Eat yourself healthy -your microbiome and you | Sheena Cruickshank | TEDxManchester

so what I'm going to be doing is I'm going to be talking about the microbiome and whether you can eat yourself healthy and you know I was trying to come up with the title as you can see there were a few attempts at that when you saw the original draft slide deck and if I'm honest quite a lot of my talk is going to be about poo so this is really the title of my talk the wonderful world of Pig you have no idea how much poo we have a laugh we have love just through you know and the reason that I am talking about poo and the microbiome is now more than ever we are being assaulted with headlines and self-help sites and websites and programs suggesting that the microbiome is the core of a whole host of conditions and if we could only change on microbiome we would be where we would be less anxious we would sleep better and the industry in making things that can change a microbiome is absolutely huge so I just pulled these off the internet last week but there are many many many more so before I go any further what is the microbiome it is the collection of organisms that lives inside you but also on you and that is a mixture of viruses yeast funghi even some parasites and of course bacteria and it's the bacteria that we know the most about so most of the research is currently on bacteria and the number that I'm showing you of 38 trillion is the number that has been suggested to be the average number of bacteria living on one person so each one of you has 38 trillion bacteria that's big but we have seven point six billion people on the planet so if I was to draw the seven point six billion to scale compared with one of your sets of bacterial populations let's have a look and see what happens can't even see it we are dwarfed by our bacteria and because we can have fun with numbers let's see how many bacteria we have on everybody in the planet it's a lot isn't it I think it's 2.9 times 10 to the 23 I did have to check the zeros quite a lot so it's staggeringly huge how many bacteria we have living inside us and on us and they are doing so many crucial things for our health they're so diverse and just to illustrate how diverse and different they are I'm going to show you this art piece here this is an M done by an artist Mel Fisher what she does is she makes agar sculptures that enable her to then seed her own bacteria onto them and you can see on this one here you can see a whole host of different colors and shapes of bacteria and if she uses a different part of her skin or a different agar mix she can get another collection of microorganisms growing on her sculpture so that gives you a little taste of just how varied those microbes are they're doing amazing things they're protecting us from infection they're shaping and developing our immune system they're even helping us digest our food and making vital vitamins we couldn't otherwise make on a mundane level we have this may reduce how much we fart everybody farts but we'd fart more if we didn't have gut bacteria to see though and if you can light your farts that's because if you've got bacteria to certain types of gut bacteria make flammable gas not everybody can do it so please don't try it at home and why are we so excited about the bacteria well they are able to confer super powers on us one example is here this is a desert rat as you can imagine it lives in the desert and there isn't really a great deal of food for it to eat but something that grows well is the creosote bush which is a very toxic plant if it were to eat it normally that would kill it however it can eat it very very comfortably which is good because it's the most common type of food it's going to get and it turns out that it's all to do with its gut bacteria its bacteria can break down the poisons and make them safe if you give the rats antibiotics it can't eat the plant anymore it will be killed that's pretty amazing people have even looked at the difference in obesity so here we've got I think you can guess which one it is we have a very obese Mouse and it has a vastly different gut bacteria to a thin Mouse and if you do an experiment where you take a mouse that is genetically likely to get fat and you give it the microbiome of a thin person that Mouse doesn't get fat it stays thin if you give the thin one the microbiome of a larger person it puts on weight so that's suggest again that the microbiome can do things that make to be able to change our biology and they can do things that maybe we can log into and I think that's the type of thing that's led to this explosion and interest in changing the microbiome so there's two main things that are done and do you know what this is this is an enema kit old and new I haven't changed much over the last 300 years and essentially and there are some people I won't name them but you know who they are Gwyneth who tell you that you should flush out your toxins by having an enema this will damage your gut it will remove the layers of protection in your blood your gut and also remove a lot of your microbiota so I wouldn't really recommend it another approach uses one of these it's called a fecal microbial transplant basically you get the poo sample of the person you're interested in do I need to go further pop it in the hopper in the blender and you make a smoothie usually it is administered using something like the enema kit and usually don't drink it and there are self-help sites that tell you how to do this it's becoming a thing also by weight by the way don't buy second-hand blender now it may be becoming a thing but is it a good idea apart from the obvious X Factor so unless you know the somebody's been screened before they give you your poo sample you're really really putting yourself at risk of an infection also there is another thing that we need to point out it's poo now I know it's poo who does contain microbes contain the right microbes if we look all the way down our guts we can see real variety in the types and numbers of microbes that we've got the stomach has been much less all the way through to the large intestine which has a really rich diverse population and so is a poo sample really capturing that diversity and if you actually have a look at how the gut is laid out what I've got here is my big science slide if I the pointer would be little easier so I'll try and talk you through it on the left hand side I have a picture of a gut biopsy and what we've done is we've stained the section so that you can see the host cells our own cells our intestinal cells in blue with little green blobs and then on the right hand side you should be able to see a kind of mixture of red and green in that image and I've put a little cartoon at the side of it to explain what everything is and basically the epithelial cells are cells that lie in our gut are making mucus just like the mucus in your nose the snot in your nose and that acts as a barrier to prevent against infection there also is the thick layer of mucus and a lot of our bacteria quite like living in there you then get a further a population of bacteria that live just outside that mucus layer now we and others have analyzed two samples and compared them to the bacteria we find in the mucus and the two populations are very very different so this poo sample is not telling us what's in the mucus and we've been looking in inflammation in disease and we can see that the mucus bacteria changed very quickly in response to inflammation where is the poo bacteria don't change at all so if you're wanting to look at things that might be important for our hell we might need to be thinking again about where we're getting those bacteria from and we still don't know about all the other guys in the microbiome the viruses the funghi the parasites etc so what can you do if you want to be healthier as regards your microbiome people who live long healthy robust lives seem to have a very varied and diverse microbiome people who live very kind of frail lives are not very well as they get older or they have a lot of inflammatory conditions seem to have a much less diverse microbiome much less variety in the species that are found there so that suggests that variety is a good thing what can you do to have a very gut microbiome well basically all you need to do is have a varied diet because the diet is the most important thing that shapes on microbiome so a diet that's rich in prebiotic foods pulses fruits vegetables you want sources of protein you want sources of carbohydrate you want you can even it sort of supplement it with probiotics like yogurts are fermented foods but what you really need is a good range of foods and what this goes to show is that we are what we thank you very much [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 67,770

Rating: 4.7461138 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Health, Bacteria, Biology, Disease, Food

Id: KMrwGEqT_hM

Length: 11min 49sec (709 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 13 2018