16,760
Speaker 7: this one ribosomal gene. And that was how we defined

862
00:44:16,960 --> 00:44:20,279
Speaker 7: a species. Since then, as our techniques have gotten better,

863
00:44:20,360 --> 00:44:25,240
Speaker 7: we've leaned towards using even tighter definitions. So we could,

864
00:44:25,920 --> 00:44:29,000
Speaker 7: you know, look at organisms that are almost identical and

865
00:44:29,040 --> 00:44:31,319
Speaker 7: only have one nuclear hide difference, and then we would

866
00:44:31,360 --> 00:44:35,880
Speaker 7: start to define that as the taxonomic unit that mattered.

867
00:44:36,120 --> 00:44:38,560
Speaker 1: Because these guys reproduce asexually.

868
00:44:38,040 --> 00:44:41,319
Speaker 7: Right, yeah, they reproduce asexually, but they have pretty high

869
00:44:41,400 --> 00:44:44,120
Speaker 7: mutation rates. They don't like correct all their mistakes. So

870
00:44:44,960 --> 00:44:48,360
Speaker 7: you know, for a virus, every progeny is immutant basically,

871
00:44:51,160 --> 00:44:53,400
Speaker 7: I mean, think about that for flu or covid, Like

872
00:44:53,480 --> 00:44:56,040
Speaker 7: I think there were actually really great visualizations about that

873
00:44:56,520 --> 00:45:00,759
Speaker 7: since the pandemic that helped that become obvious to everybody.

874
00:45:00,880 --> 00:45:03,360
Speaker 7: Which is so interesting, Right, if every time a virus

875
00:45:03,840 --> 00:45:06,080
Speaker 7: makes a copy, it's a new mutant. Some of those

876
00:45:06,160 --> 00:45:09,080
Speaker 7: just fall flat, But that's not the strategy. The strategy is,

877
00:45:09,120 --> 00:45:11,799
Speaker 7: like most of them do okay, some of them do amazing.

878
00:45:12,360 --> 00:45:14,960
Speaker 1: Well, hey, look, I'm sure those virus parents love all

879
00:45:14,960 --> 00:45:17,240
Speaker 1: their little mutants.

880
00:45:17,400 --> 00:45:19,560
Speaker 3: All right, So let's take a break and think about

881
00:45:19,680 --> 00:45:22,120
Speaker 3: the mutants in our life that we love, and when

882
00:45:22,160 --> 00:45:27,000
Speaker 3: we come back, we'll talk more about the microbiome.

883
00:45:43,520 --> 00:45:45,920
Speaker 1: All right. So we're back, and we're talking to Professor

884
00:45:46,000 --> 00:45:49,160
Speaker 1: Katrino Whitson of the Whites and Research Institute about the

885
00:45:49,239 --> 00:45:52,680
Speaker 1: microbes in our body, how they influence our world and

886
00:45:52,719 --> 00:45:55,320
Speaker 1: shape our lives. And we're talking about the links between

887
00:45:55,400 --> 00:45:58,239
Speaker 1: microbiome and health. And in a minute, I want to

888
00:45:58,280 --> 00:46:01,239
Speaker 1: ask you about what we can do to packed our microbiome.

889
00:46:01,560 --> 00:46:03,359
Speaker 1: But you sort of laid out this picture that like

890
00:46:03,600 --> 00:46:05,839
Speaker 1: these things are in our guts. We don't really understand

891
00:46:06,120 --> 00:46:08,160
Speaker 1: why they're so different from person to person. We can't

892
00:46:08,200 --> 00:46:11,200
Speaker 1: even really define health. We don't understand necessarily what microbiome

893
00:46:11,239 --> 00:46:13,880
Speaker 1: you need to have healthy function. But we know that

894
00:46:13,920 --> 00:46:17,200
Speaker 1: there's a connection between microbiome and health, right, And I've

895
00:46:17,280 --> 00:46:20,480
Speaker 1: heard about people talk about connections between like the microbiome

896
00:46:20,520 --> 00:46:25,040
Speaker 1: and like Alzheimer's or microbiome and autism and microbiome and

897
00:46:25,080 --> 00:46:27,440
Speaker 1: all sorts of things in our lives. How much do

898
00:46:27,480 --> 00:46:30,840
Speaker 1: we know about the impact of the microbiome on these.

899
00:46:30,640 --> 00:46:34,080
Speaker 3: Conditions, Can I super fast interject. I love that Katrina

900
00:46:34,320 --> 00:46:37,080
Speaker 3: is president of the Whites and Institute, but I do

901
00:46:37,080 --> 00:46:40,000
Speaker 3: feel like we've never actually mentioned that Katrina is also

902
00:46:40,040 --> 00:46:42,680
Speaker 3: a professor at UC Irvine and has her own lab.

903
00:46:42,840 --> 00:46:46,279
Speaker 3: Have we given her actual credentials at some point?

904
00:46:46,560 --> 00:46:48,840
Speaker 1: She does have a secondary affiliation that you see Irvine.

905
00:46:49,719 --> 00:46:52,680
Speaker 3: Okay, all right, so she is incredible in lots of ways.

906
00:46:52,719 --> 00:46:54,320
Speaker 3: But okay, all right, sorry, go ahead with the question.

907
00:46:55,320 --> 00:46:58,960
Speaker 7: That's nice of you. Well, I mean, yes, we have

908
00:46:59,239 --> 00:47:04,799
Speaker 7: observation evidence associating microbiomes with health on a lot of

909
00:47:04,800 --> 00:47:06,960
Speaker 7: different fronts, and I mean just it's hard to even

910
00:47:07,040 --> 00:47:08,719
Speaker 7: know where to start. But one place I could start

911
00:47:08,840 --> 00:47:10,760
Speaker 7: is that when I started my lab at EC Irvine

912
00:47:10,800 --> 00:47:14,799
Speaker 7: in twenty fourteen, right when microbiome was becoming big in

913
00:47:14,800 --> 00:47:17,560
Speaker 7: the literature and everybody was excited about it, I had

914
00:47:17,640 --> 00:47:20,960
Speaker 7: one hundred labs contact me wanting to collaborate. In that

915
00:47:21,000 --> 00:47:23,279
Speaker 7: first year, I think I had one grad student just

916
00:47:23,360 --> 00:47:25,440
Speaker 7: beginning to join my lab. We obviously couldn't do one

917
00:47:25,480 --> 00:47:28,640
Speaker 7: hundred collaborations, so I ended up joining forces with an

918
00:47:28,640 --> 00:47:32,080
Speaker 7: ecologist here, Jennifer Martini, and we started a Microbiomes center,

919
00:47:32,640 --> 00:47:34,680
Speaker 7: and in the last ten years I have gotten to

920
00:47:34,719 --> 00:47:39,080
Speaker 7: study easily one hundred different types of microbiomes. Like name

921
00:47:39,120 --> 00:47:41,359
Speaker 7: a type of body example you could think of, I've

922
00:47:41,400 --> 00:47:43,600
Speaker 7: probably got some in our lab freezer, and I've probably

