[Music]
[Applause]
good morning everybody
most people are horrified when they’re
told that they are not individuals or
even mostly human but it’s a fact we are
ecosystems with huge communities of
companion helper organisms which are
collectively known as the microbiota
these consist of viruses fungi bacteria
various other kinds of organism but even
if you consider only the bacteria and
only the bacteria present in your gut
there are more of them than there are
human cells in your entire body and
because they consist of hundreds of
different species the collective genome
of all of these organisms which referred
to as the microbiome contains far more
DNA far more genes far more encodes far
more metabolic pathways than your own
human genes do it’s not surprising
therefore that if we were to take blood
samples from all of you
we will find that in your blood there
are large percentage of molecules that
are the product not of human metabolism
but of bacterial metabolism and every
cell in your body is bathed in these
molecules of bacterial orange in every
day of your life and many of them are
powerfully biologically active now how
did this peculiar situation arise and
why did it arise well the vertebrates
evolved about 500 million years ago and
rapidly developed and co-evolved with
this huge community of microorganisms
which is much much greater than that
which already occurred in the
invertebrates and these organisms
developed and co-evolved with us to
develop roles in the development of most
organs for instance an animal that
doesn’t have any microbiota has peculiar
undeveloped brain that doesn’t function
correctly and they behave very oddly the
microbiota also developed roles in
regulating metabolism and brain function
and the immune system and that is
particularly relevant today because the
immune system of course has the job of
keeping out the pathogens that want to
get into our human ecosystem and
disruptive so therefore the immune
system has got two jobs it’s got the
role
managing or farming the microbiota the
good organisms that you do want while
simultaneously excluding the pathogens
that we don’t want now this requires the
evolution of a new branch of the immune
system which again the invertebrates
don’t have and it’s called the adaptive
immune system it’s extraordinarily
clever because what it does is it
regenerates the repertoire of things
that we recognize things that we can
tolerate things that we decide to attack
de novo it each generation in fact
therefore it’s a bit at birth rather
like a computer system it’s got hardware
and it’s got software but in order to
function correctly
it needs data in order to develop this
new repertoire so where does it get the
data from well the data come from the
microbiota itself but also from
organisms in the natural environment
soil plants and the kinds of animals
with which we go in volved animals that
we would have hunted or eaten or lived
with and that enables the immune system
to develop the repertoire to tolerate
some things and attack other things and
so forth now the problem is that this is
often not working in the modern world
there’s a whole series of errors that
the immune system is increasingly making
hay fever used to be rare but I’ll bet
there are lots of sufferers of hay fever
in its room and that’s an example of a
disorder where the immune system is
attacking forbidden targets attacking
things it should not attack it should
not be attacking allergens like grass
pollen or the neighbor’s cat it should
not be attacking your own tissues as it
does in multiple sclerosis or type 1
diabetes it shouldn’t be attacking the
gut contents which is one of the things
that’s occurring in a chronic
inflammatory bowel diseases and then
there’s another kind of error that it’s
making that is that it’s failing to turn
off inflammation that is no longer
required if you look at these cartoons
here on the left
imagine someone in a developing country
who develops markers of inflammation
that’s what this red line is meant to
show markers of inflammation that you
can measure in the peripheral blood
during an acute inflammatory episode
caused by an infection but if you look
in the United States or I’m sure many of
you in this audience and we took a blood
sample we would
find biomarkers of inflammation although
there is no clinical evidence of any
inflammatory lesion anywhere within you
but background inflammation persistent
background information is failing to be
turned off something you’ve gone wrong
with the regulation of our immune system
and in fact that is bad because chronic
background inflammation leads to
increased risk of heart disease diabetes
metabolic syndrome certain cancers even
depression for instance children who
have raised levels of markers of
inflammation at the age of nine are more
likely to be depressed or psychotic at
the age 19 the same is true for work
government workers in the ministries of
