All about Bacteria : Ravi Mantha at TEDxCoimbatore

good morning everyone so wonderful to be here in Coimbatore I'm here today to talk about your health can have a quick show of hands how many of you have ever taken antibiotics in your life if there anybody who hasn't taken antibiotics in their life yeah this is it right it's 100 percent of us have taken a course of antibiotics at some point or the other so once upon a time there was a depressed king who spent all his time inside his palace then one day he met a happy Potter who spent all his time playing in the mud the story of bacteria can seem like a fairy tale but what I'm going to tell you in the next 15 minutes is all true when I was 16 years old I moved to Seattle to study in Seattle there was one issue it had the highest rates of depression and suicide in the US and nobody could understand why there was a turn for it seasonal affective disorder and I remember thinking that wow you know is it just because you know things are gloomy during the eight months of the year and people don't go outside and there is no sunshine and you get depressed and gloomy and you know and that can lead to thoughts of suicide but somehow that really didn't sit well with me that explanation there had to be something more because as I was reading some other bits of information came to the fore the first thing was that you know people who work on submarines for six months at a time they also get depressed because they don't see the sunshine and people who watch too much TV or playing video games they also get depressed but if you actually look at some other categories people who work in Antarctic station you know in Antarctica they only work in the summer and in summer it's 24/7 sunshine six months of the year it's you know the Sun doesn't set those people also get depressed why coal miners who spend majority of their time underground don't have higher rates of depression than normal people so there's something else going on that is not related to this lack of sunshine you know and and we had no way of and certainly you know 25 years ago I had no idea what that could be but it was something that was in the back of my mind and I had an aha moment a few years ago when scientists found literally a miraculous bacteria called Mycobacterium back' that lives only in the soil in dead matter in organic matter it doesn't it doesn't actually live on our bodies but when it comes into contact with our bodies it stimulates the release of serotonin in the brain and serotonin is a mood regulator so it turns out that humans evolved to be outside out in the mud playing in the sand in the soil and a significant component of our happiness or happy mood is related to our being outside so seasonal affective disorder is not really related to the Sun it turns out it's related to the lack of soil bacteria on our bodies so we have to go outside we have to do gardening you know people who are doing pottery are actually very happy people so this is something for you guys to think about when you know you look at your own families and you see that people who get a little bit more depressed than others and here's a very easy solution so it turns out that you know in this case happiness is actually quite free because you all you have to do is just step outside or preferably in your bare feet now I had another issue when I was 22 years old I just moved to London and I used to get a lot of bacterial skin infections boils and had no idea why I went to the doctor and I got prescribed antibiotics and it would solve the problem for about six months and then I would get recurring boils again then the antibiotics made me develop acid reflux how many of you have had acid reflux and I see a quick show of hands and this is quite common especially in India and of course when I went to see the doctor about my acid reflux they put me on something called a proton pump inhibitor which is a pill that you take every day that lowers the level of stomach acids now the problem with that is that stomach acid is used is really needed by your body because in order to absorb the minerals and the vitamins and and and the nutrition from food you need acid so you then end up with the absorption issues you end up with all kinds of other issues so I was 22 years old a bit overweight with acid reflux recurring bacterial infections and I was thinking you know this there's something wrong you know why am i unhealthy you know I should be at the peak of health in my 20s and of course a daily proton pump inhibitor you know I say the pharmaceutical companies smile because you know that's what they want you to do they want you to get rid of all natural cures they want you to take pills every single day and pay them an annuity and it's it's not that they're bad people it's just that that's how they make money so I decided to spend some time researching for a cure myself because it just seemed illogical that I should be on daily medication for the rest of my life at the age of 22 so I went to the British Library because at that time there was no Google and you know you see the picture of the British Library those computers were not there then so you had to literally go through the the old you know the archives just looking and and I had no idea what I was looking for I just wanted to see what did people do in the past when they had bacterial infections and again one day I had an aha moment it turns out when I actually went for my health check-up the guide drew some blood and I asked the lab technician you know how do you know that you know what I have is a bacterial infection he said well we think the culture we put it in a petri dish and then we put some food in the petri dish and then we see what grows and in your case what is growing is this particular bacteria called staph aureus and then I thought wait so what is that food that makes the the bacteria grow that you've used on your on your dish and he said actually we use iron and I thought this is interesting and something clicked in my mind because just a few days earlier I'd been reading in the library about how independently all civilizations had developed bloodletting as a cure for bacterial illnesses at that time of course people didn't know what bacteria were this was before the age of microbiology but every single civilization from the Egyptians to