The Ruminant: Audio Candy for Farmers, Gardeners and Food Lovers - e93: Stop Washing Your Children So Much!

Episode Date: March 18, 2017

The microbes that colonize us when we're in the womb and as infants have lasting impacts on our health later on. My conversation with Claire Arrieta, author of Let Them Eat Dirt. Marie-Claire is the co-author with B. Brett Finlay of Let Them Eat Dirt: Saving Your Child from an Oversanitized World.  After that, I talk about lego for farmers.

This is the Ruminant Podcast. I'm Jordan Marr. My guest today is Marie-Claire Arrieta, co-author of Let Them Eat Dirt, Saving Your Child from an Oversanitized World. It's becoming increasingly apparent that the microbes that colonize our bodies have a major influence on our health, Claire writes, and relatively recent lifestyle changes have altered the diversity of these microbial communities in ways that are making us sicker. My conversation with Claire is coming right up. After that, I'll tell you about LEGO for farmers.

All right, let's get going. Hello, my name is Dr. Marie-Claire Arrieta. I'm a microbiologist and a researcher, and I work at the University of Calgary. I study the role of the microbes that live in and on us and how they affect childhood diseases. And I'm also the co-author of Let Them Eat Dirt. Claire Arrieta, thanks a lot for joining me on the Ruminant Podcast. Thank you for having me. Claire, we seem to be right in the middle of a revolution of our understanding of the relationships between our health and the microbiome that lives on and in our bodies. So yeah, you're right. There is a revolution on our understanding of microbes and how we relate to them. We originally studied

microbes in the context of disease and infections. This is why they do. Certain microbes will cause, you know, diarrhea and fevers and infections not just in our gut, but also in all organs, including our brain. Now we understand that, yeah, there's those microbes, but the vast majority of them are actually doing lots of things to keep us healthy. And we're understanding now that this is a process that has been very concerned by evolution. It's only until very recently, only about 100 years ago, that humans have really changed in ways that have changed our microbes too. This is causing consequences for our health.

There's now very strong association between changes in our microbiome and lots of diseases that we never thought had a microbial component. Autoimmune disease, for example, asthma, allergies, obesity, diabetes, even autism. These are diseases that were always studied as metabolic or immune diseases. And they are metabolic and immune diseases, but we're understanding now that part of the reasons why they are increasing at such a skyrocketing pace right now is because of those changes in our microbes, especially the ones that happen early in life. Great, Claire. Thank you for that summary. So I want to ask you about some of the lifestyle changes that have taken place in the last, you know, 50 or 100 years that you just mentioned. But first, I want to go a little bit further back. So as it turns out, as long as we've been humans, and even longer, we've had a microbiome. But you point in your book to two major changes that drove

our evolution and shaped our modern microbiome. Could you talk about those two changes? Yeah, for sure. Well, the first one, and this is based on what is known from anthropological research, the first one happened when humans found a way to control fire for cooking. Well, they used it for all sorts of things, but the main one was for cooking. And what happened when we started cooking food, and this was, you know, over 10,000 years ago, when we weren't even humans, was that that changed the chemistry of the food. It also, you know, burned out possible bacteria and other microbes that could potentially cause disease, possible bacteria and other microbes that could potentially cause disease, right? So all of a sudden, we're eating very differently. And what that caused, among other things, was that it

actually shortened our intestines, because we didn't need that much tissue in our intestine to digest raw food. All of a sudden, our intestines are adapted to eat cooked food, which is a lot more simple to digest. And very interestingly, this period of time matches the evolution of the brain as we understand it now for not only Homo sapiens, but some of the ancestors of Homo sapiens. So the shortening of the gut matches the enlargement of the brain, and we know what happens with enlargement of the brain. Humans are actually pretty lucky to have such big brains because we can do a lot more than many other animals. And another thing that happened, and this was a lot more recent, this happened around the time when humans discovered

that we could actually grow food and we could control the way we grew it. So agriculture is the other event that really marked not just our evolution as a human species. We became much more social and we started grouping into real societies with agriculture. And the food supply was a lot more constant, but it also became a lot more simple. So if we compare the microbiomes of modern humans with humans that still are hunting and gathering for a living, and there's still a few groups that still do that in different parts of the world. The microbiome is vastly different.