923
00:47:43,600 --> 00:47:46,560
Speaker 7: studied it's microbiome. And that goes for like lots of

924
00:47:46,560 --> 00:47:50,520
Speaker 7: different kinds of creatures, including sharks that eat seaweed from

925
00:47:50,600 --> 00:47:54,280
Speaker 7: Donovan German's lab, for example. So we have been going

926
00:47:54,320 --> 00:47:57,960
Speaker 7: around and like watching what the microbiomes look like and

927
00:47:58,000 --> 00:48:01,319
Speaker 7: taking notes and associating that way health. So a lot

928
00:48:01,360 --> 00:48:04,240
Speaker 7: of the information we have is observational. So we still

929
00:48:04,280 --> 00:48:08,319
Speaker 7: have in the future a need to do more interventional

930
00:48:08,320 --> 00:48:11,239
Speaker 7: studies where we ask how does the microbiome change when

931
00:48:11,280 --> 00:48:13,799
Speaker 7: you manipulate it in a certain way. You know, now

932
00:48:13,800 --> 00:48:16,920
Speaker 7: we kind of know that microbiomes are associated with obesity

933
00:48:17,000 --> 00:48:19,560
Speaker 7: and cancer and so forth, But then what do we

934
00:48:19,600 --> 00:48:21,520
Speaker 7: do about it? That's kind of like the next ten

935
00:48:21,600 --> 00:48:24,400
Speaker 7: years of challenge. And there's a few glimmers of really

936
00:48:24,440 --> 00:48:28,440
Speaker 7: really exciting outcomes that make me think it's going to

937
00:48:28,440 --> 00:48:32,200
Speaker 7: be possible. So, like, for example, cancer treatment is an

938
00:48:32,280 --> 00:48:34,560
Speaker 7: area that I think has a lot of room for

939
00:48:35,080 --> 00:48:39,720
Speaker 7: big improvement where my colleagues at m D Anderson gen Wargo,

940
00:48:39,800 --> 00:48:43,680
Speaker 7: for example, have done studies showing that when melanoma patients

941
00:48:43,719 --> 00:48:47,360
Speaker 7: are getting immunotherapy, which usually only succeeds about thirty percent

942
00:48:47,360 --> 00:48:49,439
Speaker 7: of the time, and the thirty percent of people who

943
00:48:49,480 --> 00:48:52,040
Speaker 7: have a successful immune therapy tend to have a certain

944
00:48:52,120 --> 00:48:54,920
Speaker 7: kind of microbiome. Well, it turns out if you do

945
00:48:54,960 --> 00:48:58,960
Speaker 7: a fecal transplant from someone who's immunotherapy succeeded into someone

946
00:48:59,000 --> 00:49:03,520
Speaker 7: who's immunotherapy failed, you increase their chances of a good outcome.

947
00:49:04,120 --> 00:49:06,920
Speaker 7: Or if you ask how much fiber people ate, people

948
00:49:06,960 --> 00:49:09,239
Speaker 7: who ate more than twenty grams of fiber per day

949
00:49:09,600 --> 00:49:13,560
Speaker 7: have double the progress free survival when they're doing immunotherapy.

950
00:49:13,680 --> 00:49:16,160
Speaker 7: And now they're even doing intervention studies where they're getting

951
00:49:16,160 --> 00:49:19,840
Speaker 7: people on immunotherapy to eat fiber and they're watching to

952
00:49:19,880 --> 00:49:23,239
Speaker 7: see if that increases their healthy outcomes. And that's not

953
00:49:23,280 --> 00:49:27,319
Speaker 7: published yet, but I'm very optimistic. So those are the

954
00:49:27,440 --> 00:49:29,640
Speaker 7: kinds of things I could see happening in the future.

955
00:49:29,680 --> 00:49:32,920
Speaker 7: We even know that vaccine efficacy depends on fiber intake,

956
00:49:33,040 --> 00:49:34,880
Speaker 7: so like if you want to have a good response

957
00:49:34,920 --> 00:49:38,520
Speaker 7: to a vaccine, eating well and Having enough plant fiber

958
00:49:38,560 --> 00:49:41,000
Speaker 7: to support your gut microbes and keep your immune system

959
00:49:41,040 --> 00:49:44,360
Speaker 7: going will actually make you have a more robust response

960
00:49:44,400 --> 00:49:45,400
Speaker 7: to a vaccine.

961
00:49:45,840 --> 00:49:47,960
Speaker 1: See. I knew tacos are good for you. I always

962
00:49:48,000 --> 00:49:49,280
Speaker 1: knew that tacos.

963
00:49:49,280 --> 00:49:51,600
Speaker 3: Exactly what are you putting in your tacos? Why are

964
00:49:51,600 --> 00:49:55,399
Speaker 3: your tacos high fiber? Oh? Oh, I see not all

965
00:49:55,440 --> 00:49:57,160
Speaker 3: tacos have beans in them, Daniel.

966
00:49:57,480 --> 00:50:00,600
Speaker 1: Real tacos. Are you having like weird virgin the tacos

967
00:50:00,600 --> 00:50:01,120
Speaker 1: with beans?

968
00:50:01,320 --> 00:50:01,600
Speaker 3: I guess?

969
00:50:01,600 --> 00:50:05,800
Speaker 7: So, yeah, I guess even Texans put beans in their chili.

970
00:50:06,320 --> 00:50:09,120
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, exactly no, No, Texans have no beans in

971
00:50:09,120 --> 00:50:10,560
Speaker 1: their chili. That's very important contrining.

972
00:50:11,800 --> 00:50:13,040
Speaker 7: Okay, well, all.

973
00:50:13,080 --> 00:50:15,359
Speaker 1: Right, So you've mentioned a few ways that we can

974
00:50:15,400 --> 00:50:18,319
Speaker 1: impact our microbiome. Let's dig into those in detail. So

975
00:50:18,400 --> 00:50:21,000
Speaker 1: you've talked a couple of times about fecal transplants, and

976
00:50:21,040 --> 00:50:23,480
Speaker 1: people are probably wondering, like, what are you talking about here?

977
00:50:23,520 --> 00:50:25,680
Speaker 1: When I think about transplant, I think about taking a

978
00:50:25,760 --> 00:50:27,640
Speaker 1: kidney out of one person's body and putting it in

979
00:50:27,680 --> 00:50:30,239
Speaker 1: somebody else's body. Now I'm trying to think about what

980
00:50:30,280 --> 00:50:33,040
Speaker 1: a fecal transplant means. Like, walk us through this what's

981
00:50:33,040 --> 00:50:35,080
Speaker 1: going on here? How does this work at all? What

982
00:50:35,120 --> 00:50:35,839
Speaker 1: do we know about it?

983
00:50:36,600 --> 00:50:42,120
Speaker 7: Okay, well, fecal transplants refer to taking a healthy microbiome

984
00:50:42,160 --> 00:50:44,560
Speaker 7: from one person and trying to give it to another person.

