The Microbiome and Me | Hoi Shan Kwan | TEDxHongKong

[Applause] well well we have quite a crowd here so maybe I should start by counting how many of us here how many people is there here so I need to come from there 1 2 3 4 oh well quickly I got 638 exactly I can secretly when I was sitting listening to cop to 2 talks but I would like to care again how many living organisms living things life forms that they are here missing listening to me in this thing to my talk a TEDx talk so I need to count again 1 2 3 4 5 Wow quickly you see how mainly I got life forms hundreds of trillions actually I didn't think that part my service so popular but but that's true because what we have here Mike all isms tiny creatures or just microbes or bugs so they're everywhere so you just you say notice nothing surprising so it's Mike Fossum should be everywhere there in the in the streams in the duct in the soil on animals in animals on the plants and so on so they're everywhere but when we look at micro some spots microbes on the things that we use daily well maybe let's stop if something that you think might be very dirty the toilet so you see this is from one study so they just swap and kong and and try to estimate the number by columns on different things you see the toilet is actually the cleanest here oh my god but come and think about it you create a tireless everyday or maybe your domestic helpers credit in the morning and also in the afternoon but then you know what's most dirty one here it's just my thumb and you're taking pictures of it you have 25,000 per inch here bucks microbes okay so stop playing with your phone now and listen to me well a lot of the microbes that we think of we think about them as Pavo Jones yes that's very true actually a lot of them are poorer Jones so they attack you the biggest sick they make you vomit the course diarrhea so they can be power Jones these are pathogens but sometimes some of them actually are gooth bucks so in fact most of the bucks a lot of the bugs that good bucks but remind you that bugs are not born to be good or bad they just behave as themselves all right but also sometimes a good buck can be back where the collisions is not so well then good but make make you sick so what he news like that lunchboxes with a lot of toxins produced by bugs excess bacteria in the lunch boxes and so on you know these are the bad parts doing their jobs but first like this the latter was the most important protein source for Japanese from long long time actually this is a bowl of bacterial culture so you culture bacteria with the soybean and the bacteria predigested the leghole the soybean and then produce a easier to digest food and they also get rid of that inhibitor that you think the soybean without being affected by the inhibitor well the be well a better version of me similarly to be and you see I'm not shedding dust I'm shedding my chromosomes bucks microbes so you say well I don't see you shedding all your bacterias but mind you by possums by crossbucks small tiny and microscopic we can let me see them with our eyes so we have a lot of bucks on us and you're sharing your bucks and you you you will not know that you're so connected with the the one sitting beside you because your poxy is going to them but you're receiving the bucks also so well actually trying to point out is that we have bucks we have microsomes on us but also in us and in the last 10 years or so we know a lot about these bacteria viruses fungi on us and also in us so you see these are cover stories of scientific journal Nature but that's not so important but when these bucks kills you to cover of The Economist then you know they are really real and important sadly the American have a cover story of your internet ecosystem so they're in a systems ecosystems the Box in you and the biggest ass whether we're really just human of course we like to think that we are the golden boy okay but we are we a hundred percent human well the answer is no so not only that we have microbes on us Fox in us but also they are outnumber us so we have about trillion cells in a body in each one of us a trillion human cells but we have ten trillion bucks in us or honors so we are actually well look at you look at yourself you think that well I'm just a human but actually I'm looking at you as a walking superhuman carrying ecosystem 10 trillion cells of bacteria or virus viruses and fungi walking around and then shedding them the reason why we can really understand the complexity of the microbes these days is that the cost of sequencing DNA has dropped by a bit Oh actually very drastically so the blue line is the cost dropping of the computer that's why we have maybe 50 years ago the power of the smartphone's that you have would take a whole building of computer but now it's all in your heads of course they are 30 the computer in those days are much cleaner but anyway the cost drop very much drop very much now we can really sequence and know about the microorganisms and they're not only around but they're associating with us very closely they don't they don't leave so easily so they're they're all over us actually no matter where you look at your brain well of course do you think your brain is clean even though with some dirty thoughts but but actually there's new clean but they created with many many many bugs there are bacterias you know bring the bacterias that in your blood the bacteria in the liver whether you find you look things you can find them so