in Whitehall twelve years after they are
found to have raised levels of these
inflammatory markers they are more
likely to be depressed so why do we
think that these defects are something
to do with something going wrong in this
axis of the microbiota in the immune
system well firstly if you look at these
classes of disorder I’m talking about
you find that they tend to have
distorted microbiota it has to say
unusual balance of different species you
find that there’s reduced biodiversity
and this is particularly important it’s
absolutely crucial that you have a very
broad diversity of different species in
your microbiota and you find that the
risk of all of these things is increased
by antibiotics particularly multiple
exposure to antibiotics but there’s much
better evidence more dramatic evidence
if you take identical germ-free mice
that’s the same mice that have been
delivered by caesarian section into a
sterile environment and maintained in a
sterile environment so that they have no
microbiota and then you transfer into
them my Kubota from a thin human or
microbiota from an obese human and then
put them all on the same diet
astonishingly the animals that receive
the microbiota from the obese human put
on more weight not quite that much I
have to admit then the animals that
receive the microbiota from the thin
human and it’s not just for nutritional
things that you see effects like this
let’s then give another example if you
take my komodo from a depressed human or
microbe either from a happy human and
put them into germ-free mice or even
just into rats that the
their microbiota graciously depleting
with antibiotic treatment you in fact
end up with depressed mice or happy mice
effectively now this sort of experiment
which may seem quite mind-boggling does
of course prove absolutely
that the microbiota is an important part
of mediation these conditions now why is
it happening well clearly the first
thing to ask yourself is where did the
microbiota come from in the first place
well the microbiota it’s some of it’s
transferred in nutria but very little
most of it of course you pick up at the
moment of birth the vaginal microbiota
from your mother and also fecal
microbiota the fact that the anus is
close to the vagina is is perhaps not
for your chance now that particular
transfer of frequent I CRO biota to the
infant is so important but for instance
koala bears where the baby is sitting in
little lamb little marsupial pocket when
he gets big enough he leans out leans
forward and leaned down and the mother
twists her pelvis up and produces a
special kind of feces that the baby then
eats in all because it has to have the
maternal microbiota in order to be able
to do the difficult task of digesting
eucalyptus leaf dolphins have another
kind of problem because the baby is born
in the sea so what does the mother do
she defecates massively at the moment of
birth and this seems to do the trick
humans don’t do that but they do also
transfer some microbiota in the milk
there are bacteria in mother and milk
believe it or not
moreover the milk contains prebiotic
oligosaccharides best to say molecules
that cannot actually be digested by the
baby that’s the astonishing thing but
there are digested by the appropriate
microorganisms but they act as a kind of
fertilizer to encourage the organisms
that you want to have in the baby’s gut
and then of course you can transfer
microbiota by sharing the spoon or
sucking the dummy clean and plugging it
back in the baby and you get more from
other members of the family the problem
which is what were about today is that
in the modern world much of this
transmission of the microbiota is being
impeded antibiotics given in pregnancy
cesarean deliveries less breastfeeding
more antibiotics in the early months and
years of life inappropriate hygiene the
hygiene
is not on the whole a big factor here
despite what you occasionally see in the
newspapers but inappropriate hygiene
that blocks transmission of maternal
microbiota to the baby like the mother
who instead of sucking the dummy clean
through throws it away and gets a new
one that indeed is not a good idea but
what about the natural environment I
said that some of the input comes from
natural environment but of course babies
left to their own devices and academics
have actually sat watching them without
intervening will consume it seems about
20 grams of soil a day Sigmund Freud had
some magnificently ludicrous
explanations for this but in fact
probably all vertebrates do it and the
green iguana you see below that baby
there has been much studied in this
particular context in fact of course by
doing this the baby is not only taking
in bacteria some of which not nor all of
which but some of which will be able to
add to the baby’s microbiota they’re
also taking in spores which I’ll come
back to later but spores are small very
very resistant forms of betaab certain
bacteria that can persist in the
