 Okay. Hi everyone. Thanks so much to the AHS organizers for inviting me back to speak this year. I'm really grateful that we were able to have the conference this year. For anyone who doesn't know me, my name is Lucy Mayling. I'm a microbiome researcher, writer, and I also do some consulting in integrative gut health. Today I'm going to be talking about rewilding the gut. Some people have asked me why I chose this topic, and I think it was partly that when I submitted my abstract it was spring and I was feeling the call to nature, but when I was younger I was also obsessed with everything related to the rainforest, and I thought that I might grow up to be a conservation ecologist. But then along the way I had my own health struggles with eczema, and that led to a journey to study a much smaller ecosystem, the microbiome, which I studied for my PhD, and one that is also very much under threat and has brought implications for our health. So this talk is kind of a culmination of my interest, my past interest in conservation ecology kind of applied to the microbiome. So hopefully we'll challenge you to rethink the way you think about your gut and learn some things along the way. So I'm guessing that just about everyone in the room is already familiar with the microbiome, so I won't be doing a significant intro here. In the last two decades we've seen increasing research about why our gut symbionts are so essential to our health, and we know that there are intimate connections between the gut microbiome and the immune system, nervous system, metabolism, and digestion. And as the human population has shifted from rural outdoor environments to more urbanized and industrialized settings it has profoundly affected the health of our bodies and our gut microbiota. Process food diets, chemicals, sanitation, antibiotics, medications, a sedentary lifestyle, and chronic stress have all potentially altered the microbiota, reducing microbial diversity, and its metabolic function. So there's no doubt that some of these things like sanitation and Western medicine have improved our lives in many ways, but the question is have we have we taken it too far? And many of these practices were developed and implemented before we really understood the effects on the microbiome. Mounting evidence also suggests that some of these changes to the gut microbiota may be crucially implicated in the spread of chronic disease. In contrast, more rural, non-industrialized, traditional cultures and hunter-gatherer populations have more diverse microbiotas and a complete absence of chronic disease. These people consume real, unprocessed food. They have an intimate connection to nature and specifically the microbial world. They have strong social ties and a sense of community, and they lead an active, low-stress lifestyle. Large-scale studies across lifestyle gradients from traditional to industrialized and everything between have shown that these changes in the microbiota occur consistently across populations. Many of you are probably already familiar with the hygiene hypothesis, which is the idea that a lack of microbial exposure early in life may deprive our bodies of the normal immune stimulation, resulting in an increased risk of allergies, asthma, hay fever, and atopic disease. Others of you may remember this slide that I showed in my AHS presentation two years ago. This is a theory often triumphed by Dr. Martin Blazer that suggests that our microbiota is disappearing and that this modern loss of ancestral diversity may be impairing the normal metabolic, cognitive, and immunological development of the host and be partly responsible for the current epidemic of chronic disease in the Western world. This study published in 2015 suggests that we've actually already lost about 50% of our microbial diversity compared to traditional cultures and that this biodiversity loss seems to be accumulating over generations. So the question, of course, is our microbiome mismatched? With human genomes evolutionary mismatch is a little more clear. Our human genomes haven't had enough time to significantly adapt to our modern environment, but microbes definitely adapt more quickly. The average generation time of a bacterium in your gut is only about 20 minutes. So since microbes have co-evolved with us, it's less clear how much our microbes are mismatched to our environment. In fact, some researchers have even gone so far as to argue that our industrialized gut microbiota is adaptive. And it is likely that there have been a few adaptations. For instance, one study that I'm showing here can show that centenarians and supercentenarians in Italy had a microbiome with an increased ability to detoxify xenobiotics, which is basically chemicals and medications. We could also imagine that our modern microbiome might be better tolerated, better able to tolerate processed foods as well as the occasional cheat meal. However, there is limited evidence for the overall benefits of the industrialized microbiota. On the other hand, there's actually ample evidence that the modern microbiome is related to the current epidemic of chronic disease. And of course, the question is, is it really beneficial to be adapted to a sick environment? Maybe we just need