that we can reveal the bacteria because for those that mix to the culture we can still look at the DNA and then now we start to understand them and that's a human body and if I asked you which part of your body that you think there's in closest contact with the environment you think well we missed my hand or maybe my face or maybe well walk around I just well of course we have shoes but look around we get in touch of the environment breathing does ravine pollens and so on but I tell you it's not all these but rather that's the tube within yourself you have a very long-term very much twisting the tip of your gastro Andrew gastro intestinal tract your gut starting with your mouth going through it and then turn and turn and turn and turn and then go out of the other end and what you have there what you have there are really another box studying from your mouth and then go to your stomach there's quite a few bucks not too many but then you go all the way down to the colon actually you have so many bucks so many that if they become human then we we need to have a thousand earths to host them so we have about 10 to live - 10 to 12 bucks in your colon so many of them well but they're not there just as passengers they're not there just to live but they are taking part of our health and disease so the ten trillions of microbes in our gut actually on every part of our body but the most are in our gut they are responsible they are connected and they can help us to develop our neural systems to help us to have immune responses you see we we keep on feeding all these foreign materials materials from the environment into the gut a lot more than the dust the soil or the poland we feed in a lot of food so we keep filling them and this force would need to be monitored and this was up also thoughts for the parks so we need to control them we need to respond to them so there comes the immune system we have to develop our immune system and the parks help us to develop a human in the systems and and help us to monitor the environmental impact and there are also barriers to diseases and irregular things like they help us to digest would have make vitamins so when the box are not happy or they just change the composition change the profile there we have a lot of problems and those are the kinds that we see quite often today the metabolic diseases obesity diabetes and also the email diseases allergies autoimmune diseases and all this because we are not feeling we are not feeling them right we give them too much sugar we'll give them too much fat we disturb the compositions and let their disturbed seems like they are fighting back but actually is they're not they just try to live happily well we need to happily together if they're only the Box are happy and we are not happy then that's too bad so the box will develop from the baby onwards and I'd like to tell you very briefly that for baby to to develop them the by opossums in their gut they need to take that in from the mother and the best way to take the Box for mother is through natural birth so going through the birth canal not c-sections and then when the baby grows then the child is taking solid food but before that they have to rely on the mother's milk or the formula so for mother's bill they're about three hundred different kinds of box for the formula for the best brand we have maybe you have to for the rest none so there's a very important inoculation of the box from mothers meal and also their oligosaccharides polysaccharides from the mother's milk they're actually are the foods for the Box not the foods for the baby so they develop the Box up to about three years old there's almost fully developed and that profile that composition will be carry on for the rest of our lives so starting from the child three years old until eight years old three years old determines what you can get at eight years old it's a Chinese saying about that but when you treat a child actually child scat infections all the time and very easily get infected Express sorry where they go to school or does your nursery schools and if you give the child antibiotics then that would be too bad there were affect this disrupt the profiles so I'd like to tell you what experiment this experiment is using mice dohsa germ-free bites that means they were raised without any contact with any bugs and they are germ-free they don't have any bugs so the way the experiment goes by feeding the mice with the faeces the stools of the fed mice and indeed mice and then we'll get from the fed mice you have fat obese mice from the obese box and then you have lean mice with from the lean tongue ma and that has been repeated with humans tools for fat twin brother you get fat mice and from from the lean twin brother you get the in vice so what we propose to do is to check your profile check your gut microbiome profile and then decide ty plans and with that we hope to help people to maintain the health to help people to lose the weight to help people to do if their quality ceases so healthy gut microbiomes give you healthy gut and then you become a healthy person so they'll finish by saying that treat your gut microbial microbes well and you will feel swell thank you [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 18,747

Rating: 4.7857141 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Hong Kong, Technology, Medicine, Teaching

Id: y239zZnzXCU

Length: 15min 46sec (946 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 18 2017