So definitely the evolution in humans as a species, and even before we became Homo sapiens have not just marked, you know, our way of living, but also marked the way that our microbes live with us. Okay. So regarding the second major change, which came much, much later, you know, in the period of thousands of years, the, you know, the adaptation of most of the human population to farming, of the human population to, to farming. You know, you mentioned a major consequence of that is that there, there suddenly our, our, our diet became much less diverse and along with it, our microbiome became much less diverse. So it seems like the problem of, of a decreasing microbiome diversity started a long, long time ago. But as you spend a lot of time on in your book, it's really some changes

that took place in the last hundred years that have further reduced the diversity of our microbiome that have really started to cause some serious problems. So I thought maybe I'd ask you, can you summarize these major lifestyle changes that have started to, that we're starting to understand have had huge implications for human health. Yeah, for sure. And I mean, humans have been farmers, even if we're not actual farmers, for thousands of years now. So our physiology has very much adapted to that. But just in the past century or century and a half, there have been further, I would say, even more important changes to it. One of them, and probably the most important one, is the emergence of antibiotics.

So these came during and after the Second World War, and they have saved millions of lives during and after that war. And they are real bombs to our microbes, and they really shift our microbiome, not in everyone, but they have the ability to do so, especially when they are given in high doses early in life. So that's one of the big changes. The second change comes with the processing of food, especially carbohydrates and foods that naturally are fibrous in nature. So only 100 years ago, humans used to eat three times the amount of fiber that we eat now. And there's a few reasons for it, but one of the most important ones is the processing of food. but one of the most important ones is the processing of food.

So fiber from grains, including rice and wheat, is now part of the process to remove some of the most important fiber components of these foods, thus reducing our intake. The amount of vegetables that we eat have been very reduced, and the amount of meat that we eat has been increased. So there's a huge change in diet that also explains why our microbes are different. And then there's other factors as well that may not be as strong as, for example, antibiotics and also diet, but they also explain, I mean, the fact that we're cleaner now. People wash themselves

more than a century ago. There's more babies that are born via C-section than a century ago. And C-section, as we know now, is a procedure that even though it's very short, it only takes a few minutes. What it does is that it prevents the baby from coming in contact with the vaginal canal, which is very rich in microbes, further changing that microbiome in certain humans. So those would be some of the major ones that I would say have drastically changed the microbes in us. Claire, one of the diseases that you have studied in the context of its relationship

to our microbiome is asthma. Am I correct about that? Yes, that's the main disease that I said. Okay, so I thought we could choose asthma as a bit of a case study for this conversation. I thought maybe I would ask you to take us through the process of a woman getting pregnant, some things that might happen during the pregnancy,

going through labor, some things that might happen during the pregnancy, going through labor, some things that might happen in labor, having the baby, and some things that might happen in the first six months or a year or two years of life that are now thought to cause asthma and allergies later. And then, of course, how this is all related to the microbiome. Does that sound okay with you? Yeah, for sure. And I would say before I even start going through these events that we now think increase the likelihood of someone developing asthma, we must understand that the humans have had asthma for millennia. So this is not like it's a new disease. But the thing is that it's been increasing a lot and really, really fast. In fact, the cases are triplicated in a matter of 15 years. And our genes do not change that fast. In fact, the cases are triplicated in a matter of 15 years. And our genes do not change

that fast. So even though asthma, we know, has a genetic component to it. For example, I come from a family that has asthma. So it's more likely that my kids eventually develop asthma. That's someone that comes without that familial history. So with that said, those changes in genes or those specific genes that make you more prone to asthma do not explain why humans are getting more and more asthma. It's definitely the environment. And there's a lot of really neat epidemiological studies that are really pointing to the microbiome. Kids that are born in farms get less

asthma. Kids that do not receive antibiotics early in life get less asthma. Kids that are breastfed get less asthma, etc. So because of that, we can definitely say, okay, there's definitely things that may happen during pregnancy and early in life that can make a child more prone to develop asthma. And during pregnancy, we can talk about a big one, which is antibiotics. So there's very strong data showing that getting antibiotics at the late stage of pregnancy, so the third trimester, that increases the chances of a child getting asthma by the time they start school. Now, that doesn't mean that if you need an antibiotic, you need an antibiotic, but you definitely need to become more judicious about when to take an antibiotic and when not to take

an antibiotic, and especially for pregnant women to try as much as possible to prevent getting an infection, a bacterial infection that will require an antibiotic. And there's ways to do that. There's a lot that has been shown for disease prevention, whether it's respiratory disease or urinary tract infections. There's ways that we can take care of ourselves a bit more when we're pregnant. Then comes birth. Well, sorry, I'm going to stop you there if it's all right, Claire. Could you just elaborate a little more? So, okay, taking antibiotics during late stages of pregnancy can be problematic as far as the microbiome goes. I mean, that's probably fairly obvious for listeners, but can you explain why? What's happening when mom takes the antibiotics? How does that ultimately increase the likelihood of asthma in the child? Yeah, sure. So what happens when anyone takes an