the Romans to the Indians no Chinese independently have developed bloodletting so if you you know in the old days if you add an infection if you were ill what they would do the first thing they would do is they would just take out a pint of blood and the worst case it didn't do any harm but in a lot of cases if you did actually have a bacterial infection this thing tended to clear up and I thought you know why would people do that and why would people independently discover it well it turns out well of course blood is full of iron and staph aureus phoebs on iron now most of us have different levels of iron in our body and and of course anemia is a debilitating illness or some two billion people have anemia but there is also there's something on the other side there are some people who have too much iron and not we don't like excessive amounts of iron but just enough that you end up getting bacterial infections so what I realized is that in my case because of my diet and from India and I was living in the West I had ended up with just enough iron at the high end of the range that it was coming out in the form of bacterial infections so from all I had to do was just a simplest cure I went to the blood donation center gave a pint of blood and in 22 years I haven't had a bacterial infection so it's been a complete cure thank you so it really gave me thought that you know science and medicine are evolving all the time and it doesn't take you know a super expert with a PhD to talk about you know about health what you really have to do is try and connect the dots across different disciplines there is a lot of knowledge that people were using in the past and there is a huge amount of scientific advances and so I decided to combine those two and that's how all about bacteria was born so here is something that I want to share with you about what the latest advances in science because medicine is typically a decade behind advances in science and in microbiology so this is what see what we see in classically in textbooks about what the human body is we've all seen a picture like this but if you think about it from a microbiologist perspective this is the human body we are made up of a hundred trillion cells 90% of which are bacterial cells and only 10% are human cells so you are actually a walk Pond 65% water with 100 trillion cells at bacterial living ecosystem now think about that next time you use a household disinfectant taking antibiotics frivolously is like pouring poison into the pond you will change the ecological balance with extremely unpredictable results and I'll show you a little bit about what are those results what are those potential results now if you're dying of bacterial infection of course you have to take antibiotics this is not not against antibiotics I'm against the 91% of antibiotic prescriptions that are written frivolously this is a fact that is astonishing and just from a few months ago and it shows you how little we know about microbiology scientists samples 60 people at random and they found two thousand three hundred and sixty-eight species of bacteria in their belly buttons you at the moment in your bellybutton have more unique individual species of bacteria then then there are species of birds in India and that's just your belly button between your forearm and your elbow they have so far discovered 450 species of bacteria and your body is literally like the Amazon rainforest right we talked about saving the rainforest why don't we say our own bodies so the maximum amount of antibiotic misuse happens unfortunately in this country because we go to the doctor and we have an expectation that they have to give us a prescription you know if they tell you oh you have the flu you don't need anything you don't feel like you got your money's worth so you say no no no just give me an antibiotic prescription I'm going to go and take something and you feel better anyway three days later but ten days later you have acid reflux and you don't know why more than 90 percent of antibiotic prescriptions are totally unnecessary you know luckily still in this country we don't feed antibiotics as much to animals if you look at the u.s. problem is even worse ninety percent of the antibiotics consumed in the US are fed to animals to fatten them up and one more thing using household disinfectants is just plain it's not required this clean it soap and water is good enough these are just some of the illnesses that are caused by antibiotic misuse Clostridium which is a deadly deadly infection vitamin B and D deficiency you know fast you actually can we have quick show of hands anyone diagnosed with vitamin B or D deficiency in this audience there's a few I see that this is a huge problem in India now people are going to the doctor and they see that their vitamin deficient that's because these vitamins are made by bacteria in your gut you take an antibiotic and you know you get rid of that particular colony then you'll end up with a vitamin deficiency acid reflux obesity gastritis celiac disease eczema all of these things are potentially it caused by bacteria or changing the composition of bacteria in your gut so now think of the human body in this way you act your body's immune system is one your body's bacterial ecosystem is on the other and they're both on on a finally balanced seesaw regulated by the amount of iron in your body neither one is better than the other they both need to be finally balanced and thats what is a health balance if you think about what are the causes of death today and this is a these are us statistics in 1940 percent of people used to die from bacterial illness and only about 14 14 percent from immune if you look at it now only 4% of people die from bacterial illnesses 64 percent of deaths are caused by immune diseases like heart disease lung disease diabetes these are all immune illnesses so why are we still fighting the war from 100 years ago in and fighting bacteria are you still taking supplements that boost your immune system if they actually work luckily for us those supplements don't work if they actually boosted your immune system you'd probably die of heart disease because heart disease is an immune illness now there are four properties of bacteria and I'll go through this fairly quickly bacteria of course they reproduce and they reproduce at an