The Microbiome, Technology, and the Future of Health | Scott Sundvor | TEDxESADE

I have an autoimmune disease called OSHA of colitis this is a disease that causes inflammation bleeding and ulcers in the large intestine if you ask a doctor they'll say that there's no known cause and no known cure for this disease the only thing that you can do if medicine fails is to surgically remove the entire colon about a year and a half ago my body started shutting down from this disease I was insanely sick I had extreme diarrhea over 20 times a day it was like the worst food poisoning you can imagine I was bleeding internally and had started developing anemia and I was so sick that my girlfriend literally thought that I was dying I was terrified so you might be thinking to yourself why do I care about this guy's disease I don't have this my guts fine I feel healthy well forty five percent of you in the Western world have some form of chronic disease fifteen percent of you have an autoimmune disease like me more and more health issues are no longer outliers they're now becoming the norm take a look at this graph on the left you can see that in the past 60 years infectious diseases have dropped a map dramatically and that is really amazing but at the same time autoimmune diseases and chronic disease are skyrocketing researchers wanted to understand better the prevalence of celiac disease so they looked at blood samples from soldiers taken sixty years ago and compared them to blood samples taken today what they found was that celiac disease is now 4.5 times more likely than it was six years ago food allergies have increased by 50 percent since 1997 and peanut and tree nut allergies specifically are now three times more common than they were 20 years ago interestingly this seems to be a problem that's mostly confined to the Western world so in the United Kingdom rates of type 1 diabetes are 10 times more likely among kids than they are in Pakistan but if a child from Pakistan moves to the United Kingdom they then become equally likely to those UK natives to have type 1 diabetes this is a problem that right now has no explanation for no idea of why or how it's happening and it is our responsibility as innovators and entrepreneurs to focus on this issue so I was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis my freshman year of college when I was at MIT and dealing with the ups and downs of this disease of the Related gut issues of the pain of the issues that just came along with it I was motivated to focus my career on health when I graduated so I founded a company called Nima and to help people with gut issues like me people with food allergies and food intolerances and we built an incredible product the world's first portable beautiful easy-to-use lab in your pocket where someone who has a gluten sensitivity or celiac disease and very soon pina could sit down at a restaurant take a tiny little sample of their food put it into our device and then within minutes know if that food was contaminated or not this was a mission that I believed in so much and at the same time I was growing incredibly I learned how to build a company from the ground up we shipped thousands of products and we were even awarded one of Time Magazine's best inventions of the year so from an outsider's perspective I was on top of the world but internally I was broken every compliment that I received tasted like ash because I was falling apart my body was disintegrating I'd started a company to provide a solution for people with issues like mine but at the same time I was killing myself where did I go wrong so when I got sick I went to see my doctor naturally to find out what I could do and my doctor recommended one last drug that I could try the only one that I hadn't tried yet and if that didn't work I would have to start preparing to have my colon cut out of my body I looked up the stats on that drug and I found out that it had about a 15% chance of getting me into remission and keeping me there and I did not like those odds so I decided to get a second opinion talk to another doctor he was a little bit more blonde he basically just said you should go have surgery so at that point I realized that if I was gonna get healthy and actually keep my colon the only way that I could do that was if I empowered myself took my health into my own hands and so that was exactly what I did well some of you might remember the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 we're almost 5 million barrels of oil flowed into the ocean now one of the primary ways that they work to clean that up was by adding another chemical to the oil to cause it to disperse and sink into the ocean they essentially tried to clean up chemicals with more chemicals and I realized that that was exactly what I had been doing every other month I would go to the hospital and I would have IV pharmaceutical drugs pumped into my arm to try to treat the disease in my intestines I was pouring chemicals into my body but it wasn't working for the past eight years I had been managing my disease but disease management is not the future health is the future there's a concept that I love that a healthspan versus lifespan lifespan is simple it's just how long you live for but health span is how long you're alive but free from disease and healthy and that's the measure that actually really matters the human body is an incredibly complex system if we want to enable health we need to treat the system that is the human body in a comprehensive way for multifaceted issues like chronic disease autoimmune disease food allergies a single drug that targets a single chemical pathway and a single part of her body has not developed a cure we live in a culture that's predisposed to look for silver bullets for those magic pills that will make all of our problems go away but those silver bullets things like the polio vaccine penicillin smallpox those have mostly been discovered and used already today drug discovery is becoming more and more difficult nine out of ten drugs that are created today and reach clinical trials fail because are they're unsafe for humans or they're ineffective it's for us to change the paradigm of one of looking for silver bullets to one of comprehensive health so in the 1960s most of us are probably too young to remember this but the rivers and waterways in America were so polluted and so full of oil that they literally lit on fire now to solve this problem the EPA didn't just try to put out those fires and then allow companies and cities to keep dumping their waste into the ocean no they worked to stop the problem at the source and so I decided to do the same now I'm not a doctor but I am an mit-trained engineer and to me this was something that I could apply in engineering and a problem-solving mindset too so I jumped into research and I wanted to understand not just how I could treat my symptoms but I needed to understand the why and the how of what was happening so that I could start working to find the root cause and to fix it at the source and through my research I realized that there was a common thread a theme that linked everything together and that theme was the microbiome so the microbiome is a community of organisms microbes that live in or on our bodies most of them being in our gut we think of the microbiome mostly as bacteria but it's actually also viruses fungi bacteria phages and helmets and well I started by looking for a cure and how to help my specific condition what I realize is that the microbiome actually impacts the health of every single one of you and we can think of our bodies of our health of our genetics as a chain and if your microbiome is unhealthy it's only a matter of time before the weakest link in that chain is going to break for me that weakest link turned into ulcer of colitis for someone else it might be obesity diabetes Parkinson's disease you're thinking the microbiome that's in your gut