antibiotic is that your microbiome shifts. Now, when you're pregnant, this is one of the only times in your life when naturally that community of microbes shifts because of the hormonal changes. So what you have, your microbiome in your gut is actually changing. And because it's changing, it's actually less resilient than a community of microbes of a person that is not pregnant. So when you take an antibiotic and that hits a less resilient community of microbes, they take a bigger hit. And what happens is that those microbes, when you're pregnant, they're producing a lot of stuff, we call it metabolites, that actually influence the immune development of the fetus. So those microbes, even though they're not in direct contact with the fetus,

they're actually influencing the fetus. And when a pregnant woman takes an antibiotic later in pregnancy, this type of metabolites may change. The other factor that changes is that women inherit their microbes to their babies, especially when babies are born naturally, vaginally. So if this community has shifted because of an antibiotic, the type of microbes that are going to be inherited are not necessarily the best ones or the ones that would have been given without the antibiotic. So that's the, I guess, the biological reason why this may affect the microbiome of the baby afterwards. Okay, great. Thank you. So now, and you've already just touched on it, but let's proceed now. So mom goes into labor, and you can continue with

this little case study. Yeah, so birth is really the moment where the baby acquires his or her first microbes. And it's a huge moment. I mean, not just because it's birth, and birth is on its own a huge moment, but think about being completely devoid of microbes, zero microbes, and suddenly you have millions within minutes. It's a big event in terms of biology and all the things that happen. And evolution has seen to it that humans are exposed to specific types of microbes that are involved in the processes that depend on these microbes. So, for example, the development of the immune system, certain aspects of our metabolism,

and now we know also certain aspects of our brain development are fully relying on certain types of microbes that we encounter soon after birth. So, birth is a very important process. And, of course, with a C-section, we're not encountering them in the same way because the baby does not go through the birth canal. So, we know now that not only babies that are born via C-section, they have different microbes and these differences can be detected for a while, not just after a few days,

but definitely for a few months. And some studies claim that for a few years as well. But these babies are at an increased risk of developing certain diseases, including asthma as well. Then what happens after birth? This baby is going to continue acquiring microbes from its environment. I mean, definitely from his parents, but also the environment in general. And one of the first drivers of change in this microbiome after birth is nutrition. And babies, human babies, for a few months, they're only drinking milk. So the type of milk is really going to influence the type of microbiomes of the babies. There's two kinds. I mean, there's breast milk or formula. And actually, there's not two kinds,

because there's also formulas and there's babies that get both breast milk and formula. And that we know really changes the type of microbiome. So again, this is when evolution comes into play here. And evolution comes into play here. Human breast milk, not only we know now has microbes in a way that the mom is not just inheriting the microbes at birth, but she continues to give microbes to the babies. But human milk also has a very interesting component known as human oligosaccharides that can only be digested by the microbes in the human tummy, in the baby tummy, not by the baby's enzymes. So when a mom is breastfeeding her child, she is not just feeding the child,

but she's also feeding his or her microbes. Now, when a child is getting formula, formula is a complete nutrition for a baby in terms of nutritional content, but unfortunately, it misses out on this microbial content. And if you look at the microbiome of three-month-old babies, breastfed versus formula, they also have differences in microbiome. And formula feeding is also unfortunately associated with an increased risk of asthma as well. And then what happens after that? Well, the baby starts... Claire? Claire? I'm sorry. I'm excited for you to proceed, but I have one follow-up question, or really just a follow-up comment. I was blown away in your book when you talked about those

really just a follow-up comment. I was blown away in your book when you talked about those oligosaccharides that are present in breast milk that make up, essentially, you and Dr. Finley gave a factoid, I guess, that up to 10% of breast milk is not nutritionally absorbed in the baby's stomach. It's for their microbiome. It's digested by their microbiome. And that's quite astounding when you think of the energy it requires mom to produce that breast milk. For sure. And it's also a reflection on how important microbes are so that so much energy is invested in keeping them well fed. well fed. So it's a very important way of not just microbe transmission, but also to keep these microbes fed so that they keep staying and reproducing in the baby's gut. Okay, so moving on, you were just about to move on from the nursing and into other factors that can contribute to asthma later. Yeah. So the next one that we know that really

affects a baby's developing microbiome is solid foods. So babies around four to six months of age, they start eating solid foods. And we go from just drinking milk to eating lots of different things, you know, vegetables and meat and humans are omnivores. So think about that bloom in diet diversity. Well, that bloom in diet diversity, it matches perfectly the bloom in microbial diversity. So all of a sudden, there's a lot more food sources for these microbes. And you see it in studies of microbiome studies of babies and around four to six months of age. There's this huge spike of the number of species of microbes. However, it really depends on the type of food that you give them.