environment for hundreds maybe thousands
of years and so those good germination
the bowel can be added to the microbiota
now of course
farmers are always you would think
closely exposed to the natural
environment so this should help them but
it depends on how you farm the Amish
farm in a traditional manner they are
people of German origin just like the
Hutterites they all farm in America but
the Amish farm in a traditional manner
they use animals for transport animals
to pull their plows the Hutterites are
super mechanized industrialized farmers
and if you look down the Amish column
you will see that they have much lower
levels of allergic disorders they have
higher levels of expression in their
blood of genes that are involved with
the control and regulation of the immune
system and amazingly Amish house dust
contains microorganisms and so on that
if squirted into the nose of an
asthmatic mouse make the asthmatic mouse
better the Hutterites and they’re highly
mechanized farming everything is exactly
the reverse they have more allergic
disorders and their house dust actually
makes the asthmatic mouse worse so
if you were lucky enough to receive your
mother’s microbiota and to have lots of
exposure to the natural environment how
do you make sure you hang on to your
good microbiota well avoiding antibiotic
is one thing eating a diet with huge
variety is another fascinatingly
he archaeological sites from thirteen
thousand five hundred years ago in New
Freitas Valley revealed that people were
eating as many as a hundred and ninety
different plants how many different
plants have you eaten in the last week
an other site shown eating more than 100
different birds and animals then there’s
the question of fiber often described
rather mysteriously in the in the media
fiber simply means plant cell wall
doesn’t have to be fibrous at all it’s
just cloud cell walls but you have to
have organisms in your gut that are
digesting fiber what you can’t digest
but these microorganisms can you have to
have those organisms there because the
products of the digestion of the fiber
are actually necessary for your
physiology actually act as signaling
molecules systemically in your
physiology and moreover feed the
epithelium of the gut and so necessary
for gut health and then polyphenols
these are some plant pigments and so and
I just like those because they also seem
to maintain the diversity of the gut
microbiota and the one called
resveratrol is found in red wine now if
you have lived on an appalling diet for
some weeks some of the organisms
particularly the fiber digesting ones
might have become extinct but of course
you can always reinstall them get by
going back into the natural environment
and for instance the spores wherever
humans have been the environment will
have been seeded by spores of bacteria
that are adapted to the human gut so if
you butt into the natural environment
you can reinstall just like me
installing software and then your
microbiota can also pick up genes from
the environment many Japanese people can
digest peculiar polysaccharides found in
seaweed now it’s not that the Japanese
genome contains the genes that encode
the enzymes that can digest these
seaweed molecules is that the organisms
their gut have picked up the relevant
genes from organisms in the environment
because they’ve been repeatedly exposed
to seaweed so now to summarize what I’ve
been saying I pointed out that our
microbiota nowadays is under strain and
is rather abnormal because of a failure
to inherit mother’s microbiota because
of diminished contact with the natural
environment and because of antibiotics
and bad diet but now something new has
hit the theme and that is the arrival of
agricultural chemicals industrial
pollution even chemicals in highly
processed food and in personal care
products because what’s beginning to
emerge is that many of these compounds
even the ones that don’t appear to be
enormous the toxic to humans in their
own right are in fact antibacterial and
are altering the microbiota not only of
the natural environment but also of
human beings and this is worrying
because if we further distort the human
microbiota which is already massively
different from that of contemporary
hunter-gatherers then we will have lower
biodiversity and further problems with
the diseases I’ve already talked about
and the worrying thing is that it looks
from recent epidemiology that in
countries like India where there are
massive increases for instance in type 2
diabetes
it’s the factors on the right hand side
there which are hitting them first
before they adopt the lifestyle
practices of high-income Western society
so the thing is on the left you can look
after yourself by using common sense but
and changing your lifestyle but the
thing is on the right need us as
citizens to be vigilant and to make sure
that governments investigate and that we
really know what it is that we’re being exposed to thank
[Applause]