to modify the environment, too. And I think this is where, of course, ancestral health comes in. So of course, we all start thinking, well, of course, we want an ancestral gut microbiota. And there are some promising studies in animal models that suggest that a wilder microbiota promotes host fitness. So this was an interesting study where they introduced a wild gut microbiota to a lab mouse colony through vertical transfer at birth. And they found that it increased survival following respiratory virus infection, and also improved resistance against colorectal cancer. There's a few other studies along the same line. But can we even define an ancestral microbiota? Just as there is no one ancestral diet, there is no unhealthy or ancestral microbiota. We see wide variation across nonindustrial populations. And furthermore, a whopping half of the microbiota is yet to be characterized. So as much as we think we know about the microbiome, there's equally as much that we don't know. So it's probably going to be a while before we can identify specific characteristics of an ancestral microbiota. Moreover, the gut is a complex system. There's many cases. Sorry, the human tendency is to have this more reductionist approach to think that if we can only just change one or two microbes, you know, acromansia being a big hot one at the moment, that we could potentially provide benefit. But, you know, there's many cases in nature where humans have done this where we assume we understand a natural ecosystem, we intervene, and then we find that we've only done more harm than good. So I don't want to knock microbiome interventions completely, but I think we really need to recognize that we're managing an ecosystem. And then we need to be thoughtful about how we're going about that and the unanticipated effects that certain interventions might have. So some people have proposed, I mean, one researcher has gone so far as to even try this. Well, couldn't we all just get fecal microbiota transplants from the Hadza? The microbiome of these hunter-gatherers has been idolized for its high diversity in particular. And there are actually large scale efforts to preserve the microbiomes of these populations with the potential, you know, for the potential of the apocalypse, basically. But beyond the highly questionable ethics of this, it's not really likely to work unless you want to spend the rest of your life in the African bush. The microbiota quickly adapts to our environment, and we're very unlikely to maintain a hunter gatherer microbiome while living in a relatively urbanized setting. Moreover, there could also be unknown consequences of introducing ancestral microbes into our modern guts, which did not receive the same microbial stimulation from birth. The benefits of many microbes are known to be context dependent. For example, Preventella copri is a fiber consuming microbe that's highly enriched in non-industrialized populations like the Hadza and has been associated with improved glucose tolerance. However, in Western populations, it also seems to be very highly associated with inflammatory and autoimmune conditions and seems to be involved in it exacerbating those. So potentially a better alternative is this concept of rewilding. So what is rewilding exactly? Well, many people believe that rewilding is the same as restoring. And this is definitely understandable as the media and even researchers in the ecology field often conflate the two terms. So there's this recent New York Times article even just a month ago that argued against rewilding the gut, but really they just argued against restoring an ancestral microbiome and going back to essentially a Hadza microbiome. So what rewilding really is in conservation ecology, it's long been defined as instead promoting the self generation of wildness and an ecologically damaged landscape with minimal ongoing intervention. So the emergence of wilderness around Chernobyl following the nuclear disaster is a great example of this in a macro ecosystem. So just to further illustrate that and kind of give you some background on rewilding as an ecological concept, it's a form of ecological restoration with an emphasis on humans stepping back and leaving an area more to nature. It's a method to preserve function in ecosystems and reduce biodiversity loss. So it focuses on the adaptive capacity of ecosystems and the restoration of ecosystem processes rather than aiming to restore a specific species composition. So the end result is a more self organizing ecosystem that requires much less human ongoing management in the long term. And it recognizes that ecosystem as a dynamic system. So ecologists have actually identified three key elements of rewilding that promote the complexity and resilience of macro ecosystems and I think we can apply this to the gut microbiome as well. So the first is the presence of keystone predator species. This is typically in macro ecosystems, the large carnivores which promotes trophic complexity, which I'll be going into in a second. The second is exposure to new organisms or dispersal. So the connectivity of habitats helps to promote resilience. And the third is periodic natural disturbances, also known as stochastic disturbance. So