985
00:50:45,120 --> 00:50:48,160
Speaker 7: We have been doing this since ancient times, so more

986
00:50:48,200 --> 00:50:50,760
Speaker 7: than a thousand years ago in China, people were using

987
00:50:50,760 --> 00:50:56,960
Speaker 7: what they call golden soup to treat diarrhea. And actually,

988
00:50:57,040 --> 00:50:59,360
Speaker 7: since I teach about this in my big classes, and

989
00:50:59,400 --> 00:51:01,920
Speaker 7: I've heard so many good stories from my students who

990
00:51:02,000 --> 00:51:04,480
Speaker 7: bring up, Oh, yeah, my family's from the South and

991
00:51:04,520 --> 00:51:09,040
Speaker 7: we used to do cow Patty's tea to treat diarrhea.

992
00:51:09,080 --> 00:51:12,680
Speaker 1: What really, Yeah, Southern hospitality there you go.

993
00:51:12,800 --> 00:51:14,160
Speaker 3: Yeah, you guys have a lot to look forward to

994
00:51:14,239 --> 00:51:15,000
Speaker 3: when you come to visit.

995
00:51:17,560 --> 00:51:19,680
Speaker 7: I mean, this is something you would only do when

996
00:51:19,680 --> 00:51:21,920
Speaker 7: you're in dire streets, right, But if you've been having

997
00:51:21,960 --> 00:51:24,760
Speaker 7: diarrhea and you weigh sixty five pounds and you can't walk,

998
00:51:25,200 --> 00:51:27,960
Speaker 7: you might be up for trying something bizarre to survive,

999
00:51:28,080 --> 00:51:31,480
Speaker 7: you know. And so actually, a modern time story comes

1000
00:51:31,560 --> 00:51:34,960
Speaker 7: from the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, where a woman who

1001
00:51:35,040 --> 00:51:37,600
Speaker 7: had a sea diff infection. Sea diff is typically caused

1002
00:51:37,640 --> 00:51:41,319
Speaker 7: by taking antibiotics and decimating your healthy microbiome, which makes

1003
00:51:41,360 --> 00:51:44,439
Speaker 7: it easy for sea diff which forms spores in your gut,

1004
00:51:44,480 --> 00:51:47,560
Speaker 7: to rear its head and make toxins and cause diarrhea,

1005
00:51:48,040 --> 00:51:51,080
Speaker 7: and it can get really recurrent and difficult to treat.

1006
00:51:51,160 --> 00:51:54,439
Speaker 7: And the standard of care, ironically is more antibiotics, which

1007
00:51:54,480 --> 00:51:57,400
Speaker 7: caused the problem in the first place. So a woman

1008
00:51:57,640 --> 00:52:01,400
Speaker 7: at the University of Minnesota at the Mayo, her doctor

1009
00:52:01,440 --> 00:52:04,640
Speaker 7: had this, you know, kind of crazy idea like let's

1010
00:52:04,760 --> 00:52:07,920
Speaker 7: take a fecal sample from her husband and transplant it

1011
00:52:07,960 --> 00:52:10,759
Speaker 7: into her and see if we can help this situation

1012
00:52:10,920 --> 00:52:14,359
Speaker 7: get better, And her symptoms improved. Within a day. She

1013
00:52:14,440 --> 00:52:17,120
Speaker 7: went from having had diarrhea every fifteen minutes and she

1014
00:52:17,200 --> 00:52:20,000
Speaker 7: was in a wheelchair and was like unlikely to survive

1015
00:52:20,920 --> 00:52:23,400
Speaker 7: to the next day her diarrhea was resolved.

1016
00:52:23,560 --> 00:52:24,360
Speaker 3: It's incredible.

1017
00:52:24,680 --> 00:52:27,320
Speaker 1: I think you're skipping over some of the crucial steps involved,

1018
00:52:27,320 --> 00:52:29,360
Speaker 1: Like when you talk about this fecal transplant, are we

1019
00:52:29,360 --> 00:52:31,560
Speaker 1: talking about the northern route the southern route, Like how

1020
00:52:31,600 --> 00:52:33,279
Speaker 1: do you get it from him into her?

1021
00:52:33,640 --> 00:52:36,120
Speaker 7: Yes, good question. You've heard me say my northern and

1022
00:52:36,160 --> 00:52:40,239
Speaker 7: southern route joke. Well, I mean your digestive tract is

1023
00:52:40,280 --> 00:52:42,720
Speaker 7: a tube, so you have a couple of entry points.

1024
00:52:44,600 --> 00:52:45,799
Speaker 1: She's so polite for me.

1025
00:52:47,239 --> 00:52:50,919
Speaker 7: And so to do a fecal transplant, you can take

1026
00:52:50,960 --> 00:52:54,040
Speaker 7: a healthy sample, put it in the blender and then

1027
00:52:54,320 --> 00:52:58,160
Speaker 7: get it into a nasal gastric tube down into your

1028
00:52:58,520 --> 00:53:01,880
Speaker 7: stomach from the northern route, or you can do it

1029
00:53:01,920 --> 00:53:05,560
Speaker 7: more like an enema into the bottom part of your

1030
00:53:05,560 --> 00:53:09,719
Speaker 7: digestive tract. You can also make capsules, and you would

1031
00:53:09,800 --> 00:53:12,920
Speaker 7: need to swallow about twenty or thirty glisterin capsules that

1032
00:53:13,000 --> 00:53:16,280
Speaker 7: have poop in them to have an impact, which reminds

1033
00:53:16,360 --> 00:53:19,320
Speaker 7: me of a favorite story. Stanley Falco at Stanford in

1034
00:53:19,360 --> 00:53:23,120
Speaker 7: the nineteen fifties was a hospital technician as a young man,

1035
00:53:23,160 --> 00:53:25,400
Speaker 7: he's now like he was one of the fathers of

1036
00:53:25,440 --> 00:53:27,680
Speaker 7: the hygiene hypothesis, But as a young man he was

1037
00:53:27,719 --> 00:53:31,200
Speaker 7: helping a surgeon who had this idea that they could

1038
00:53:31,320 --> 00:53:35,240
Speaker 7: hide healthy fecal samples from before a patient had surgery

1039
00:53:35,360 --> 00:53:37,800
Speaker 7: in their ice cream and they could eat that post

1040
00:53:37,800 --> 00:53:39,600
Speaker 7: operatively as they were waking up, because a lot of

1041
00:53:39,640 --> 00:53:42,040
Speaker 7: people were getting diarrhea from the antibiotics they were getting

1042
00:53:42,040 --> 00:53:46,399
Speaker 7: in the surgical ward, and without telling them, they had

1043
00:53:46,480 --> 00:53:50,440
Speaker 7: them eat ice cream with these fecal glisterin caps in there,

1044
00:53:51,200 --> 00:53:53,920
Speaker 7: and it was working great, like nobody was getting diarrhea.

1045
00:53:54,120 --> 00:53:56,080
Speaker 7: But when the director of the hospital found out, he

1046
00:53:56,120 --> 00:53:56,680
Speaker 7: fired them.