good morning everybody
most people are horrified when they’re
told that they are not individuals or
even mostly human but it’s a fact we are
ecosystems with huge communities of
companion helper organisms which are
collectively known as the microbiota
these consist of viruses fungi bacteria
various other kinds of organism but even
if you consider only the bacteria and
only the bacteria present in your gut
there are more of them than there are
human cells in your entire body and
because they consist of hundreds of
different species the collective genome
of all of these organisms which referred
to as the microbiome contains far more
DNA far more genes far more encodes far
more metabolic pathways than your own
human genes do it’s not surprising
therefore that if we were to take blood
samples from all of you
we will find that in your blood there
are large percentage of molecules that
are the product not of human metabolism
but of bacterial metabolism and every
cell in your body is bathed in these
molecules of bacterial orange in every
day of your life and many of them are
powerfully biologically active now how
did this peculiar situation arise and
why did it arise well the vertebrates
evolved about 500 million years ago and
rapidly developed and co-evolved with
this huge community of microorganisms
which is much much greater than that
which already occurred in the
invertebrates and these organisms
developed and co-evolved with us to
develop roles in the development of most
organs for instance an animal that
doesn’t have any microbiota has peculiar
undeveloped brain that doesn’t function
correctly and they behave very oddly the
microbiota also developed roles in
regulating metabolism and brain function
and the immune system and that is
particularly relevant today because the
immune system of course has the job of
keeping out the pathogens that want to
get into our human ecosystem and
disruptive so therefore the immune
system has got two jobs it’s got the
role
managing or farming the microbiota the
good organisms that you do want while
simultaneously excluding the pathogens
that we don’t want now this requires the
evolution of a new branch of the immune
system which again the invertebrates
don’t have and it’s called the adaptive
immune system it’s extraordinarily
clever because what it does is it
regenerates the repertoire of things
that we recognize things that we can
tolerate things that we decide to attack
de novo it each generation in fact
therefore it’s a bit at birth rather
like a computer system it’s got hardware
and it’s got software but in order to
function correctly
it needs data in order to develop this
new repertoire so where does it get the
data from well the data come from the
microbiota itself but also from
organisms in the natural environment
soil plants and the kinds of animals
with which we go in volved animals that
we would have hunted or eaten or lived
with and that enables the immune system
to develop the repertoire to tolerate
some things and attack other things and
so forth now the problem is that this is
often not working in the modern world
there’s a whole series of errors that
the immune system is increasingly making
hay fever used to be rare but I’ll bet
there are lots of sufferers of hay fever
in its room and that’s an example of a
disorder where the immune system is
attacking forbidden targets attacking
things it should not attack it should
not be attacking allergens like grass
pollen or the neighbor’s cat it should
not be attacking your own tissues as it
does in multiple sclerosis or type 1
diabetes it shouldn’t be attacking the
gut contents which is one of the things
that’s occurring in a chronic
inflammatory bowel diseases and then
there’s another kind of error that it’s
making that is that it’s failing to turn
off inflammation that is no longer
required if you look at these cartoons
here on the left
imagine someone in a developing country
who develops markers of inflammation
that’s what this red line is meant to
show markers of inflammation that you
can measure in the peripheral blood
during an acute inflammatory episode
caused by an infection but if you look
in the United States or I’m sure many of
you in this audience and we took a blood
sample we would
find biomarkers of inflammation although
there is no clinical evidence of any
inflammatory lesion anywhere within you
but background inflammation persistent
background information is failing to be
turned off something you’ve gone wrong
with the regulation of our immune system
and in fact that is bad because chronic
background inflammation leads to
increased risk of heart disease diabetes
metabolic syndrome certain cancers even
depression for instance children who
have raised levels of markers of
inflammation at the age of nine are more
likely to be depressed or psychotic at
the age 19 the same is true for work
government workers in the ministries of
in Whitehall twelve years after they are