So diversity here is where we think it's key. And going back to what I was talking about, how we live now in a fiber depleted society, we really need to increase the type of fibers and the amount of fibers that we give to kids. And really, practically, what this means is that we shouldn't give them just rice cereal for four weeks until the box is empty and then give them just applesauce. What this means is that, yes, of course, follow what pediatricians are recommending us now in terms of feeding them just one type of food for a couple of days, just to make sure that a child is not developing a sensitivity

or an allergy towards it, but definitely increase that diversity. So use all sorts of grains. And always opt for the whole grain version and not for the refined version. Always give them fruits and vegetables. And also, as soon as the baby is six months, you can start giving them fermented foods. Kefir and yogurt are great sources of nutrition and also sources of life microbes for babies. And that's another thing that has changed drastically over the past century.

Humans used to eat a lot more fermented foods because that was one of the ways that we used to preserve foods. Every now has a fridge and a freezer now, so we don't need them anymore. But that's also a change that has occurred in the past century. Right. Okay. So I think you've taken us through the major stages of development that can lead to higher risk of asthma later on. Am I really briefly, am I correct on that? Were you kind of, was that this? Yeah, for sure. I would say another one that has been implicated with the risk of asthma is the environment. And some of the stronger studies of the environment and asthma come from studies that

have been done in farming communities. So not only do children that are born and raised in farms experience a reduced risk of asthma, but we also know that not all farms are the same. And some of these studies are really neat. So they did a study comparing Amish communities versus Hutterite communities. So Amish and Hutterites have a common ancestry. They come from Germany and Austria, and they immigrated to different parts of the world, but most of them are in North America,

and they're very traditionalist in the way we live. But Amish people more so. They still have preserved the ways of farming of the 1800s, and they still use horses and all these things, whereas Hutterites don't. They have full-blown motor farms with machinery and everything that you can possibly imagine. And importantly, they also use antibiotics the way motor farms do it now, whereas Amish people don't.

And when you compare the rates of asthma incidence in these two communities, Amish are really at a reduced risk, whereas Sutterites, they look the same as the rest of the population, which means that not farms are the same. But what I'm trying to get to is that the environment is very important. It's very, very likely that if we are very clean early in life, we're reducing the exposure of microbes that we have evolved with. And this is becoming reflected in this case at a higher risk of asthma, but not just asthma, there's other diseases as well. So the way kids develop now is if they're always inside and they're just watching TV or playing video games or they're not allowed to get dirty, this is only going to make matters worse. Kids

should be allowed to be kids, they should be outside and we should be less worried about them getting dirty. And talking about the different kinds of farming, I mean, I grow veggies for a living. I'm sure there's lots of benefits for my children to be had in playing around on the farm, but it really sounds like it's animal agriculture where there's a lot of great benefits to microbiome diversity that can be achieved, just interactions with animals. Yeah, for sure. Interactions with animals, but also interactions with the soil. And there's interesting studies that have been done with vegetable farms as well. And they also seem to have that, although you're right, it seems that the bigger differences come from farms where there's animals as well. Okay. So the last part of this little case study you've taken us through on asthma is,

I just want you to talk about the FLVR bacteria. I think that's made up part of your research and how, if I have it right, we've identified, or you and your colleagues have identified, just a few certain bacteria that seem to be missing in the microbiomes of the kids with a higher risk of asthma. Yeah, and this was interesting for a couple of reasons, because we found that there's these four bacteria, a couple of reasons because we found that there's these four bacteria and we, you know, the ZFL, VR, or flavor as a colleague of mine nicknamed them, that we're missing in three-month-old babies. And this is interesting because these babies, they haven't started wheezing.