1047
00:53:58,000 --> 00:54:01,600
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, no more Brownie Chunk ice cream.

1048
00:54:03,280 --> 00:54:06,719
Speaker 7: But they've all recovered and that thinking got them really far.

1049
00:54:06,840 --> 00:54:08,719
Speaker 7: So that was actually very ahead of their time to

1050
00:54:08,719 --> 00:54:10,440
Speaker 7: be doing that in the nineteen fifties. But then it

1051
00:54:10,480 --> 00:54:13,560
Speaker 7: was around twenty ten or so that this story in

1052
00:54:13,600 --> 00:54:17,360
Speaker 7: Minnesota I told you about emerged, and then since then

1053
00:54:18,080 --> 00:54:21,680
Speaker 7: it's become like really a sought after treatment for sea

1054
00:54:21,680 --> 00:54:24,120
Speaker 7: diff but very hard to regulate. It's kind of similar

1055
00:54:24,160 --> 00:54:26,480
Speaker 7: to blood donation, like we haven't figured out how to

1056
00:54:26,480 --> 00:54:30,160
Speaker 7: make synthetic blood and it's still a quest, and similarly

1057
00:54:30,200 --> 00:54:32,880
Speaker 7: for fecal material, it's a quest to figure out like

1058
00:54:32,920 --> 00:54:34,920
Speaker 7: what is even in there, which parts of it are

1059
00:54:34,960 --> 00:54:37,160
Speaker 7: needed to make a fecal transplant successful.

1060
00:54:37,560 --> 00:54:40,360
Speaker 1: So what's happening is that, like my microbiome is devastated,

1061
00:54:40,360 --> 00:54:42,600
Speaker 1: which is why I have Diarrhea'm getting somebody else's community

1062
00:54:42,600 --> 00:54:45,719
Speaker 1: that comes in and then grows into some healthy community.

1063
00:54:45,719 --> 00:54:46,280
Speaker 1: That's the idea.

1064
00:54:47,120 --> 00:54:49,880
Speaker 7: Well, that might have been initial thoughts on what the

1065
00:54:49,920 --> 00:54:53,839
Speaker 7: idea was, but interestingly in the last fifteen years, we've

1066
00:54:53,880 --> 00:54:57,279
Speaker 7: tried dissecting the poop into its various components, and so

1067
00:54:57,520 --> 00:55:01,280
Speaker 7: fascinatingly we've discovered that many of the components are enough

1068
00:55:01,440 --> 00:55:04,000
Speaker 7: to work as a fecal transplant. So you can filter

1069
00:55:04,080 --> 00:55:07,480
Speaker 7: the poop and only give the liquid supernatan, which has

1070
00:55:07,560 --> 00:55:11,560
Speaker 7: molecules and maybe viruses, but certainly not bacterial cells, and

1071
00:55:11,600 --> 00:55:15,759
Speaker 7: that's enough to cause a successful so called fecal transplant.

1072
00:55:15,760 --> 00:55:19,120
Speaker 7: We call it a filtered fecal transplant, and that still works.

1073
00:55:19,960 --> 00:55:23,680
Speaker 7: Or you can just isolate the spores out those are

1074
00:55:23,760 --> 00:55:26,920
Speaker 7: cells for sure, and give that as a treatment. That's

1075
00:55:26,960 --> 00:55:30,480
Speaker 7: the FDA approved treatment for the product v OUST, or

1076
00:55:30,840 --> 00:55:33,920
Speaker 7: you can take a whole fecal community. There's a Swedish

1077
00:55:33,920 --> 00:55:37,200
Speaker 7: poop from the nineteen nineties that has been cultivated anaerobically

1078
00:55:37,280 --> 00:55:38,080
Speaker 7: ever since then.

1079
00:55:39,440 --> 00:55:39,720
Speaker 6: Poop.

1080
00:55:40,120 --> 00:55:42,160
Speaker 7: Yes, and my students are like, hey, that poop is

1081
00:55:42,160 --> 00:55:42,640
Speaker 7: older than me.

1082
00:55:46,320 --> 00:55:48,319
Speaker 1: Whenever I use the bath though, I never imagine it's

1083
00:55:48,360 --> 00:55:50,399
Speaker 1: going to go down in history, but this one really did.

1084
00:55:50,560 --> 00:55:53,760
Speaker 7: Yeah, this one poop has saved like probably thousands of lives.

1085
00:55:53,760 --> 00:55:57,800
Speaker 7: This one poop has been cultivated anaerobically for many years,

1086
00:55:57,880 --> 00:56:02,040
Speaker 7: and so presumably none of the initial molecules from that

1087
00:56:02,120 --> 00:56:04,839
Speaker 7: poop are present, but just the progeny of all those

1088
00:56:04,880 --> 00:56:09,200
Speaker 7: generations of microbial growth, and that has been enough to

1089
00:56:09,280 --> 00:56:13,600
Speaker 7: cure seedff in many, many different people. So, to be honest,

1090
00:56:13,640 --> 00:56:16,160
Speaker 7: it's still a science question, like what you actually need

1091
00:56:16,360 --> 00:56:18,960
Speaker 7: to make a fecal transplant work. There also have been

1092
00:56:19,040 --> 00:56:24,200
Speaker 7: famous failures. There were phase three clinical trials of cocktails

1093
00:56:24,200 --> 00:56:27,560
Speaker 7: of microbes that people put together in the pharmaceutical industry

1094
00:56:27,640 --> 00:56:30,560
Speaker 7: thinking that that would work, and it didn't. So there's

1095
00:56:30,600 --> 00:56:34,360
Speaker 7: a geni sequax about the poop that just works perfect.

1096
00:56:34,640 --> 00:56:37,200
Speaker 3: So you mentioned that when you've got the liquid supernatan

1097
00:56:37,280 --> 00:56:39,520
Speaker 3: without any of the bacteria in it, but you've got

1098
00:56:39,560 --> 00:56:44,799
Speaker 3: their metabolic excretions plus viruses, it works fine.

1099
00:56:44,960 --> 00:56:45,200
Speaker 7: Yeah.

1100
00:56:45,239 --> 00:56:47,760
Speaker 3: Does that suggest it's the viruses that actually matter?