found to have raised levels of these
inflammatory markers they are more
likely to be depressed so why do we
think that these defects are something
to do with something going wrong in this
axis of the microbiota in the immune
system well firstly if you look at these
classes of disorder I’m talking about
you find that they tend to have
distorted microbiota it has to say
unusual balance of different species you
find that there’s reduced biodiversity
and this is particularly important it’s
absolutely crucial that you have a very
broad diversity of different species in
your microbiota and you find that the
risk of all of these things is increased
by antibiotics particularly multiple
exposure to antibiotics but there’s much
better evidence more dramatic evidence
if you take identical germ-free mice
that’s the same mice that have been
delivered by caesarian section into a
sterile environment and maintained in a
sterile environment so that they have no
microbiota and then you transfer into
them my Kubota from a thin human or
microbiota from an obese human and then
put them all on the same diet
astonishingly the animals that receive
the microbiota from the obese human put
on more weight not quite that much I
have to admit then the animals that
receive the microbiota from the thin
human and it’s not just for nutritional
things that you see effects like this
let’s then give another example if you
take my komodo from a depressed human or
microbe either from a happy human and
put them into germ-free mice or even
just into rats that the
their microbiota graciously depleting
with antibiotic treatment you in fact
end up with depressed mice or happy mice
effectively now this sort of experiment
which may seem quite mind-boggling does
of course prove absolutely
that the microbiota is an important part
of mediation these conditions now why is
it happening well clearly the first
thing to ask yourself is where did the
microbiota come from in the first place
well the microbiota it’s some of it’s
transferred in nutria but very little
most of it of course you pick up at the
moment of birth the vaginal microbiota
from your mother and also fecal
microbiota the fact that the anus is
close to the vagina is is perhaps not
for your chance now that particular
transfer of frequent I CRO biota to the
infant is so important but for instance
koala bears where the baby is sitting in
little lamb little marsupial pocket when
he gets big enough he leans out leans
forward and leaned down and the mother
twists her pelvis up and produces a
special kind of feces that the baby then
eats in all because it has to have the
maternal microbiota in order to be able
to do the difficult task of digesting
eucalyptus leaf dolphins have another
kind of problem because the baby is born
in the sea so what does the mother do
she defecates massively at the moment of
birth and this seems to do the trick
humans don’t do that but they do also
transfer some microbiota in the milk
there are bacteria in mother and milk
believe it or not
moreover the milk contains prebiotic
oligosaccharides best to say molecules
that cannot actually be digested by the
baby that’s the astonishing thing but
there are digested by the appropriate
microorganisms but they act as a kind of
fertilizer to encourage the organisms
that you want to have in the baby’s gut
and then of course you can transfer
microbiota by sharing the spoon or
sucking the dummy clean and plugging it
back in the baby and you get more from
other members of the family the problem
which is what were about today is that
in the modern world much of this
transmission of the microbiota is being
impeded antibiotics given in pregnancy
cesarean deliveries less breastfeeding
more antibiotics in the early months and
years of life inappropriate hygiene the
hygiene
is not on the whole a big factor here
despite what you occasionally see in the
newspapers but inappropriate hygiene
that blocks transmission of maternal
microbiota to the baby like the mother
who instead of sucking the dummy clean
through throws it away and gets a new
one that indeed is not a good idea but
what about the natural environment I
said that some of the input comes from
natural environment but of course babies
left to their own devices and academics
have actually sat watching them without
intervening will consume it seems about
20 grams of soil a day Sigmund Freud had
some magnificently ludicrous
explanations for this but in fact
probably all vertebrates do it and the
green iguana you see below that baby
there has been much studied in this
particular context in fact of course by
doing this the baby is not only taking
in bacteria some of which not nor all of
which but some of which will be able to
add to the baby’s microbiota they’re
also taking in spores which I’ll come
back to later but spores are small very
very resistant forms of betaab certain
bacteria that can persist in the
environment for hundreds maybe thousands