we're going to see how this maps on to the gut microbiome. So first, I want to start with the presence of keystone predator species, also called trophic complexity. It's well established that keystone species at higher trophic levels, so higher up on the food chain, often can increase the diversity and abundance of other taxa through top down control. So in the this is showing here with the example of blastocystis hominis that when you don't have the blastocystis present, you can see this kind of overgrowth of the or high abundance of the light blue, the light blue microbe. Whereas on this side, you have that blastocystis consuming more of the light blue microbe basically increasing diversity in the ecosystem. So you carry out like blastocystis are often overlooked in human microbiome studies or considered less important due to their reduced abundance relative to bacteria. And they become less prevalent due to sanitation and the direct targeting of these protozoan parasites. So how to rewild number one, this is kind of the first of the practical tips is to stop targeting these commensal parasites. Blastocystis and diatomoeba, these are ones that are often seen on functional stool tests and they're honestly rarely the cause of signs and symptoms. There are potentially subtypes that are a little bit more virulent, but I think the widespread targeting of these is actually a detriment to our overall gut health. These microbes are generally more abundant in non-industrialized populations. I've also seen them more prevalent in children, even in Western society who go to forest school, nature school, they tend to have more abundance of these potentially because of more intimate exposure to the natural environment. Okay, so the second one that I mentioned is reduced microbial dispersal. And according to ecological theory, the exchange or dispersal of organisms between different habitats and populations supports genetic diversity and leads to more viable populations. I'm sorry, that overlapped a bit. So there's also this concept related to this called ecological drift, which basically means that low abundant species are more likely to be lost from the ecosystem unless they have a competitive advantage, access to a unique niche or they become replenished through regular dispersal, meaning regular exposure to those microbes. So this is actually exemplified in a very well-known paper that was done by the Sonnenberg lab titled diet-induced extinctions in the gut microbiome over, I don't know where compound came from there, that's interesting, diet-induced extinctions in the gut microbiome over generations. What they found is that changes in the gut microbiota from a Western diet are reversible within a single generation, but not recoverable after several generations. After several generations, restoring the microbiota requires re-exposure to some of those missing microbes. And this has also been shown in models of gut recovery after osmotic laxative use as well. So how do we, while number two, get regular exposure to soil microbes? Host to host dispersal among humans has been reduced to limit the spread of infectious disease, but this is also potentially limited to the spread of beneficial microbes as well. So there's a great deal of overlap between the gut microbiome and the soil microbiome as well. So this is potentially one way that we can safely get more dispersal without increasing our exposure to infectious disease is to get more intimate with our soil. And that means eating local and naturally grown produce, gardening, foraging and generally spending time in nature. Other ways to do this are getting a pet. They definitely increase your soil exposure. And I could argue kids could do that as well. And the other thing is that fermented foods do, if they're naturally fermented, they do contain a lot of soil microbes as well. So third is lost natural disturbances, and this can lead to reduced complexity. So in ecological theory, periodic natural disturbances, like you can imagine a fire in a prairie that clears things and allows secession. This often leads to a reconfiguration of the ecosystem leading to increased complexity. So in the gut, we have lost a lot of these natural disturbances, which I'll touch on in a second. Instead, we have very unnatural disturbances, antibiotics, antimicrobials and more inflammatory insults. And I think the natural disturbances that have been lost primarily are seasonality of diet and fasting. So we know that from studies of the Hadza that their gut microbiota tracks the seasonal availability of different foods. So the researchers who performed this study published in 2017 found that many, there were many differences between the wet and the dry seasons in terms of the microbial composition. And many of the taxa that dropped to undetectable levels in one season flourished in the next. And those same microbes that tended to oscillate more tended to be the ones that were lost from industrialized populations. So eating seasonally and fasting periodically may increase gut metabolic flexibility and support overall ecosystem resilience. Okay, so we just covered the three natural processes that wild ecosystems need to recover according to conservation ecology and