1101
00:56:48,280 --> 00:56:51,400
Speaker 7: What a cool question. I love that question. I don't

1102
00:56:51,440 --> 00:56:53,520
Speaker 7: know the answer, but it has been shown in like

1103
00:56:53,600 --> 00:56:55,600
Speaker 7: a number of different ways. There was a group in

1104
00:56:55,640 --> 00:56:59,040
Speaker 7: Germany and Kiel that showed this with the viruses with

1105
00:56:59,080 --> 00:57:02,040
Speaker 7: the filtered fecal filtrate. And then there's a group at

1106
00:57:02,040 --> 00:57:05,360
Speaker 7: the University of Copenhagen who have done really extensive studies

1107
00:57:05,400 --> 00:57:08,680
Speaker 7: in this really cool model of baby piglets, and their

1108
00:57:08,760 --> 00:57:11,520
Speaker 7: goal is to be able to help preterm infants in

1109
00:57:11,560 --> 00:57:13,600
Speaker 7: the NICKEU. And it's such a good idea because it

1110
00:57:13,600 --> 00:57:17,120
Speaker 7: would be very dangerous to give live microbes to pre

1111
00:57:17,240 --> 00:57:20,200
Speaker 7: term babies whose guts are in really bad shape. But

1112
00:57:20,440 --> 00:57:22,720
Speaker 7: if you could do it with the viruses, you might

1113
00:57:22,760 --> 00:57:25,840
Speaker 7: be able to create an environment that helps the gut

1114
00:57:25,880 --> 00:57:29,360
Speaker 7: microbiome develop successfully. And like babies in the nick you

1115
00:57:29,600 --> 00:57:32,000
Speaker 7: have really bad outcomes with their guts, like a third

1116
00:57:32,080 --> 00:57:35,640
Speaker 7: become septic, a third get necrotizing enterocolitis, and a third

1117
00:57:35,720 --> 00:57:38,360
Speaker 7: have what they call healthy outcomes, but I mean they're

1118
00:57:38,360 --> 00:57:41,440
Speaker 7: really in dire straits. And so I love what the

1119
00:57:41,480 --> 00:57:43,680
Speaker 7: group at the University of Copenhagen is doing because they're

1120
00:57:43,680 --> 00:57:46,200
Speaker 7: starting in a model of baby piglets, which is pretty

1121
00:57:46,200 --> 00:57:49,720
Speaker 7: similar to a human model, and I am optimistic that

1122
00:57:49,800 --> 00:57:52,760
Speaker 7: it won't take too long before they'll feel like it's

1123
00:57:52,800 --> 00:57:55,040
Speaker 7: safe to try it in babies because the room for

1124
00:57:55,080 --> 00:57:57,920
Speaker 7: improvement there is just enormous. So that to me is

1125
00:57:57,960 --> 00:58:01,200
Speaker 7: like a really really cool way that we could improve health.

1126
00:58:01,760 --> 00:58:03,560
Speaker 1: So if you get a transplant from somebody else they

1127
00:58:03,560 --> 00:58:06,120
Speaker 1: have a different microbiome, it's no guarantee that it's definitely

1128
00:58:06,120 --> 00:58:09,080
Speaker 1: going to work for you? Is the ideal transplant a

1129
00:58:09,120 --> 00:58:12,280
Speaker 1: donation from yourself, Like, if you're out there having good

1130
00:58:12,360 --> 00:58:14,480
Speaker 1: poops every day, should people put some of that in

1131
00:58:14,480 --> 00:58:17,480
Speaker 1: the freezer for the day when they have surgery or diarrhea.

1132
00:58:18,120 --> 00:58:20,840
Speaker 7: I really like that idea. It's certainly been a topic

1133
00:58:20,920 --> 00:58:22,360
Speaker 7: of conversation in our household.

1134
00:58:23,840 --> 00:58:26,280
Speaker 1: Don't dig around in our freezer unless you want some surprises.

1135
00:58:26,320 --> 00:58:29,120
Speaker 13: By the way, well, not your favorite part of our freezer,

1136
00:58:29,160 --> 00:58:34,720
Speaker 13: I know, but I appreciate your open mindedness. And by

1137
00:58:34,760 --> 00:58:37,360
Speaker 13: the way, when my students have to put vehicle samples

1138
00:58:37,360 --> 00:58:39,720
Speaker 13: in the freezer for our studies, we joke about like

1139
00:58:39,880 --> 00:58:41,480
Speaker 13: the right way to do that, and like, if your

1140
00:58:41,560 --> 00:58:44,360
Speaker 13: roommates don't like the idea, just empty out a box

1141
00:58:44,360 --> 00:58:46,960
Speaker 13: of strawberry popsicles or like chicken nuggets and you could

1142
00:58:46,960 --> 00:58:48,560
Speaker 13: just hide your samples in there. And if they're trying

1143
00:58:48,600 --> 00:58:50,680
Speaker 13: to steal a popsicle, I mean, that's on them.

1144
00:58:52,840 --> 00:58:54,640
Speaker 1: Oh they're going to get a popsicle. It's not going

1145
00:58:54,640 --> 00:58:56,080
Speaker 1: to be strawberry exactly.

1146
00:58:56,880 --> 00:58:59,080
Speaker 3: After this conversation, I'm never going to look at popsicles

1147
00:58:59,080 --> 00:59:04,200
Speaker 3: again say yeah.

1148
00:59:03,560 --> 00:59:07,200
Speaker 7: Yeah, So the question was could we do like auto

1149
00:59:07,240 --> 00:59:09,920
Speaker 7: like self fecal transplants and have that work. And that

1150
00:59:09,960 --> 00:59:12,440
Speaker 7: has been studied in a lot of different contexts also,

1151
00:59:12,520 --> 00:59:15,600
Speaker 7: for like recovery from antibiotics. If you really know that

1152
00:59:15,640 --> 00:59:19,000
Speaker 7: you're healthy, Like maybe everybody should be banking their own

1153
00:59:19,040 --> 00:59:21,280
Speaker 7: sample at some point in their life when they just

1154
00:59:21,320 --> 00:59:24,400
Speaker 7: were digesting really well and they were eighteen and had

1155
00:59:24,440 --> 00:59:26,560
Speaker 7: like been eating really well for the summer or something,

1156
00:59:26,800 --> 00:59:29,400
Speaker 7: save a moment of that glorious part of your health

1157
00:59:29,400 --> 00:59:31,480
Speaker 7: in the freezer so you could restore yourself to it.

1158
00:59:32,240 --> 00:59:35,560
Speaker 7: I like that idea. I've proposed this for different kinds

1159
00:59:35,560 --> 00:59:38,480
Speaker 7: of context. Like one time I wrote a proposal about

1160
00:59:38,760 --> 00:59:41,600
Speaker 7: helping people who are going to have to have radiotherapy

1161
00:59:41,720 --> 00:59:46,000
Speaker 7: for cancer. And often people get essentially diarrhea and other

1162
00:59:46,080 --> 00:59:50,080
Speaker 7: really rough consequences of the radiation treatment. So the idea

1163
00:59:50,160 --> 00:59:52,520
Speaker 7: was to restore their health to what they were before

1164
00:59:52,560 --> 00:59:56,360
Speaker 7: the treatment. But somebody who has cancer might have cancer

1165
00:59:56,400 --> 00:59:59,840
Speaker 7: promoting properties in their own fecal microbiomes, so you could

1166
01:00:00,000 --> 01:00:04,160
Speaker 7: certainly bring them back to getting cancer again. I mean

1167
01:00:04,160 --> 01:00:07,040
Speaker 7: this has been studied extensively, Like this kind of approach

1168
01:00:07,080 --> 01:00:09,720
Speaker 7: has been used. There was a big study in New

1169
01:00:09,800 --> 01:00:13,120
Speaker 7: York City of people who were getting bone marrow transplants

1170
01:00:13,120 --> 01:00:17,880
Speaker 7: for blood cancers, where they did transplants from people's before

1171
01:00:18,400 --> 01:00:21,160
Speaker 7: fecal sample in order to try to help them avoid

1172
01:00:21,200 --> 01:00:25,320
Speaker 7: getting I mean, people get terrible infections after getting cancer treatment.