of years and so those good germination
the bowel can be added to the microbiota
now of course
farmers are always you would think
closely exposed to the natural
environment so this should help them but
it depends on how you farm the Amish
farm in a traditional manner they are
people of German origin just like the
Hutterites they all farm in America but
the Amish farm in a traditional manner
they use animals for transport animals
to pull their plows the Hutterites are
super mechanized industrialized farmers
and if you look down the Amish column
you will see that they have much lower
levels of allergic disorders they have
higher levels of expression in their
blood of genes that are involved with
the control and regulation of the immune
system and amazingly Amish house dust
contains microorganisms and so on that
if squirted into the nose of an
asthmatic mouse make the asthmatic mouse
better the Hutterites and they’re highly
mechanized farming everything is exactly
the reverse they have more allergic
disorders and their house dust actually
makes the asthmatic mouse worse so
if you were lucky enough to receive your
mother’s microbiota and to have lots of
exposure to the natural environment how
do you make sure you hang on to your
good microbiota well avoiding antibiotic
is one thing eating a diet with huge
variety is another fascinatingly
he archaeological sites from thirteen
thousand five hundred years ago in New
Freitas Valley revealed that people were
eating as many as a hundred and ninety
different plants how many different
plants have you eaten in the last week
an other site shown eating more than 100
different birds and animals then there’s
the question of fiber often described
rather mysteriously in the in the media
fiber simply means plant cell wall
doesn’t have to be fibrous at all it’s
just cloud cell walls but you have to
have organisms in your gut that are
digesting fiber what you can’t digest
but these microorganisms can you have to
have those organisms there because the
products of the digestion of the fiber
are actually necessary for your
physiology actually act as signaling
molecules systemically in your
physiology and moreover feed the
epithelium of the gut and so necessary
for gut health and then polyphenols
these are some plant pigments and so and
I just like those because they also seem
to maintain the diversity of the gut
microbiota and the one called
resveratrol is found in red wine now if
you have lived on an appalling diet for
some weeks some of the organisms
particularly the fiber digesting ones
might have become extinct but of course
you can always reinstall them get by
going back into the natural environment
and for instance the spores wherever
humans have been the environment will
have been seeded by spores of bacteria
that are adapted to the human gut so if
you butt into the natural environment
you can reinstall just like me
installing software and then your
microbiota can also pick up genes from
the environment many Japanese people can
digest peculiar polysaccharides found in
seaweed now it’s not that the Japanese
genome contains the genes that encode
the enzymes that can digest these
seaweed molecules is that the organisms
their gut have picked up the relevant
genes from organisms in the environment
because they’ve been repeatedly exposed
to seaweed so now to summarize what I’ve
been saying I pointed out that our
microbiota nowadays is under strain and
is rather abnormal because of a failure
to inherit mother’s microbiota because
of diminished contact with the natural
environment and because of antibiotics
and bad diet but now something new has
hit the theme and that is the arrival of
agricultural chemicals industrial
pollution even chemicals in highly
processed food and in personal care
products because what’s beginning to
emerge is that many of these compounds
even the ones that don’t appear to be
enormous the toxic to humans in their
own right are in fact antibacterial and
are altering the microbiota not only of
the natural environment but also of
human beings and this is worrying
because if we further distort the human
microbiota which is already massively
different from that of contemporary
hunter-gatherers then we will have lower
biodiversity and further problems with
the diseases I’ve already talked about
and the worrying thing is that it looks
from recent epidemiology that in
countries like India where there are
massive increases for instance in type 2
diabetes
it’s the factors on the right hand side
there which are hitting them first
before they adopt the lifestyle
practices of high-income Western society
so the thing is on the left you can look
after yourself by using common sense but
and changing your lifestyle but the
thing is on the right need us as
citizens to be vigilant and to make sure
that governments investigate and that we
really know what it is that we’re being exposed to thank
Please follow and like us: