Dear Beyoncé: May The Carter Twins Meet Helpful Microbial Life Partners

Dear Beyoncé: May The Carter Twins Meet Helpful Microbial Life Partners

An open letter to Beyoncé wishing her and her family well as the twins meet their microbial partners for life.  Dear Beyoncé, As you wait and prepare for the twins’ birth please don’t forget the invisible microbes that will protect, feed, and teach your babies for the rest of their lives.  Yep, I’m talking about “germs” or more politically correctly – “microbes”. Babies are “microbe magnets”. Those first microbes that baby encounters become their microbes for life. They are stuck together – life partners in sickness and in health. What’s cool is that these microbes are security guards keeping away diseases, chefs chopping up food to feed baby, and soothing Jedi masters who teach baby’s immune system what to kill and what to ignore. In my grandmother’s day, people in developed countries died from communicable diseases – polio, mumps, measles, yellow fever. Diseases that are spread from person to person by sneezing, coughing, or spread by insects, like mosquitos. Today people die from non-communicable diseases – diabetes, allergies, asthma, autoimmune diseases, and more. Our diseases today aren’t due to specific microbial pathogens. Vaccines, handwashing, clean water, sewers, and antibiotics keep these easy-to-spread microbial diseases at low numbers. Instead, today’s diseases

Book Review:”Let Them Eat Dirt” – Save Your Child by Saving Their Microbes!

Book Review:”Let Them Eat Dirt” – Save Your Child by Saving Their Microbes!

  “Let Them Eat Dirt: Saving Your Child from an Oversanitized World” provides suggestions for a microbially rich and healthy childhood. Let Them Eat Dirt: Saving Your Child from an Oversanitized World talks directly to parents about the importance of microbes to your young kids. Authors  Brett Finlay, PhD and Marie-Claire Arrieta, PhD have an excellent message – let kids get dirty and quit abusing antibiotics. Let Them Eat Dirt is an engaging read clearly written and written clearly by scientist parents who have been in the “parenting trenches”. This microbiome parenting book is a fun read. Several times I laughed out loud at the references to pregnancy and parenting woes. As a scientist, I appreciated their overall message about the importance of microbes to our health.

Missing Microbes and Increased Antibiotic Resistance

Missing Microbes and Increased Antibiotic Resistance

Dr. Martin Blaser’s book Missing Microbes details his observations and hypotheses on how overuse and misuse of antibiotics may be the source of modern non-communicable diseases, such as diabetes, asthma, and obesity. The maps of the U.S. colored with obesity and antibiotic prescriptions fit extremely well – and centered on my Southern homeland. Could it be that the obesity epidemic, diabetes, allergies, asthma, and other non-communicable diseases that are centered over the American South are not due to our preference for all things fried or sopped in butter and washed down with a swig of sweet tea? It’s not just due to sitting in front of screens too much. Certainly poor diet and little exercise don’t help. But could an over-use of antibiotics also be to blame?  That was the hypothesis. Obesity Caused by Over Use of Antibiotics? Dr. Martin Blaser from NYU’s experimental research on mice demonstrated drastic changes in the different types of gut bacteria present before and after antibiotic use. More strikingly, when the antibiotic use was discontinued and the bacterial populations rebounded, the bacterial types that did come back were different metabolically. Antibiotics drastically effected the gut microbiome. Does antibiotic somehow set us on a path