They are not allergic yet. These are normal-looking babies. Asthma and allergies is something that develops in older babies. So we're finding that it is early in life where there's almost a window of opportunity during which these changes in microbiome really alter the way your immune system develops, and this can be reflected in asthma later in life. Now, they may be more than these just four. This is just from a study. We did a large study in Canadian children. Fortunately, there's more of these type of studies happening around the world. So I'm pretty positive that we'll find more. And there's now pharmaceutical companies that are studying them. And hopefully,

at some point, probably about a decade from now, there will be some sort of probiotic that can be given to children that are found to not have these microbes in their guts. Okay, so Claire, that makes for a nice segue. I want to spend the last part of our conversation talking about how we can be fostering a good or better microbiome. But before we talk about improving our microbiome, I think it's, I kind of want to point out and ask you about something. It seems what was clear in your book is that the microbiome that we develop beyond a certain age when we're infants seems uh, seems very resilient against change. If I read your book correctly, um, before I read your book, by the way, I really, I would have guessed that it's, it's, it's the use or overuse of antibiotics that represents the hugest threat to the diversity of

microbiome. But now that I've read your book, I feel like the overuse of antibiotics is just one component of a number of ways in which we're failing to cultivate a diverse microbiome in the first place when we're very young. So I guess I just want to ask you, if I have your book right, why is it that once we establish that microbiome, you know, basically as infants, why is it so resilient against improving it? And I think maybe you can see where I'm going. I'm going to be asking you about how we improve it, but it does seem like it's a tough job to try and change our microbiome once it's been set in early stages of our life. Yes, it is definitely harder. It's much easier to change it early on. And there's just ecological reasons for that. When an ecological

community has been established, it's really hard to modify it in a way. That's not to say that you can't. So for example, if an adult becomes vegan, the microbiome is going to change because that's a drastic change. All of a sudden, there's not going to be any animal protein and animal nutrients that are going to be feeding these microbes. So the microbes that depend on that are just going to die off. The same thing if we go the other way around. If we're vegan and we're vegetarian and we decide to start eating meat again. So there are ways of changing it.

There are studies showing that increasing, but substantially increasing fiber intake will also change not the overall microbiome, but it will definitely increase the proportion of some of these bugs that are better at eating and digesting fiber. So there are ways of modifying it, but definitely not as effectively as when it happens early in life. But is it just a fact of like certain bacteria, good or bad, once they're in there, you can definitely reduce their numbers, but it's just really hard to completely eliminate them. I guess that's what I'm getting at. Why is it so hard to just get rid of certain bacteria or to establish new ones?

You know, because I guess I mentioned the antibiotics at the start of this part, because I thought I used to figure that antibiotics were so bad because they would just wipe out all that good stuff but I learned in your book it's not quite like that they do temporarily wipe out parts of our microbiome but they usually bounce back yeah it does and I think this comes to the fact that our our guts are such an amazing habitat for microbes. And they really love it there. And for, you know, millennia, they have adapted very specific strategies to really grab hold and stay there. So yeah, you can take an antibiotic, but I think it would take, you know, constant, you know, for years, taking an antibiotic to actually become germ free. In fact, we've done it would take, you know, constant, you know, for years taking an antibiotic to actually become germ-free. In fact, we've done it in animals.

It's extremely hard to make an animal completely germ-free just by shoving it tons and tons of antibiotics, more than what we would normally take. So these communities of microbes are really, they have evolved very good strategies to take hold in our gut. So it's really hard to just think about completely modifying them. Okay, so now on that note, now I want to talk about what we can do to be improving our microbiome. But here's the thing, Claire. I assume that all this new knowledge, this revolution we're in the middle of scientifically makes it an exciting time to be a microbiologist but reading your book i kind of my reaction is it's it's and by the way i'm a brand new parent my baby is less than two weeks old um my first child congratulations thank you but reading your

book it kind of feels like a shitty time to be a parent um because uh before you know going back five or ten years ago we didn't know what we didn't know. And now I think we're at a place where now we kind of are getting a sense of what we don't know. In other words, the science is young. We don't have a lot of solutions yet. And so I feel like to some extent, it's just going to create a ton of anxiety in parents like me, because I read your book and I see how important the nursing is, how important it is to try and have a vaginal birth and all these other things. And yet, if we fail on those counts, if my kid next week needs a course of antibiotics, you know,

there are some strategies we can take, which we're going to talk about in a minute. But overall, it seems like the science in five or 10 years is going to get so much better at being able to offer like tailored solutions for. For sure. Yeah. Yeah. And this is just I mean, welcome to science based parenting. This is a phenomenon that I think this is not new. Right.

