Podcast Intro:

Immunity refers to an organism's ability to withstand a specific virus or poison through the use of specialized antibodies or sensitized white blood cells. We prefer to sacrifice healthy selections for the sake of saving time in this fast-paced atmosphere where fast foods are abundant. On the other hand, what are the negative consequences of these actions?

With many businesses competing with one another, and with the high demand for food relative to the continuous growth in population, companies are now churning out processed and cheap food rapidly. The lack of education and the rise of daily expenses on necessities, such as food, allowed people to compromise. Now, the pandemic accelerated and made things worse. What are the factors and effects that unhealthy food consumption leads to? Tune in as Dr. Emeran Meyer discusses the gut-immune relationship in this episode.

What you’ll get out of tuning in:

• What is the “One Health Concept”
• What is the importance of the soil microbiome for plant and human health
• What are the mind-gut microbiome system and its role in health and disease
• What is the key to longevity and good health
• How the microbiome determines the strength of your immune system and your immune resistance.
• How to increase the abundance of microbes in your gut.
• How lifestyle determines your chances of surviving pandemics that are about to come in the future.

Links/CTA:

• Emeran Mayer, MD
• Instagram: @emeranmayer
• Youtube Channel: emeranmayermd
• The Mind Gut Connection book, Harper Wave 2016
• The Gut Immune Connection book, Harper Wave 2021

Highlights:

• Cate talks about the case of Covid and an Elderly with regards to Microbiome
• Cate talks about perspective, our beliefs influence how we think and how we solve problems.
• Cate talks about the direct correlation between chronic systemic inflammation and the severity of symptoms

Timestamps:

• 12:26 - Metabolic Syndrome
• 16:14 - Science and Practice of Mind-Body Interactions
• 22:23 - Cytokine Storm
• 27:10 - The “Gut Immune Connection” by Emeran Mayer
• 28:55 - Why do people fear when they hear “virus or bacteria”
• 33:41 - Scientific vs. Empirical Evidence
• 37:05 - Ancient vs. Modern Concepts
• 40:53 - Learning from the Ancient Sages

Quotes:

• “The fact that today, we see this increasing prevalence of autoimmune diseases and allergies and food sensitivities. Many people think it has a lot to do with the altered interaction we have, as infants in a much more sterile environment. Where we have banned microbes from the time of deliveries, or C sections and sterile hospital environments, to antibiotics early on, prematurely born babies ending up in intensive care units being loaded with antibiotics for four weeks sometimes.”
• “Early in life in terms of the natural exposure, Homo sapiens have had to their environment, including going through the birth canal, and picking up some of the good bacteria in the birth canal, which helps start to build the baby immune system is even like upon injection, right from the mom’s body to then what we do. And if we look back, historically, there was a lot of skin-to-skin contact with newborns. There’s a lot of mixing of the environment with the infant. And that helped create a baseline immune system, an innate immune system that was stronger.”
• “When we look in any indigenous culture, usually there’s some relationship with a specific type of traditional fermented foods. And so in ayurvedic medicine, it was always considered to pacify Vata, which is the wind force, which creates the issues primarily in the nervous system first, and then the digestive system second, and it’s like the nerves that upset the digestive system, like just being nervous, being anxious, being worried more of the people that are on the lighter side have less consistency with digestive capacity.”
• “The immune activation happens in the gut. So, these microbes are only microns away from immune cells. And it’s the only separation not even from the real physical barrier, but from this mucous layer produced by some cells in the gut in the colon. And so, the margin for error is pretty small, and if you change that mucous layer just a little bit, you will already get contact between microbes and these immune sensors.”
• “People always talk about how we need to boost our immune system. With COVID-19, it’s the opposite. You want to prevent this excessive response. An excessive response happens because the immune cells are programmed in a non-adaptive way in their passage through the gut.”

Guest BIO: Emeran Mayer

Dr. Mayer is a Distinguished Research Professor in the Department of Medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, and Executive Director of the G Oppenheimer Center for Neurobiology of Stress & Resilience.

He has been one of the pioneers in the science and practice of brain gut microbiome interactions with applications in a wide range of diseases in gastrointestinal, psychiatric, and neurological disorders. He has published close to 400 scientific papers and several books and has received multiple awards.

In addition to his academic interests, Mayer has a longstanding interest in ancient healing traditions and has been involved in documentary film productions about the Yanomami people in the Orinoco region of Venezuela, and the Asmat people in Irian Jaya. He has recently co-produced the award-winning documentary “In Search of Balance” and is working on a new documentary “Interconnected Planet”. He is a strong believer in Buddhist philosophy and got married in a Tibetan monastery by Choekyi Nyima Rinpoche in Kathmandu. He regularly pursues meditative practices.

He has spoken at UCLA TEDx on the Mysterious Origins of Gut Feelings in 2015 and has been interviewed on National Public Radio, PBS, and by many national and international media outlets including the Los Angeles and New York Times, the Atlantic, and Time magazine. He has appeared on numerous podcasts, including Lewis Howes’ The School of Greatness, Tom Bilyeu’s Impact Theory, and Mark Hyman’s The Doctor’s Pharmacy. He is the author of the 2016 bestselling book The Mind Gut Connection published by Harper&Collins and translated into 16 languages.

In his new book, The Gut Immune Connection, Mayer proposes a radical, unifying concept about the chronic non-communicable disease epidemic we are finding ourselves in. He discusses how changes in our diet, lifestyle, and the way we interact with the world during the last 75 years have led to a profound dysregulation of the community of trillions of microbes living in our gut, resulting in a progressive chronic activation of our immune system. This aberrant immune system activation is emerging as the root cause of our current epidemic of interrelated chronic diseases affecting every part of our body. In addition, it makes us more vulnerable to viral pandemics. He uses the One Health concept to explain the intricate interconnectedness between the microbes living in our gut, in the soil, the health of our plants, and our own health.