Recap: How your gut microbes could fight disease | Suzanne Devkota & Tim Spector

Hello, and welcome to Zoe recap, where each week we find the best bits from one of our podcast episodes to help you improve your health. Inside each of us lives a bustling community of microbes, tiny organisms that outnumber our human cells. They're there from the very moment we're born, shaping our immune system and influencing our long term health. The science of the microbiome is evolving rapidly, but one thing is clear. We need to take care of these microbes so that they can take care of us. Today, I'm joined by doctor Suzanne de Coter and Tim Spector to explore how our gut bacteria protect us from diseases and what we can do to strengthen this vital partnership. The education of our immune system by our microbe starts from the moment we're born. Looking at the early life, you know, microbiome, the first year of life tells you a lot about the interactions with the immune system and the gut microbiome. There's a lot of research now on this really critical window where, a baby is born essentially sterile, no microbes until they get, you know, the first bugs from their mother. And immune cells, as more bacteria start to colonize the gut, so do more immune cells start to develop in the intestines as well. And what's really interesting is there's this weaning period weaning meaning when you go from breast or formula onto your native diet, or table foods, or adult diet and that introduction of food, you had this rapid expansion of immune cells in the infant. And a lot of that is attributed to the more diverse foods you eat, the more diverse microbes that colonize the gut. And so there's this beautiful, evolutionary, conserved interplay between microbes colonizing, immune cells growing, which you want. That's a good thing. You want diverse immune cells, so that when you grow up and see different foods, as Tim said, and different life exposures, you don't react and auto react. And so there's a lot of studies saying, hey, what happens when we mess that up and we give babies a lot of antibiotics early in life or something like that? And studies show that their immune system doesn't develop as well as their microbes don't also. And the hypothesis being, could that be predisposing infants, children, to autoimmune conditions airway allergies, food allergies, and so on? So I think, you know, we study a lot what happens in adults, the defects that happen in adults, but a lot of it starts very early in life. That's probably why we've got so many allergies now that we didn't have, forty, fifty years ago because breastfeeding rates have gone down and diversity of baby foods has gone right down. They're now getting ultra processed foods very early on in life. And you combine that with cesarean sections plus antibiotics. It's a recipe for all these allergies we're we're getting, isn't it? Because as you said, a badly …