macroecosystems. Those are often the only things you really need in place to and then remove human influences and the ecosystem will naturally recover. But of course the key difference with the gut is that it also depends on certain inputs to maintain homeostasis. We can't, you know, as humans do nothing and our gut depends on these these inputs to maintain homeostasis. So I think we need to take an even bigger step back and look at the body as a whole and how all these impacts inputs can impact the ecosystem of our gut. So the gut basically expects certain inputs that we evolved with including nutrient dense food, regular exercise, parasympathetic nervous system activity, and social interaction. These inputs we can basically think of as habitat filters which is basically a collection of conditions that allow the growth of certain microbes in the gut and not not others. So these host influences basically provide this top-down influence that shapes the microbiota. So in other words what selective pressures are we putting on the microbiota with the modern lifestyle? And I think this should be seen as different than intervening in the ecosystem. It's more giving the gut what it would expect evolutionarily. So it's the, I think of it kind of as the equivalent of natural processes like rain in a macro ecosystem. So this is of course where ancestral health principles come in and given that most people at AHS are quite familiar with that I'm not going to kind of dive into these aspects all that much with the time I have but I did want to share this study which was published in plus one in 2019. It shows that it is possible to have the diversity of a hunter-gatherer even in a Western context. So in this study they looked at urban Italians eating either a modern paleolithic diet or a Mediterranean diet. So this is the modified paleolithic diet and this is the Mediterranean diet and then they compared it to three more traditional cultures and these are just two different indexes of alpha diversity here. So this is really interesting because as I mentioned before there was that previous study that had suggested that we've lost 50 percent of our ancestral diversity. Yet here we have modern paleolithic diet eaters who have a gut microbiome diversity equivalent to the hodza. So it's important to note that this was a cross-sectional study so we can't say it was the diet per se because paleo eaters are also more likely to be health conscious and living a more ancestral lifestyle as well. All the subjects were metabolically healthy so they had no chronic disease were on no medications. Most of them exercise regular and had regular daily contact with nature but regardless of the cross-sectional nature I think this is this is interesting because it suggests that it is possible to kind of have that idolized diversity of the hodza even in our modern world. But I do think that one thing has that has been overlooked more as even among the ancestral health community is the role of the nervous system and the mind body connection. When we look to hunter-gatherers and traditional cultures to understand the principles that underlie their lack of chronic disease we often focus on things that are a little bit more clearly measurable like their diet and lifestyle. Yet I wonder if it's possible that we've maybe missed one of the most crucial pieces. Depictions of hunter-gatherers and traditional tribes people often describe them as free of anxiety and depression completely at home in themselves and the world. They seem completely in the present, virtually unencumbered by expectations and are securely attached to those around them. You can contrast that with our modern epidemic of stress anxiety and depression all of which we know negatively impact gut health and overall quality of life. So I could probably dedicate an entire presentation on this but I'm just going to highlight a few things here that I've personally found helpful with myself and my clients and think can be really impactful. So the first is social connection community and rebuilding of secure attachment. Ben Greenfield's talk yesterday definitely touched on on the social connection piece for sure. Time in nature and just trying to re-regulate the nervous system through yoga, breath work, a lot of those modalities can be really helpful for that. More trauma-informed mental health support and even potentially psychedelic assisted therapy when done in the right context and setting and particularly just breaking free of societal expectations and kind of reconnecting to the authentic self. So this is certainly something that there's less research for. We have little research on this to date but I've been in touch with several research groups that are actively working on this and exploring how these various treatment modalities might impact the gut microbiome and both for myself and for several clients that I've been working with. A lot of these approaches have been hugely powerful where no other gut interventions were really working. So this is something I've become increasingly passionate about. And so before I summarize the key takeaways that I hope you'll get from this talk I want to highlight this quote from the English artist and environmentalist Andy