It's a few decades in the making. I think the same thing happened probably in the 80s with the research that started on breast milk before there, there was supposed to be no difference in terms of nutrition between formula and breast milk. So I think this will continue to happen. It's just that the microbe seems to be the new kid in the block here. We're learning a lot more. This is actually the reason why we decided to write this book, not necessarily to give parents more anxiety than what we have now. And I remember that when I was studying this brand new stuff,

I was becoming a mom. And there were lots of things that I didn't do with my first one, and luckily I was able to incorporate with my second one. So at least in your case, you have some of this information to start. But you're right, it can be a cause of anxiety. What's important is that now we do have what we think is pretty good information. Yeah, there's, we still do not know how to improve many of the things. There's certain things that can be recommended. And as you say, we can cover them in a bit. But in my case, I prefer to know instead of not to know.

Right. Okay. So I want to try and cover this part of improving things as briefly as we can for such a complicated topic. But if as briefly as you could, where, how does a parent or anyone draw the line between when to use antibiotics and when not to? What, what would be some, some basic advice? And if they want more advice, they can go to your book. It's got tons of it, but what, how do you, how do you walk that line? Well, you need to go to the doctor, right? The kid, let's say, the kid has potentially an ear infection because it has been screaming all night long and everyone's super tired. And you go to the doctor or to the emergency room. And now, actually, doctors have changed their protocols into a more of a wait-and-see approach for ear infections. So you'll probably have to manage pain and fever for a couple of days before giving an antibiotic right away

because most of the cases, that infection is going to be viral. It's not going to be bacterial. So we still do not have a test in doctors' offices or even in hospitals that can tell you right away whether the infection is viral or bacterial. I think this is where we're going, but it's not there yet. But for ear infections that are very common in babies, the wait-and-see approach is one that is recommended by pediatricians. But always, always trust what your doctor says and try not to push antibiotics because there's there's many parents that still do that so just be more judicious when it comes in and follow proper

medical advice so that would be in terms of antibiotics that would be our advice. Clara is this newer approach to being a little more careful with antibiotics and not just being so not being in such a rush to use them. Have you and your colleagues, like, seen pushback from the field of medicine over that? I mean, are there people who are... Not at all. No? Not at all. I mean, no.

I mean, they know about this, and they're reading, and they're becoming a lot more interested in the microbiome. I'm part of a pediatrics department, and they're constantly, you know, wanting to get informed in this type of research. And the other side of antibiotics that doesn't necessarily have to do with the microbiome is antibiotic resistance. And that is potentially even a bigger threat. I mean, a woman just died of a, you know, potentially preventable or curable disease

just a few weeks ago because none of the antibiotics worked. So bacteria are completely outsmarting the types of antibiotics that humans are making. And if we just continue giving antibiotics, not just to humans, but to animals, the way we do, there will be a time where they're not going to be effective. Okay, Claire. So now I want to talk about probiotics. Yes. Because in, so really briefly, when we talk about probiotics, yeah because in so so really briefly when we talk about probiotics we mean we're ingesting or or in in various ways getting into our bodies good kinds of microbes

that that we're trying to encourage to take to take root to to make a home in in and on our bodies is that a fair definition of probiotics yeah exactly Okay. You're taking bugs that have health benefits to them. Right. And I mean, we hear about probiotics all the time, just in the marketplace. Lots of people are trying to sell us on probiotics. But I just want to ask you about some of their limitations, I guess. Because first of all, one very common way we hear to take probiotics is the right kind of yogurt. And you see all kinds of yogurt brands advertising that they take probiotics is is the right kind of yogurt and you see all kinds of yogurt brands advertising that they contain probiotics but um i want to use that example to get at a question i have which is how does yogurt make it through the acidic environment how do the how do

the good bacteria in a good yogurt make it down into where they need to be into the lower intestine when they have to get through the acidic environment of the stomach? A couple of reasons. Well, many of these lactic acid bacteria, they're called the ones that are probiotics and the ones that grow in this type of food, they're actually very resistant to acidic environments and food products are not in the stomach where the acid is so, so strong, you know, pH one or one and a half for very long. So yeah, bacteria make it down there. Even non-lactic acid bacteria can do that. You can trust bacteria to do all sorts of crazy and live in crazy environments because they were very well adapted to do that. So they do make it down there. What they're not that good at is at staying down there.