1173
01:00:25,400 --> 01:00:27,280
Speaker 7: So this is an area again kind of like the

1174
01:00:27,320 --> 01:00:29,080
Speaker 7: preacher and babies. There's like a ton of room for

1175
01:00:29,160 --> 01:00:32,080
Speaker 7: improvement there. But the concern is that you would cause

1176
01:00:32,120 --> 01:00:36,200
Speaker 7: cancer again, so maybe a healthy donor is safer. And

1177
01:00:36,240 --> 01:00:38,080
Speaker 7: then I hear your question, well, what if the healthy

1178
01:00:38,080 --> 01:00:40,880
Speaker 7: donor is really different than you. Well, another thing that

1179
01:00:40,920 --> 01:00:43,920
Speaker 7: happens is it's rare that we follow up our studies

1180
01:00:43,920 --> 01:00:46,000
Speaker 7: long enough to really see what happens. But there was

1181
01:00:46,040 --> 01:00:49,880
Speaker 7: one study of autistic children where they did fecal transplants

1182
01:00:49,880 --> 01:00:52,880
Speaker 7: from a stranger, like a healthy donor, not a family member.

1183
01:00:52,960 --> 01:00:55,600
Speaker 7: But then they followed up for two years both the

1184
01:00:55,680 --> 01:00:58,880
Speaker 7: kids with autism and a healthy sibling in the same household.

1185
01:00:59,560 --> 01:01:02,000
Speaker 7: And I loved that they did this for two years.

1186
01:01:02,760 --> 01:01:06,920
Speaker 7: This is Rosy Krasmo like Brown at Arizona, and they

1187
01:01:07,000 --> 01:01:11,560
Speaker 7: found that at first the autistic children who received the

1188
01:01:11,600 --> 01:01:15,320
Speaker 7: fecal transplant from a stranger donor their guts were more

1189
01:01:15,360 --> 01:01:19,360
Speaker 7: similar to the healthy donor, but after two years their

1190
01:01:19,400 --> 01:01:22,920
Speaker 7: gut microbiomes resembled their siblings more, but they did have

1191
01:01:23,000 --> 01:01:26,880
Speaker 7: higher diversity. So it's almost like the fecal transplant kick

1192
01:01:26,960 --> 01:01:31,200
Speaker 7: started the capacity to carry a higher microbial diversity, But

1193
01:01:31,320 --> 01:01:34,880
Speaker 7: then all those strains got replaced by strains that were

1194
01:01:35,200 --> 01:01:39,960
Speaker 7: available in the household. So the household influence is really important,

1195
01:01:40,600 --> 01:01:43,240
Speaker 7: and it makes me wonder like when people get married,

1196
01:01:43,280 --> 01:01:45,400
Speaker 7: there's going to be a battle of the microbiotas and

1197
01:01:45,440 --> 01:01:48,000
Speaker 7: somebody's going to win, and that hasn't really been studied

1198
01:01:48,000 --> 01:01:48,439
Speaker 7: that much.

1199
01:01:48,840 --> 01:01:53,680
Speaker 1: You know, killed diarrhea do us part? Can we talk

1200
01:01:53,720 --> 01:01:57,160
Speaker 1: about the probiotic industry you mentioned earlier. It's eighty billion

1201
01:01:57,200 --> 01:01:59,760
Speaker 1: dollars and I feel like I see pills and powders

1202
01:01:59,800 --> 01:02:04,440
Speaker 1: and yogurts promoting probiotic this and probiotic that. What's in

1203
01:02:04,520 --> 01:02:07,240
Speaker 1: those And what's your take on whether they're likely to

1204
01:02:07,280 --> 01:02:07,800
Speaker 1: do anything?

1205
01:02:08,320 --> 01:02:10,640
Speaker 7: Well, that's a really big question. It is a really

1206
01:02:10,640 --> 01:02:13,440
Speaker 7: big industry. I was even just comparing the size of

1207
01:02:13,480 --> 01:02:16,880
Speaker 7: the probiotic industry in the antibiotic industry, and I think

1208
01:02:16,920 --> 01:02:20,080
Speaker 7: the probiotic industry might even be a bigger money maker

1209
01:02:20,080 --> 01:02:23,240
Speaker 7: than antibiotics, but it's close. But I mean that's amazing

1210
01:02:23,240 --> 01:02:26,200
Speaker 7: to me. Eighty billion dollars, like that's close to the

1211
01:02:26,240 --> 01:02:30,440
Speaker 7: GDP of many nations. And so whether it could work

1212
01:02:30,920 --> 01:02:34,240
Speaker 7: is one question. And yes, the idea of a probiotic

1213
01:02:34,320 --> 01:02:36,280
Speaker 7: makes sense. I mean, if you could get the right

1214
01:02:36,320 --> 01:02:38,840
Speaker 7: bug to the right place at the right time, that's

1215
01:02:38,840 --> 01:02:42,480
Speaker 7: a great idea. It could definitely work. When we say probiotic,

1216
01:02:42,520 --> 01:02:46,560
Speaker 7: that includes fermented foods like yogurt and kombucha and kiefer

1217
01:02:46,600 --> 01:02:50,880
Speaker 7: and miso, and those we actually can see really kickstart

1218
01:02:51,040 --> 01:02:54,280
Speaker 7: diversity in our guts. Not necessarily because the bacteria in

1219
01:02:54,360 --> 01:02:58,640
Speaker 7: those products are colonizing our gut, but they can kickstart

1220
01:02:58,720 --> 01:03:02,000
Speaker 7: diversity in a good way. Most people when they take

1221
01:03:02,040 --> 01:03:06,760
Speaker 7: a probiotic, and many packages claim that it's gonna directly

1222
01:03:06,960 --> 01:03:09,760
Speaker 7: increase your microbiome diversity. I think a lot of people

1223
01:03:09,800 --> 01:03:12,440
Speaker 7: when they eat a probiotic, imagine that now that bug

1224
01:03:12,520 --> 01:03:14,680
Speaker 7: is happily living in their gut and they just like

1225
01:03:14,920 --> 01:03:18,880
Speaker 7: got their community a little happier now. Most probiotics actually

1226
01:03:18,880 --> 01:03:21,680
Speaker 7: don't do that. Most are transient. So if you are

1227
01:03:21,800 --> 01:03:24,200
Speaker 7: taking those pills and then you measure people for a week,

1228
01:03:24,280 --> 01:03:26,320
Speaker 7: you'll see a wash out period and after a week

1229
01:03:26,440 --> 01:03:29,040
Speaker 7: or so it'll be gone, which is probably not what

1230
01:03:29,080 --> 01:03:32,880
Speaker 7: people imagine. You also might not want the probiotic to stick,

1231
01:03:33,120 --> 01:03:35,280
Speaker 7: so I always remember the story of a startup in

1232
01:03:35,320 --> 01:03:39,200
Speaker 7: San Francisco where they evolved probiotics that were good at

1233
01:03:39,200 --> 01:03:42,000
Speaker 7: binding to mucus, with the idea that they could persist

1234
01:03:42,040 --> 01:03:44,800
Speaker 7: in the gut. But they forgot about gum mucus and

1235
01:03:44,880 --> 01:03:48,240
Speaker 7: everybody got cavities in their little study.