Goldsworthy. He said, we often forget that we are nature. Nature is not something separate from us. So when we say that we have lost our connection to nature we've lost our connection to ourselves. All right. So summary. It is not beneficial to be adapted to a sick environment. We can change both our microbiome and our environments. I think it's key that we remember that the goal is not necessarily to go back to restore our ancestral microbiome but instead to have a well functioning self sustaining resilient microbiome that is aligned with human biology and promotes optimal health in our modern world. We should always favor restoring natural system processes over highly reductionist gut management practices. For example, ongoing antimicrobials or fiber supplements just to try and maintain a certain microbiome. And in terms of practical tips getting regular soil exposure as I mentioned through gardening, hiking, outdoor swimming, lay down and roll in the dirt eating local seasonal foods and fasting and cagely. And lastly, living ancestral health is definitely going to be in support of rewilding, slow down, prioritize time in nature and reconnect yourself and others. I do want to kind of throw in one caveat at the end here. I do think there are some cases where some initial management is required. I don't want to pretend like every gut case is going to be a case where you can just kind of take this a little bit more hands-off approach and try to restore these processes. In some cases it might be necessary to remove some invasive species. You can imagine some sort of gut infection or potentially reduce unnatural disturbances. So if you've got unchecked inflammation, perhaps in inflammatory bowel disease, you may need to resolve that before you can kind of allow rewilding to occur. But still, I think the goal should be minimal intervention to avoid those kind of off-target effects that we talked about and start to incorporate rewilding practices as early as possible to ultimately get to a self-sustaining ecosystem as early as possible. So that got cut off a little bit, but says rewilding is slower but usually leads to a more adaptive, resilient ecosystem. And that's all I have. Thanks for your attention. Now we're going to open Mike for questions. Hi, Lucy. Thank you for that. I feel like this is at the very foundation of why we're here with Ancestral Health. You know, I wanted to say something about my N equals one kind of experimentation and ask you why it might be this way. So here, having come to the conferences and thinking like most everybody here trying to figure things out, save the planet and recognize the importance of ancestral ways. I have started to change my thinking and you had mentioned something about the more primitive peoples feeling less anxiety in that type of thing. So a lot of people have different ways for Americans or, you know, the all of us to deal with our stresses and that type of thing. We talk about our brain and what not. But I have found without a doubt that when I work on my gut microbiome, I take a specific spore and I work on reducing inflammation that my brain cannot go to those negative thoughts. I literally if I run out of my supplement and I don't like this outside thing impacting me that much. But when I run out of my supplement, I'm like, oh, it's OK. It's OK. Then I get super, super dark because I have different stresses. So when I get it back, I'm working on my gut microbiome and then I'm like a normal person. Why is that so like night and day so obvious in terms of working with the gut microbiome and the gut of brain axis? Yeah. Yeah. It's like it's really interesting. I mean, the gut brain axis is absolutely bidirectional. So our brain states influence our gut and our gut also influence our brain states. So I don't doubt that there could be a specific probiotic that that absolutely changes your brain chemistry, your experience. My guess is I would argue that maybe that's spore based probiotic in your case is fulfilling the role that normal soil exposure might otherwise. Right. Actually, there has been at least one interesting study in mice where they expose them to more biodiverse air samples and it had anxiolytic effects, so anxiety reducing effects. So I definitely think there is there is something to that. Right. And it fits in perfectly with your thing about we are nature. I also just wanted to say probably most of us haven't stumbled on to this, but I learned such a great deal about the HUDSA because a guy, he's a cool dude who does stuff. His YouTube, I'm trying to get off of here, but his YouTube is fearless and far and he went hunting with them. And so he's hanging out with the HUDSA and it was just like really clear how their lifestyles are vastly different than ours. But I loved your talk. Thank you. Hi, Lucy. First off, thank you for your research. Microbiome is not my specialty, so I appreciate people like you doing this. Two part question, but I'll be quick. First, do you think that because of the different cultures in our ancestors used to do more vaginal deliveries, now we're doing more cesarean deliveries here? Do you feel that that's had a big impact, which I'm sure you're going to say yes on the microbiome and why people in