They will go through your gut and many of them will produce compounds that are good for you and for your immune system. But it's harder for probiotics to take hold and be part of your microbiome, which means that you need to constantly take these probiotics or these probiotic-containing foods to feel these these potential benefits for an extended period of time okay so one thing i wanted to ask you is just like um the the inevitability that as more and more people seek out these probiotics it's going to open up a lot of uh opportunity for fraudsters to sell us sell stuff that is ineffective and i'm just wondering if you have any comment about that it just it, it's, you know, because we're, we're essentially being asked to, to, to, to take a

medicine that we, that we can't see or can't even have any sense of, of what's in what we're taking. So I guess if I could direct that to a more productive question, I'm just wondering if you have advice for, for where to get good probiotics or how to avoid, inevitably, there's going to be a whole bunch of BS fraud happening. For sure. There are. So the main issue with probiotics is that they are not regulated, meaning that no one has to do a single test to put a probiotic in the market. If I want to go to my lab and tell my trainees to start growing probiotics and brand them, I could do it. I don't need to ask either Health Canada or the FDA in the States.

I could do it right away. Because I don't need to actually prove that they are going to improve anything. I just need to prove that they're safe and these microorganisms are safe. So it's really hard to find a good probiotic. So what we did is that we found a really neat resource online where they list the names of probiotics that actually have been tested in randomized clinical trials, which is the gold standard for these type of things. And they list them when they have worked and for what ailment. So I would really encourage people to find this resource. And we

have it in our website, and it is 11meter.com. And under resources, you'll find a link for probiotics. And that will take you to this wonderful resource. Because other than that, you're just going to show up to the grocery store or to the drugstore and you have no idea which one to use. Claire, isn't one major barrier to creating, you know, to having science create like tailored probiotic solutions for people and to be able to like help, you know, create treatments to get these good microbes in our gut, isn't a major problem that so, so, so many microbes cannot be cultured in a lab? Like, isn't that a massive barrier to developing treatments that can be really helpful?

It is and it isn't. I mean, microbiologists have gotten pretty good now at growing them. And there's been a boom of biotech startups in different parts of the world looking at this. And now they're gotten really good at growing them and putting them in pills. And there's a few of them that are actually under human trials. So I think it's inevitable in the next decade or so, we'll probably see a product that has been properly tested that includes actual species that are part of our microbiome

and that we're not only giving one or two species, but what we're trying, that we will eventually do is to try and replace a microbiome with another microbiome. So I think this is where the science will be getting to. Okay, well, we've got like,

I got two minutes left with you. Claire, there's just one more thing I wanted you to do. You told such a charming, there was an anecdote about you and your daughter that was pretty charming in the book. And it was like, because one of the challenges that you've got a, you've got a toddler or a little bit older, and you're trying to get them to eat a diverse diet.

Most parents know that's really hard. What did you, what did you tell your daughter to, to encourage her to eat, you know, this diversity of vegetables and stuff? You told, you told her a little story about her belly. And I thought that was really cute and, and seemed really effective. Well, I just told her about the microbiome. I mean, of course, she was two, so I had to really, you know, simple the science, make it a lot more digestible for her, but I just told her that she had lots of little critters, little bugs living in them, and that they were super happy, and they would throw parties every time that she would eat vegetables and they were only able to eat vegetables so they were they were like their pet sorry her pet and and she was in charge of them and then she was in charge of

feeding them just like you know you water a plant or you feed a dog and then they really depend on fiber and vegetables and they do not like you like pizza and mac and cheese and all the delicious foods that our tummy likes. So that we need to eat both. We need to eat both foods that we like and foods that we don't like because there's little critters that make us healthy and that completely depend on us. So I kind of made her feel a little bit guilty about keeping her pets well fed. Well, guilty and excited and it seemed like it had a positive effect so that's that's it has with both of them and i'm happy to say that that it has happened for other children too that that um have uh you know that have been

that have been using this this little anecdote and in fact i'm working on a on a children's book right now uh exactly trying to tell that in a way that can be used for kids, because I know that my kids respond really well to children's books. So that's the hope that they can read it and actually believe this story the same way they believe in Santa. Well, Dr. Marie-Claire Arrieta, I just want to thank you for coming on the show. I enjoy the book. I learned so much from the book, and I hope my listeners will check it out. There's so much there, and thanks again. Well, thank you so much, Jordan, for having me. All right, so there you go, folks. I hope you liked that. If any of you are interested in winning a free copy

of Let Them Eat Dirt, head over to Facebook and share the post for this episode or retweet the tweet for this episode on Twitter. At Facebook, look for the Ruminant Podcast and on Twitter, it's at Ruminant Blog. All right. So once again, I don't have a formally produced farmer gardener segment for you folks. I blame, I don't know, a colicky baby, a new farm project that is a lot more daunting than I expected. Okay.

