 Click on OC-16 Hawaii's weekly newscast on Things That Matter to Tech, and to Hawaii. I'm Elise Anderson. And I'm Kauai Lucas. In our show this time, we'll cover Let Them Eat Dirt, a popular book co-authored by scientist Brett Finley from the University of British Columbia. He was here at the University of Hawaii last week to talk about what in the world he means by suggesting that kids should eat dirt. Brett Finley is Canada's number one microbiologist. His book is about the development of microbiomes in humans from the pregnancy of the mother through childhood, and is important not only for scientists but for the public. The book came out last year and will soon be published in nine other languages. He's well known for his contributions to understanding how microbes cause disease and for developing new tools for fighting infections, as well as the role the microbiome plays in human health and disease. He took his Bachelor of Science and his PhD in Biochemistry from the University of Alberta and did post-doctoral work at Stanford University. He is the Peter Wall Distinguished Professor of Microbiology at the University of British Columbia and a professor in the Michael Smith Laboratory there. He is co-director of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, Humans and Microbes Program and has an international team of 20 scientists all the way from the Pesture Institute in France to Shanghai Jitong University in China. Among his interests are the dangerous and unnecessary use of antibiotics worldwide and the desperate lack of clean water and good sanitation in the undeveloped world. His lab engages in multidisciplinary research exploring how microbes affect human health and disease. His research has resulted in tools for fighting infection. He is best known for his work with Salmonella and Estorica coli E. coli, how these pathogens develop in the early stages of infection and avoid our self-defense mechanisms. He is one of the world's leading experts on how bacteria infect their hosts and has developed a vaccine for SARS and a bovine vaccine for E. coli. His research focuses on the role of the microbiome in infections, asthma and malnutrition. He has been researching microbes for 30 years and has published some 500 articles. He is also a founder of various biotech companies and is a member of the prestigious Order of Canada. Keep in mind that humans and microbes are intrinsically linked. Microglyph forms are found in our skin and in our guts. Often we blame these microbes for making us sick, but most microbes play beneficial roles in our lives. The collection of microbes living in us, our microbiome, has played a crucial role in our survival and evolution. There is much to be learned and gained from studying the human microbiome. Comparing the microbiome composition of people in North America before and after European colonization also sheds light on disease and human evolution. Only recently have we begun to understand how the microbiome affects obesity, bowel disease, diabetes, asthma, nutrition and brain development. In developed countries, we have gone to great lengths to minimize our exposure to microbes, both pathogenic and harmless, but perhaps we have gone too far. After all, our species has evolved in a virtual sea of microbes and actually we need exposure to microbes early in life to develop normally. So this book is called Let the Meat Dirt, saving your child from an oversanitized world and was authored by Finley and co-author Marie Claire Arietta of the University of Calgary. Their study, connecting asthma and babies to missing key intestinal bacteria species, was deemed a breakthrough and reported around the world. The key points of the book are that one, an attitude adjustment is in order. Two, the study of the microbiome is cutting-edge science. Three, the first five years of a child's life are crucial. Four, birth and pregnancy choices matter in establishing the child's microbiome. Five, breast milk is the jackpot for friendly microbes. Six, cleanliness may actually be harming us. Seven, antibiotics are in fact overused. Eight, finally, surprise of surprise, kids need dirt. The book tells us about the development of the neonatal gut and immune system and why it is crucial to expose all kids to good microbes and let them eat dirt and things even worse. True to his wish to educate the public about these things, Finley gave a number of talks while he was here, including one at the UH Campus Center. It was well attended by scientists from UH and the public. I want you to kind of think about, you know, what's precious in this world? So you think, you know, diamond rings, yachts, whatever, swimming pools, but you know, what did you get beyond that? I mean, what does society treasure most? And the answer, of course, is kids. And you know, here's a lovely baby and we do everything we can because we know this is our future as a species. So that's what a kid looks like, right? By the time my talk is finished, I want you to think of this. This is kids coded in microbes. And so we're going to discuss how these microbes interface with kids and we'll not also talk about adults and how they affect us. And what I hope to encourage you by the time the evening's out is, you know, even those microbes, you can't see them. They actually have a big role in both health and disease. And that's kind of what the upshot of tonight's going to be. So where do we start? Well, let's do, let's go back when microbes first discovered. There was this guy named Anthony Van Lievenhoek and way back in 1683. So he was a textile merchant. He sold cloth and as a hobby, he ground lenses because he could then start to look at his cloth and the fibers in these claws. But he got, he got really good at grinding these lenses. He got so good, he actually made the first microscope. So