how does how does that affect all these other things that doesn't make any sense well try it yourself you can go on Google Scholar search for medical papers type in the microbiome in autism and you'll find out that microbiome specific treatment has caused a 25% or more reduction in autism symptoms and kits type in the microbiome and autoimmune disease and you'll find out that researchers have actually found specific bacteria in the gut that travel to different parts of the body and create diseases as diverse as lupus or autoimmune liver disease type in the microbiome and depression and you'll find out that 90% of our serotonin is produced in our gut and when researchers took germ-free mice those are mice that had their microbiome wiped out they started producing 60 percent less serotonin when they then reintroduce the microbiome their serotonin production went back to normal so it is becoming easier and easier for us today to track our health by ourselves we no longer have to do this just with a doctor we're becoming empowered with technology that we can wear on our wrist we can test ourselves at home rather than just at the doctor we're democratizing access to lab grade chemistry so when I got sick I decided to use that technology that was available to me to help me in my own journey and the first thing that I did was look at my microbiome I knew that from my research even just one course of antibiotics can permanently alter your microbiome and I had been on a bit on antibiotics for months at a time as a kid so I used an at-home test where I took a sample of my microbiome sent it into a lab a few weeks later I got results on on my computer that showed that I only had 10% bacterial diversity so I decided to do something that was a bit drastic although arguably it's a lot less tracked drastic than cutting out an organ from my body and I underwent what's called fecal microbiota transplant now this is a relatively new treatment that is actually exactly what it sounds like it's where the poop and therefore the microbiome from a healthy donor is taken it's mixed with saline solution and then has the solid waste material filtered out to essentially leave a bacterial water mixture that's then introduced into the colon of a person like me via a colonoscopy and NMR sometimes even capsules so for a month every day I had this treatment done and after five days for the first time in over five years I took a solid poop and it was great and within a month after every drug that I had ever tried had failed I was finally in remission it was an incredible experience so I had gotten my microbiome to a much better place I knew I still had further to go and I wanted to understand how I could also keep my microbiome healthy but continued to improve it we live in a world now of Technology and we look for technological solutions to a lot of things but a lot of times the solution can be a lot simpler than that in this case I was able to use technology to help me really understand what was going on but in this situation this solution was just so simple it was just diet so let's jump into some science so I can explain this in more detail all of you inside your gut have a mucosal membrane this is a protective layer barrier that in between your gut bacteria and the food waste and your intestinal lining if this mucosal membrane is degraded if has any holes in it then your bacteria and your foodways can actually interact directly with your gut lining which can cause an immune response it can cause inflammation and it can lead to what's known as leaky gut we're literally food particles and bacteria will leak through your intestinal lining directly into your bloodstream and this can cause a whole host of issues can cause food allergies and intolerances you can cause chronic inflammation through the entire body and can lead to autoimmune diseases and chronic diseases like what I have but our microbiome can actually help keep us healthy when we eat plant matter fiber resistant starch our microbiome actually consumes that fiber to produce a compound that's called butyrate and butyrate is the fuel source for our intestinal cells to produce mucin which then repairs that intestinal lining repairs the mucosal membrane and reduces inflammation now on the flip side we also have some bacteria in our gut called sulfate-reducing bacteria these guys are not nice they consume sulfur in our food to produce hydrogen Sol gasps this is that toxic rotten egg smelling gas we've all smelled it that is genotoxic it causes inflammation and actually breaks down that mucosal membrane and I found out that the primary sources of sulfur in our diet are from the amino acids methionine and cysteine that are found primarily in animal protein so here I'd learn something actually really amazing the fiber from plants leads to butyrate production which helps heal the mucosal membrane and reduces inflammation but the sulfur from meat causes hydrogen sulfide production which damages that mucosal membrane and causes inflammation now my entire life I'd been completely against a vegan or vegetarian diet but I'm a man of science and here the science was clear the next day I switched to a plant-based diet and ever since then I've felt so much better the exciting thing here is though that we have barely scratched the surface of Health and the technological empowerment that we have available to us think about it it was only 15 years ago that we first mapped the human genome 90% of the research that we have on the microbiome has come out in only the past five years so we've just touched the surface and this is really where we need the trends of tomorrow to focus the exciting thing is that this movement has already started a friend of mine from MIT is using artificial intelligence and machine learning to look at how the microbiome actually impacts chronic disease there are companies that are using your personal physiological health data to help provide better preventive medicine and my company NEMA is using tools and technology so that you can stay healthy before you get sick rather than just reacting afterwards so all of these technologies are amazing and they're all coming out now this is really the future of health and this is where we have to focus I have so much hope in our future in 50 years we're going to think that it was absolutely crazy that we thought that we're gonna live with chronic diseases or mewn diseases for the rest of our lives everyday startups private companies individual researchers are developing new technologies coming out with new research that is driving us forward in the right direction but we still need more focus here so what I ask from everyone who's listening for this today is to make a choice to impact the future make a choice to look at yourself look at your friends look at your family and don't just work on something that could help today or is interesting today think about your children and your children's children and how you can make the world a better place every one of you has the ability to impact the mindsets of your friends and your families and the organizations that you're in or to be entrepreneurs and to move us forward so standing on the stage right now today I'm making the commitment and holding myself accountable to sit at the intersection of health and technology and to help provide the conversations and the tools for us to move our health systems in the right way and for people to empower themselves in their own health journeys we are the generation that will eliminate chronic disease I know that this is possible and I will work tirelessly until we have accomplished that so please join me thank you [Applause] [Music]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 97,556

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Health, Food, Future, Illness, Innovation, Technology

Id: 47csmddyZMM

Length: 17min 1sec (1021 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 09 2018