Well, it's not even more daunting. It's as daunting as I expected it to be. Anyway, it's been busy. So look, I thought I could do this. I want to tell you about one inch by one inch square aluminum tubing. A few years ago, I found out about a company out in Ontario called Wike or Wicycle. And Wike makes different types of bike trailers trailers including a do-it-yourself kit where you pay them about 150 bucks they sell you a bunch of parts that when combined with some

one by one inch square aluminum tubing that you source yourself gives you a pretty skookum bike trailer of I don't know it's kind of up you, but I made one about two feet by six feet long. Anyway, a really great bike trailer that can stand up to about 150 pounds. I use it on the farm. It goes behind a bike and then I send myself or a staff member out on harvest with a trailer full of bins. They grab their harvest and then they can load up the bike and head back into the processing shed. Anyway, this past off-season I was doing various types of research as I'm always doing in the off-season and I had a couple of building projects in mind and I was I got to thinking about that one by one inch tubing and I decided

kind of on a whim to see if there were any different kinds of connectors being pre-fabricated for that tubing. I looked around online, I think I googled square tubing connectors or square tubing fasteners. Anyway, I came up with a couple of companies. The one I ended up purchasing from is called ESTO, E-S-T-O, and they sell all kinds of connectors to go with this tubing. So here's the deal, you can order this, these connectors from ESTO for anywhere, I don't know, I think the cheapest connectors go for about $1, $1.10, and then they go up from there to as high as $10 or something. But what they allow you to do is to source some aluminum tubing to a while back in their manual for when you build their caterpillar tunnel. Johnny's also had plans for a do-it-yourself greenhouse bench using the same top rail that you make their caterpillar tunnels out of.

curiously when I went back to check that out a few months later the newer manual had removed the plans for that bench and I noticed that Johnny's was now selling some of the parts to make that bench presumably they they took the do-it-yourself plans out because they wanted to encourage you to buy from them I don't know I don't know if that's true for sure but it seems like that's what happened anyway I combined the esto connectors with the plans for the Johnny's greenhouse bench, except that I use the one by one inch tubing and the result was pretty great. What I found is that if you live in a moderately sized town or even better a city, it shouldn't be too hard for you to find a supplier of this tubing. So you want to avoid Home Depot and other hardware stores because

it tends to be really expensive. But if you find like a supplier of different alloy materials, typically you can get this stuff relatively cheap. Around me, I can get it for about a buck a foot for the 065 gauge of tubing, which is really light and fairly strong and that's what I built the greenhouse benches out of and I also plan to use it to build some shelving for stacking up bins in my delivery van. Now some of you may be thinking well why would you pay a dollar a foot for this tubing when you can basically build all these same things out of lumber and that's true you can do use lumber for a lot more cheaply however in my experience this stuff's a lot stronger and even lighter than the lumber and takes up less space i'd also rather have my my greenhouse benches made out of aluminum than

the lumber anyway it wasn't until i had the esto connectors in the mail and i had the tubing to play with it i realized it's it's a lot like lego for farmers the possibilities of what you can do given that there's all kinds of different connectors that you can source is is really kind of endless and kind of fun so check it out check out esto connectors and see if you can find a supplier of the tubing in your area by just googling like specialty alloys or something like that and see what you find. It might be worth goofing around with in the next off season. And if you're curious to see my bike trailers or a picture of the greenhouse benches, I'll put something up on the ruminant, the ruminant.ca

just as soon as I can. It'll probably be up by the time you hear this. So there you go, folks, something for me to end the episode. And now it's time for bed. Talk to you next time. I've met a whole army of weasels, a legion of leeches, trying to give me the screw. But if we bury ourselves in the woods in the country, we're no closer, we never have laundry. We'll owe nothing to this world of thieves live life like it was meant to be i don't fret honey i've got a plan to make our final escape all we'll need is each other a hundred dollars and maybe a roll of duct tape And we'll run right outside of the city's reaches

We'll live off chestnuts, spring water and peaches We'll owe nothing to this world of thieves And live life like it was meant to be Because why would we live in a place that don't want us a place that is trying to bleed us dry. We could be happy with life in the country. With salt on our skin and the dirt on our hands.

I've been doing a lot of thinking Some real soul searching And here's my final resolve I don't need a big old house Or some fancy car To keep my love going strong So we'll run right out Into the wilds and braces

We'll keep close quarters with gentle faces And live next door to the birds and the bees And live life like it was meant to be Bye.