478: The Gut Immune Connection with Emeran Mayer
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Lucas Rockwood
4.8 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 25 August 2021
⏱️ 48 minutes
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Summary
The Gut Immune Connection
with Emeran Mayer
There are an estimated 100 trillion bacteria in your gut right now that weigh 2-3 lbs. If you were to spread them out, they would cover the surface of an entire tennis course. These include good bugs, bag bugs, and even some pathogens lurking in the corners.
Your microbiome is believed to influence not just digestion and absorption of nutrients, but also mood, hormones, neurotransmitters, and more. People often compare the microbiome to the soil on farmland, but we know much more about topsoil than we do our own gastrointestinal tracts.
What should we eat to feed our good gut bacteria? How do you prevent gut dysbiosis? Can supplements help or hurt? On this week's show, Dr. Emeran Mayer will expand our understanding of our internal world.
Listen and learn:
- Are probiotics really that harmful to your gut?
- What is the ideal diet for a healthy gut?
- Fiber, water, organics, and chemicals
Resources and Links:
ABOUT OUR GUEST
Emeran A. Mayer is the executive director of the Oppenheimer Center for Stress and Resilience and the Co-director of the Digestive Diseases Research Center at UCLA. He is the author of more than 300 scientific publications and several books. His latest book is called, The Gut Immune Connection, is available now.
Nutritional Tip of the Week:
- Seaweed
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | So there are about three pounds of bacteria in your gastrointestinal tract. |
| 0:09.2 | If you were to lay them out on the ground, it'd be like the size of a tennis court. |
| 0:13.9 | And those bacteria, good bacteria, bad bacteria, even some pathogens are in there. |
| 0:19.9 | They have an impact on a whole bunch of different things. Your mood, your energy, your ability |
| 0:24.2 | to digest and assimilate nutrients. And there's been a lot of hype around the microbiome. |
| 0:28.7 | What can we learn? How can we affect it? If we think of the microbiome, sort of like the soil |
| 0:34.0 | of your body, right? If we had cornfield, we would analyze the soil to see about the nitrogen, |
| 0:40.7 | the potassium. And if we were to analyze your microbiome, it'd really interesting to see |
| 0:45.7 | what we can learn. The challenge is we don't know exactly what all of these different bacteria do. |
| 0:51.9 | We don't know how they interact. We don't know how they work together or how they clash. |
| 0:56.9 | And the reality is my microbiota are different than yours. And so someone who's very healthy might |
| 1:04.4 | be able to share their good bugs with someone who's not healthy. People are experimenting with |
| 1:09.2 | all kinds of things right now, including fecal transplants. It's just like it sounds, sharing |
| 1:13.8 | poo with someone else. And there's a lot of really interesting research. It's very much sort of |
| 1:18.7 | midterm in terms of knowledge and breakthroughs. And there's lots and lots of research. Despite the |
| 1:23.5 | fact that you go into the health food store and see loads and loads of probiotic supplements |
| 1:28.5 | and everything from baby food to energy drinks, it's kind of unclear how any of this stuff works. |
| 1:33.2 | But very likely within the next decade, in the same way you can get a genetic test. You can |
| 1:38.0 | probably, probably more reliably, at least start to get a microbiome test to understand what's |
| 1:44.9 | going on now. Of course, some of this stuff is available through the mainstream alopathic medical |
| 1:49.6 | system right now to test for things like H. Pylori and other pathogens. And some of this stuff |
| 1:55.0 | is available off piece, like in these experimental Silicon Valley startups and things like this. |
... |
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