1236
01:03:49,720 --> 01:03:53,600
Speaker 3: I'm not laugh is so complicated, I know.

1237
01:03:55,080 --> 01:03:58,880
Speaker 7: So on average probiotic packages, you know, they don't have

1238
01:03:59,000 --> 01:04:01,840
Speaker 7: to have evident for the claims they make on the packages,

1239
01:04:02,400 --> 01:04:05,960
Speaker 7: so they can say some pretty fantastical things. And actually,

1240
01:04:06,000 --> 01:04:10,000
Speaker 7: in my Microbiomes class this quarter, we had a probiotic

1241
01:04:10,280 --> 01:04:14,080
Speaker 7: sus score, like a suspicion score activity where everybody had

1242
01:04:14,120 --> 01:04:16,440
Speaker 7: to go find a probiotic with crazy claims on the

1243
01:04:16,480 --> 01:04:18,800
Speaker 7: package and then try to investigate the claims and like

1244
01:04:18,840 --> 01:04:21,840
Speaker 7: what evidence there was for them, and there was not

1245
01:04:21,960 --> 01:04:24,480
Speaker 7: usually a whole lot of evidence, And the students had

1246
01:04:24,560 --> 01:04:27,360
Speaker 7: amazing comments afterwards that were like, man, if I saw

1247
01:04:27,360 --> 01:04:30,200
Speaker 7: a celebrity claiming that a probiotic worked, I just would

1248
01:04:30,200 --> 01:04:32,840
Speaker 7: believe it. It never occurred to me to like investigate the evidence.

1249
01:04:32,880 --> 01:04:35,360
Speaker 7: And I'm like, you guys are science students. I'm glad

1250
01:04:35,400 --> 01:04:36,160
Speaker 7: if you're learning that.

1251
01:04:36,400 --> 01:04:37,440
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's important.

1252
01:04:38,280 --> 01:04:41,400
Speaker 7: Yeah. So you know, just off the top of my head,

1253
01:04:41,480 --> 01:04:44,200
Speaker 7: you know, there's probiotics out there that are named like

1254
01:04:44,320 --> 01:04:47,440
Speaker 7: happy hoo ha, and they claim to improve your imaginal

1255
01:04:47,560 --> 01:04:53,880
Speaker 7: micro or like you know, anyway, there's some pretty funny ones.

1256
01:04:54,040 --> 01:04:57,920
Speaker 7: But there are some probiotics that are well investigated and

1257
01:04:57,960 --> 01:05:00,560
Speaker 7: people are doing studies with them, and so sometimes they're

1258
01:05:00,600 --> 01:05:03,880
Speaker 7: not sharing the evidence in order to protect their ip.

1259
01:05:04,160 --> 01:05:07,680
Speaker 7: So it's complicated. But the way the industry is regulated

1260
01:05:07,840 --> 01:05:11,000
Speaker 7: is just that the probiotics have to be generally regarded

1261
01:05:11,040 --> 01:05:14,440
Speaker 7: as safe or grass, which is not a very high standard.

1262
01:05:14,480 --> 01:05:16,120
Speaker 7: I mean, it's a high standard in the sense that

1263
01:05:16,200 --> 01:05:17,840
Speaker 7: like this thing's not going to kill you, that's.

1264
01:05:17,680 --> 01:05:20,280
Speaker 3: Good, might give you cavities, might give.

1265
01:05:20,120 --> 01:05:22,880
Speaker 7: You cavities, or might just do absolutely nothing. And I

1266
01:05:22,920 --> 01:05:26,880
Speaker 7: mean the supplement industry, even beyond probiotics, is an enormous

1267
01:05:26,880 --> 01:05:30,840
Speaker 7: industry and there's very few claims and it's pretty hard

1268
01:05:30,840 --> 01:05:33,480
Speaker 7: to know. I mean, even for you know ourselves, like

1269
01:05:33,720 --> 01:05:35,840
Speaker 7: Daniel and I we have a son who's an athlete,

1270
01:05:35,920 --> 01:05:38,400
Speaker 7: and he's always, you know, really willing to do what

1271
01:05:38,480 --> 01:05:40,120
Speaker 7: it takes to be healthy. And so we've had a

1272
01:05:40,160 --> 01:05:43,360
Speaker 7: lot of conversations about what we understand about what's in

1273
01:05:43,400 --> 01:05:46,160
Speaker 7: a supplement versus what we understand about what's in a food.

1274
01:05:46,320 --> 01:05:48,920
Speaker 7: And you know, with the tools we have in our

1275
01:05:48,960 --> 01:05:52,440
Speaker 7: own households, we can't really assess the safety of food

1276
01:05:52,640 --> 01:05:57,600
Speaker 7: or supplements. That's why we need infrastructure and institutions that

1277
01:05:57,680 --> 01:05:59,840
Speaker 7: help us understand that. But a lot of the things

1278
01:05:59,880 --> 01:06:02,920
Speaker 7: that we can buy in packages might have stuff that's

1279
01:06:03,000 --> 01:06:05,360
Speaker 7: dangerous in them, and we have to be really careful.

1280
01:06:05,400 --> 01:06:10,120
Speaker 7: So my general instinct is to lean towards food, and

1281
01:06:11,160 --> 01:06:14,120
Speaker 7: you know the advice to generally not eat things that

1282
01:06:14,160 --> 01:06:16,800
Speaker 7: your grandparents wouldn't recognize as food, or maybe it has

1283
01:06:16,840 --> 01:06:19,920
Speaker 7: to be our great grandparents now, because a lot of

1284
01:06:19,960 --> 01:06:23,960
Speaker 7: the processed foods that are available to us these days,

1285
01:06:23,960 --> 01:06:27,240
Speaker 7: with tons of ingredients we can't even pronounce, it could

1286
01:06:27,280 --> 01:06:30,040
Speaker 7: be really damaging our health. It's not like I have

1287
01:06:30,120 --> 01:06:32,520
Speaker 7: really great evidence for every single one, but I think

1288
01:06:32,800 --> 01:06:37,040
Speaker 7: that leaning towards eating things that you can recognize tends

1289
01:06:37,080 --> 01:06:39,080
Speaker 7: to work the best for the evidence that we have

1290
01:06:39,200 --> 01:06:39,600
Speaker 7: right now.