he's a creative guy. Okay, I got a microscope. Now what do I do? So he started looking at things. He started looking in rainwater and other things. And then he did what I think was a profound experiment. He scraped out his mouth, put it on the microscope, and lo and behold, he saw all these things called animicules jumping around. And he said that there are more of these animicules in his mouth than all the people living in Holland or the Netherlands, which is where he lived. That was the birth of microbiology, 330 odd years ago. So the question of where are all these things living in and on us? It's basically wherever your body is exposed to the environment. So they're up in the nasal area of your nose every time you breathe. You actually breathe in microbes that get rid out in your nose and they accumulate there. Your mouth is full of these things. You do an oral swab. You have lots of these things. They're all over your skin. They're, you know, it's neat. You can actually, we can now swab. I can swab a forehead of a person, characterize those microbes, and I can tell how old that person is within 10 years just by looking at the microbes on the forehead. I can also tell whether they're bald or not, but it's easier to look at a person and say you're bald. But they're different environments, right? Your genital tract, especially women, is filled with microbes. That's normal. And, you know, for example, your armpit, the microbes, the armpits are moist. There's actually very different microbes there than growing, say, on your skin. One of the amazing things is the microbes on your right hand are different than your left hand. How come? Your right hand's doing different things. It's typing or holding this thing or whatever. And that's just because they're different. And it turns out the vast majority of microbes are in your gastrointestinal tract. There's quite a few in your mouth, but then as you go down the stomach, there's very few. But as you go beyond the stomach, heading towards, as I say, the light at the end of the tunnel, the other end down there, there's more and more microbes as you go down the intestine. And it's lower intestine that we see these phenomenal numbers of microbes. That's the majority of these. Okay, you're full of microbes. When you get them, what do they do? Well, you get them basically from the second you're born. And as an infant, they bounce around. All these little color circles just represent different kinds of microbes. So then you become a kid. And a kid's microbes are pretty constant until a kid hits puberty. But once that child hits puberty, then they're stable. And basically for your whole adult life, if you live without changing things, like moving to a different country or becoming a vegetarian or becoming drinking beer or something, it's pretty constant. And as I get older, the worrisome thing is that once you turn 65, your microbes actually become very unhealthy and become very different. And we'll talk about this later on in the talk, how that might influence aging. So the moral of this is that basically your microbes are pretty stable unless you're really insult them in some way or another for most of your life. Okay, so we have microbes. And we get them early in life, and they last us our life. Do we need them or not? The answer to that's also been done, and the answer is yes. We know that these microbes are actually really essential for life. And the experiment's done a couple of ways. Here's this child who was about to be born in California several years ago that he didn't have, they knew he didn't genetically have an immune system. If you were born in this world of immune system, you're dead. So they said, okay, let's birth this boy by cesarean sections, which keeps him from being exposed to microbes. And let's put him in a sterile container and basically keep him there. Now they knew that he wouldn't live unless they fed him key vitamins. These microbes make key vitamins you have to have to live. So they fed him key vitamins. And he actually did live to age 12, and then he died of infection. He became known as what we call the bubble boy now. So they could keep him alive. But the problem is that he didn't develop normally. And we've learned an awful lot from experiments just like that, but using animals. You can do the same things with mice and other animals. We call these things germ-free animals, but really that should say micro-free. And you birth them sterile by cesarean section. You keep them in these sterile things, you feed them sterile food and water. These things are not normal. They do not develop normal, these animals. Their immune system does not develop normally. Their gut doesn't develop normally. Even their brain doesn't develop normally. So all these kind of studies are showing that, well, if you have the right vitamins, you can kind of stay alive. But you just don't become a normal organism. So I had a first year graduate student, she was just starting the lab. And she was coming to my office the first time to discuss what she was gonna do her PhD on. And everyone in my lab worked on E. coli and Salmonella. And so I took a flyer, said, hey, Shannon, how'd you like to work on asthma? And what does a first year graduate student say to this big boss you're about to work for? So she says, sure. I said, well, if it doesn't work, we'll go back to E. coli and Salmonella. So Shannon set up some really neat experiments where they're pretty simple. Often the most elegant experiments of science are things that are actually pretty simply set up, and they actually have a really definitive answer. So it's a pretty simple experiment in a sense. We were gonna take both really young mice and adult mice, treat them with antibiotics, so we really shift their microbial composition. And then there's a most asthma model that