astonishing rate right they double typically in your body at every 17 minutes and uh and you know you would end up with a massive overgrowth of bacteria it's like it's like how bread is made no and we know how quickly you double and they make bread it's the same way bacteria reproduce at a very astonishing rate they also exchange DNA this is why good bacteria can become pathogenic because they are passing virus or another teria gives it a evil DNA the third thing is a very interesting characteristic bacteria have the ability to sense how many of their own species there are in a given ecosystem and what's amazing is if they are held in check if their number doesn't rise above what we call the quorum sensing threshold they're not dangerous even the most dangerous bacteria in your body unless they cross a certain threshold in terms of that numbers they don't start doing the fourth thing which is producing a toxin or a vitamin or whatever it is that they do so there are many ways you can keep bacteria and check in the body but the best the single best way of doing it is by maintaining a healthy ecological balance with all the thousands of species of bacteria are held in check by each other that is really the best way that is how a pond ecosystem works and that is how our human ecosystem also works so here are some new treatments that we can think of by using some of the information that we learned in the last few years the first thing is you know how in Indian villages people cluster their homes and floors with cow dung there is a reason for this cow dung is 25 percent bacteria but these bacteria are a form of e.coli that are completely harmless to humans so what happens is that this dung acts as a disinfectant because it actually prevents pathogens by swamping the whole area with friendly bacteria so now think of operating theaters right the reason we have this superbugs evolving is that you're trying to keep operating theaters sterile sterile doesn't work in nature because nature is full of bacteria but what if we had some kind of a sanitized cow dung which would be sprayed in operating theaters which would prevent pathogens probe just because you know you know that the it's friendly bacteria that's preventing the pathogens from taking root so in this sense here I mentioned earlier that household disinfectants are but it actually turns out that is actually the best disinfectant now here is the this is my favorite part right probiotics so because I'm against frivolous antibiotics people ask me are you for probiotics I said sure I'm for probiotics now here's a problem when you take probiotics there it has to go through your stomach acid and stomach acid is extremely powerful the other problem is that probiotics are typically just one species you know when you have thousands of spirits living in your gut all is the point of taking one species of friendly bacteria right and the real issue is that it's a big marketing story you know we can take we can go and buy all these things in the in the store and we can take it it's harmless probiotics are pretty harmless because they have friendly bacteria but they don't they don't have a huge benefit because of the method of delivery if you're really serious about probiotics there is another way of taking probiotics which doesn't involve stomach acid and that is you take it as an enema and in fact in the next decade my prediction is that enema treatments will become hugely popular and there are some life-threatening illnesses like Clostridium which are being solved by taking fecal enemas from close relatives and giving and giving it to patients were dying of Clostridium and I think what we will see in the next decade is that kind of treatments will become very popular because it's natural it's replacing a diseased bacterial ecosystem in your gut with a healthy bacteria Liko system from a close relative or from some other family member and this has a huge amount of potential in medicine today thank you very much so Robbie we have a few doctors in the audience do you have any comments for them well you know I tell people I think doctors absolutely save lives right there's no question about it if you're sick go see a doctor don't come talk to me oh you know what I'm talking about is its prevention what I'm talking about is how do we take the latest advances in microbiology and incorporate it into medicine that's already practiced well bye bye bye that my doctor wonderful but how do you change these hats easily I understand that you are also working on a weight loss program and you've been invited by celebrities in Hollywood to come and work with them for weight loss so can you tell how do you balance all these things you know the the bacterial part that actually was for me this the first step of the journey you know I'm kind of looking at the human body and thinking you know what is the ideal way of treating the human body and we're all different so we all have different body types and some things work differently for individuals and that's part of the the journey is to understand the differences in India if you ask me the single biggest problem is the amount of sugar we consume and I'm not just talking about sweet sugar I'm talking about non sweet sugar which is rice rice pasta wheat in please these things are absolutely causing a massive diabetes epidemic in India and you know and that's something it's not directly related to bacteria but that's the crusade that I'm on is you know if we have to stop and reverse diabetes in India we have to really cut down on the amount of sugar particularly the rice sugar that weakens you thank you so much thank you for coming all the way from Singapore and I'm sure a lot of people will appreciate your venture into medicine and body stuff in the future and so and his book all about bacteria is in the goodie bag for everybody Thanks

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 7,719

Rating: 4.9636364 out of 5

Keywords: Promo, ted talks, India, Chennai, Coimbatore, Tamilnadu, ted, Social Change, dr, Ravi Mantha, tedx, health, wealth, Activism, Education, Climate Change, Global Issues, Devote, tedx talk, ted x, Science, ted talk, Tamil, Bacteria, School, tedx talks, TEDxCoimbatore, Architecture

Id: 1mMAH_O1A2U

Length: 19min 19sec (1159 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 25 2013