1291
01:06:40,120 --> 01:06:43,360
Speaker 1: And earlier on you mentioned fiber and beans. Why is

1292
01:06:43,440 --> 01:06:45,200
Speaker 1: fiber something good to eat? I mean, if you're not

1293
01:06:45,200 --> 01:06:47,520
Speaker 1: going to do a poop transplant and you're not buying

1294
01:06:47,520 --> 01:06:49,920
Speaker 1: happy hooha or whatever, if you're just going to try

1295
01:06:49,960 --> 01:06:52,240
Speaker 1: to do this through like healthy eating and food, tell

1296
01:06:52,320 --> 01:06:53,720
Speaker 1: us why fiber is important.

1297
01:06:54,520 --> 01:06:58,640
Speaker 7: Definitely. So, fiber is the part of carbohydrates that doesn't

1298
01:06:58,760 --> 01:07:02,560
Speaker 7: get digested very quickly. It's longer chains of carbohydrates that

1299
01:07:02,640 --> 01:07:05,600
Speaker 7: your human enzymes can't even access. So the way to

1300
01:07:05,600 --> 01:07:07,840
Speaker 7: figure this out is if you look at a nutrition label,

1301
01:07:07,880 --> 01:07:10,320
Speaker 7: it'll list the total carbs and then it'll list the

1302
01:07:10,320 --> 01:07:12,480
Speaker 7: subset of the carbs that are fiber. So for a

1303
01:07:12,480 --> 01:07:15,000
Speaker 7: piece of white bread, it might be like nineteen grams

1304
01:07:15,000 --> 01:07:18,080
Speaker 7: of carbs one gram of fiber. Wheat bread might be

1305
01:07:18,640 --> 01:07:21,240
Speaker 7: nineteen grams of carbs five grams of fiber. Okay, cool.

1306
01:07:21,320 --> 01:07:24,080
Speaker 7: So now we're talking like you know, nearly a quarter

1307
01:07:24,120 --> 01:07:26,000
Speaker 7: of the carbs in that piece of bread is fiber.

1308
01:07:26,080 --> 01:07:29,560
Speaker 7: It's going to be slower to hit your blood sugar levels.

1309
01:07:30,160 --> 01:07:32,720
Speaker 7: It's going to persist in your digestive track down to

1310
01:07:32,760 --> 01:07:35,160
Speaker 7: your colon where all the microbes live and give them

1311
01:07:35,240 --> 01:07:37,919
Speaker 7: some food. So that's pretty good. Now let's talk about

1312
01:07:37,960 --> 01:07:40,840
Speaker 7: beans and lentils. Half of the carbs in beans and

1313
01:07:40,920 --> 01:07:43,680
Speaker 7: lentils are in the form of fiber. So if you

1314
01:07:43,760 --> 01:07:46,400
Speaker 7: eat a cup of black beans or old navy beans

1315
01:07:46,440 --> 01:07:49,680
Speaker 7: or lentils in a day, you'll get probably ten or

1316
01:07:49,720 --> 01:07:52,240
Speaker 7: twenty grams of fiber out of the thirty or forty

1317
01:07:52,280 --> 01:07:55,400
Speaker 7: grams of carbs. That's half of your fiber needs for

1318
01:07:55,440 --> 01:07:58,640
Speaker 7: the day. So the daily recommended allowance of fiber in

1319
01:07:58,640 --> 01:08:01,280
Speaker 7: the US is twenty five to three five grams per day,

1320
01:08:02,120 --> 01:08:04,600
Speaker 7: and we're usually getting half of that. Most Americans are

1321
01:08:04,600 --> 01:08:07,520
Speaker 7: getting ten to fifteen grams per day, So we all

1322
01:08:07,560 --> 01:08:09,479
Speaker 7: need to think about how to fill our fiber gap.

1323
01:08:09,480 --> 01:08:11,400
Speaker 7: You always hear about how we're not eating enough protein.

1324
01:08:11,440 --> 01:08:12,800
Speaker 7: I mean, to be honest, we're probably eating money of

1325
01:08:12,840 --> 01:08:14,800
Speaker 7: protein in the United States, but we really are not

1326
01:08:14,880 --> 01:08:18,679
Speaker 7: eating enough fiber. If you eat fiber, you are fueling

1327
01:08:18,720 --> 01:08:21,400
Speaker 7: the microbes in your colon. And then if you do

1328
01:08:21,520 --> 01:08:25,160
Speaker 7: experience some kind of stress, whether it's antibiotics or diarrhea

1329
01:08:25,280 --> 01:08:29,440
Speaker 7: or just like literally stress that causes inflammation and oxygen

1330
01:08:29,800 --> 01:08:32,200
Speaker 7: descending upon you and making it harder for those bugs

1331
01:08:32,240 --> 01:08:35,000
Speaker 7: to thrive in your colon. When you have fiber in there,

1332
01:08:35,080 --> 01:08:37,559
Speaker 7: you've given the bugs a place to hide out, so

1333
01:08:37,680 --> 01:08:40,160
Speaker 7: you can weather the storms of any kind of other

1334
01:08:40,200 --> 01:08:43,559
Speaker 7: fluctuations in your life better and keep the microbes happier.

1335
01:08:43,760 --> 01:08:46,120
Speaker 7: So like, if you did know you had to take antibiotics,

1336
01:08:46,240 --> 01:08:50,160
Speaker 7: I would definitely really recommend making sure you're eating enough

1337
01:08:50,200 --> 01:08:54,320
Speaker 7: fiber and fermented foods actually are another really good contributor.

1338
01:08:54,640 --> 01:08:57,559
Speaker 1: All right. So that's scientific evidence that chili should have

1339
01:08:57,600 --> 01:09:01,400
Speaker 1: beans in it. Settled that age old question.

1340
01:09:01,680 --> 01:09:04,600
Speaker 7: I mean, I don't think there's anyone who would disagree

1341
01:09:04,720 --> 01:09:08,240
Speaker 7: that if you wanted to protect your microbiome, having beans

1342
01:09:08,280 --> 01:09:10,200
Speaker 7: in your chili would be a good idea.

1343
01:09:10,240 --> 01:09:12,920
Speaker 3: All right, everybody, So tonight, grab your beans and your

1344
01:09:13,040 --> 01:09:16,160
Speaker 3: bino and hopefully Katrina Whitson will be back on the

1345
01:09:16,160 --> 01:09:18,360
Speaker 3: show and not too long. Thanks for spending some time

1346
01:09:18,400 --> 01:09:19,000
Speaker 3: with us today.

1347
01:09:19,479 --> 01:09:20,320
Speaker 7: Awesome. Thank you.

1348
01:09:27,439 --> 01:09:31,280
Speaker 3: Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by iHeartRadio. We

1349
01:09:31,320 --> 01:09:33,759
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1350
01:09:33,920 --> 01:09:36,519
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1351
01:09:36,560 --> 01:09:38,519
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1352
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1355
01:09:45,280 --> 01:09:48,800
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1356
01:09:48,840 --> 01:09:52,040
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1357
01:09:51,120 --> 01:09:53,160
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01:09:53,240 --> 01:09:57,040
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