other cultures are still having better guts than we are? Secondly, this has been a fad. I'm not sure how I feel about it. Fecal transplants, what are your thoughts on that? Yeah, great questions. So first, C sections absolutely leading to loss of diversity because you start immediately as soon as you have a C section, the baby starts off with a very different microbiome from from the mother. Some of that can be made up with breast feeding has been shown, but I think there is definitely some loss there. And actually the my answer is going to tie into your second question that there have been some really interesting studies in mice where they've had basically the mice have been given C section delivered by C section and they've used a maternal FMT to actually basically perform that vertical transfer that wasn't able to happen because of the cesarean section. So I do think there's especially potential for that and it's likely to be very safe in that context because that's already what happens, you know, naturally evolutionarily. So that's definitely one thing that if if it's absolutely necessary to perform a C section, that can be one thing that helps to imagine labor and delivery being like, OK, now we're going to do fecal transfer. Yeah, but it is it is a valuable question and thing. I've had parents who've had gut dysbiosis and they've utilized their children's, you know, fecal to do the train or, you know, to do the stool transplant and have done well. But I don't know if you've seen it in your research. Yeah. Yeah, well, I'd say on fecal transplants in general, I think we're learning a lot more, but it's still way too early for everyone to be doing at home at home fecal transplants are not recommended screening before because a lot of the same things that I mentioned in regards to doing an FMT from the HADSA still apply from doing an FMT from, you know, any stranger in the room or even from a relative. It's possible that they have, you know, that they have microbes that you've never been exposed to right and with a relatively kind of sterile immune environments that could be very detrimental. So I think it's still very important that we're using well screen donors and, you know, doing it in a controlled setting. Do you see that it's researched or being researched for? Sorry. Do you see that it's being researched for? Definitely. Okay. Definitely. There's actually a really interesting study recently on FMT for IBS, which has historically had very mixed results. But in this study they use one single super donor and had, you know, much improved. I think it was like 70% of people actually had improvement after one year. So I think increasingly we're learning more like what constitutes a very good sample, right? Because that's part of the trouble is that we don't necessarily know who's going to be a good match to be a donor. But yeah, there's definitely a lot more research in the area. I appreciate your research. Thank you. Thank you. Great talk, Lucy. So I just wanted to, I guess it's all about fecal transplants today. So I just wanted to give a data point. So autism is now one in 36 and the University of Arizona has had a successful pilot study where they did a fecal transplant and they some of the children started speaking again. And it's happening in Parkinson's we're finding out. So for people who have autism in your network, there's work being done exactly here. Thank you. Yeah, thanks for that point. There really is huge potential there. I wonder whether our ancestors did fecal transplants. Well, the thing is I don't think they needed to because, you know, the lack of I think the reduced sanitation, it just, you know, led to more general dispersal between. Yeah, I probably have too many questions, but I'll just stick to one. A kind of a chicken and the egg question that in my limited understanding the gut microbiome, how it evolves as we shift our diets. And which comes first? I mean, you describe the industrial microbiome as a single common microbiome versus the variations that are found outside of the industrial societies. So two part question, which comes first as we adjust our diet, I understand that the microbiome will change, but is it influencing? I mean, I think I think that's the direction it takes. The other question is if you look around the room, what would be your guess of the varieties of the microbiomes in this room? Great point. So I will say I did highlight the variation among ancestral populations or non industrialized populations, but there is also wide variation within the industrialized microbiome as well. So on average, you only share about a third of your microbes with the person sitting next to you. So there is a lot of variation in what even a healthy microbiome in an industrialized setting looks like as well. So I can't necessarily speak to the room in here, although I would guess that healthier on average than the general industrialized population. Hi, Lucy. I wanted to throw out a clinical observation I have from working with my clients relative to the bigger question of how do you study in a scientifically acceptable way mechanisms of inflammation, the effects of inflammation on biodiversity of microbiota, et cetera, and the value of clinical observation and as a leading force in helping us direct our attention and research and then figuring out methodologies to be able to guesstimate what's going on and why clinical interventions work or don't work. In my client population are self-selected people who decided that they've been on a high oxalate diet for a long time, which is a diet that tends to be loaded in spinach and nuts and beans and superfoods. And so we changed the diet to a low oxalate diet. We also do other changes, add some mineral supplements and things. And we see reversal of autistic behavior and way improvements in autism, by the way. But one thing that's really interesting is that decades-long treatment resistant dysbiosis and chronic infections with candida and fungi and even limes and so on just resolve. And oxalates well-known and established as a hugely inflammatory acid as are the crystals. Oxalate also comes in these crystal shapes that create a lot of potential irritation in the gut, might depend on how much other fiber or how much mucus the gut is able to produce in defense. But it's quite profound, the reversals we're seeing and the complexity of studying this and explaining all the mechanisms seems beyond any methodologies we have. Sure. Yeah, that's interesting to know. I do think there are a certain subset of people that have problems with some of those plant compounds. I do think there is a strong interaction with the microbiome. So a lot of our oxalate degrading microbes are very susceptible to antibiotics and tend to be some of the first to be eliminated. So only a fraction of the population has that microbial capacity to degrade that. Relative to kind of removing that and doing kind of removing that source of inflammation and things resolving, I think that really speaks to the idea that the host actually controls the gut microbiota. And when the host is healthy, it will naturally select for a healthy microbiota. So we see that in removing inflammation through a number of means. That when you're able to resolve inflammation, your gut epithelium is functioning properly. It's able to secrete its antimicrobial peptides and all those immune factors that basically select for a healthier microbiome as well. So I think that's potentially one mechanism that I've seen in the literature that would potentially explain that. Can I just throw out one response or kind of a dialogue about what kind of microbiome exists in the stomach and the upper GI tract? Sorry? The microbiome of the stomach? Yeah. Is there much of one? Is there a oxalate degrading bacteria in the stomach and the upper GI tract where the absorption of oxalic acids occurring? That's it. So there's certainly a stomach microbiome and an upper small intestine microbiome. They are not nearly as bacterially dense as the large intestine. That's where the bulk of the microbiota is, but there is definitely some of the stomach and the small intestine. My understanding of oxalate degrading microbes, there's oxalobacter formagines, which is kind of the primary one. I believe that's a little bit further more in the colon, but also certain strains of lactobacillus, which are present in the stomach and the small intestine could also potentially help degrade oxalate and also other plant compounds too. It's been shown that certain strains of lactobacillus can help even degrade gluten, for example, and may explain some ability in some people versus others to tolerate those compounds. Thank you. Great talk. So for anyone who doesn't know, Lucy has an amazing blog. Each blog post is probably worth at least five scientific papers because she really gets to the point. It totally changed my understanding of the microbiome, so quick plug there. So we know in natural ecosystems we have different reptiles and mammals and amphibians and fish and all these different types, and you mentioned that there's more than bacteria in the microbiome. I think it's like 99% or 98% bacteria. And you mentioned protists and eukaryotes. What role do you think the fungal organisms, the archaea in the microbiome and viruses play and kind of rewilding? Yeah, great question. And something that actually ended up getting cut from a talk into the interest of time. Yeah, I mean, that big unknown section of the microbiome is full of particularly viruses, fungi, I think, that we haven't yet been able to characterize. And probably a number of bacteria fit in that category as well. But I think the truth is that those non-bacterial components of the microbiome are still very understudied. And honestly, there's actually a few researchers who are looking at the microbiome from this more ecological lens. So I really tried in researching this to try and figure out what trophic levels do different microbes fall at. And I really couldn't find a great answer other than the eukaryotes do seem to be more like top predators. Bacteriophages, which are viruses that infect bacteria, may also kind of play that more predatory role as well. And we're starting to understand more about those, too. So it's a great question. And yeah, I hope we learn more about that. Thank you so much. And this concludes the session. And maybe Lucy is going to step out and answer because there's a lot of interest. So while we're on break.