you can actually induce asthma in these mice. And then we were gonna test them to see if we could actually shift asthma rates. And what we found was really amazing is that if you treated mice early in life with antibiotics, they got profound rates of asthma. The guy that I worked with, Kelly McBangby, that does this asthma model, he'd never seen asthma like this in this mouse model. He just couldn't believe it. It was just off the charts. And all we had done is pre-treat these young mice with antibiotics. If you treated the adult ones with antibiotics, you didn't change it. Basically, it was too late. So that argued that early life microbes are somehow actually being involved in asthma. So that's most asthma, that's gonna make it really famous, right? Wrong. So we thought, well, what about kids? Can we do something like that and actually sort out what's going on with kids? So we then joined something called the Child Cohort, which is basically a group of 2,500 Canadian kids that were being studied for asthma. So what they would do is they'd ask, did you, how were you born? Did you have antibiotics? And they were following these kids from age zero to age five. And so I called these guys up and said, hey guys, you gotta collect feces. This is really cool. And they say, oh god, there's finliness feces again, you know? Why would we ever wanna collect feces? We're gonna lung disease. I said, no, no, really, just trust me sort of thing. So for whatever reason they did, and they were collecting the feces at three months, one year, two year type thing. So that gave us basically the power to go in and look at what the microbes were doing and composed of these kids. And we chose three months of age and one year of age, because we knew it was gonna be early in life from our animal studies. But we didn't know how early. We're all getting older, right? We don't want to admit it, but heck, it actually just happened. What about microbes and the other areas of life, and how do we live healthily? Here's the top ten reasons of why you're gonna die, great morbid slide, I know. But if you look closely at this slide, how many of these things have microbes involved in this? Only one, influenza pneumonia, that's microbial, right? But when you look really carefully at these things, I can actually convince you that nine out of ten of these things actually have microbial links. And no, I'm not smoking whatever wine smoke here. This is actually based on science. The only one I can't show has microbial links or accidents. So you can't say the microbes made me do it. So I'm just gonna deviate a bit, and we're gonna dig into just a couple of these to give you examples of how these things are actually affecting things. So cardiovascular diseases, so this is heart attacks and strokes, right? Hardening arteries, atherosclerosis type stuff. Turns out that when you eat red meat, there's a component red meat called choline, that microbes convert in something called TMA. And then your body converts in something called TMAO. And it turns out that this chemical called TMAO is what causes atherosclerosis. If you have germ-free mice, no microbes, if you eat them on a red meat, they want, they don't get atherosclerosis. They don't have the microbes to do this, that's neat. It turns out that vegans and vegetarians, for example, they have very low rates of atherosclerosis because they're not eating red meat. If everything I've told you, you start to believe is these microbes are important, with all these antibiotics and everything, we are really changing the world we live in. And we're actually making these microbes disappear. We know that microbes in cities are getting less and less diverse. And they're actually, maybe they're endangered species. Maybe we should rethink about these poor microbes, we're hurting them. These are important to us. So I don't have an answer for this. There's some people that talk about bio-banking microbes. You can't go back to have the microbes your great-great-grandparents have. There's just no way. And what about your great-great-grandkids? Unless you put your poop in a freezer and say, my gift to eternity is this little brown tube, you know? They can't go that way. So it's a very interesting problem. These are microbes we evolved with and we're taking them out of our equation. And what are we going to do? I do want to say one quick thing about vaccines. The book, I talk about it quite a bit, vaccines work. There's an awful lot of nonsense on the web and fraudulent scientists talk about vaccines. But if you're interested in this, read the chapter in the book where we really try and go through what do vaccines do and how they work, but they have been a wonderful tool medically. So that brings me to the end of this. And of course, the book, there's a lot more. There's also a website called letthemeter.com that has much of this information on there. And so I guess what I'd like to end on is the idea that we live in this microbial world. They're part of every part of this world. They're part of us. They're a normal part of us. This is how we evolve. And we know that now know that these things actually play a big role in our health and our disease. And so it's really still an early field. I've told you some of the areas it's going. I think in the next 10 years, this is just going to have drastic and huge influence on all aspects of medicine because of this. And I think it's a very exciting time. Thank you very much. There's more. He also appeared at one of our ThinkTech research in Minoa talk shows to talk about his book and about his science. Well, let's talk about your book, which is a scientific bestseller and readable. It's called Let Them Eat Dirt with Brett Finley. And as they say, it's an earthy book. Yeah. Well, I said I always want to read a dirty book, so there we go. Dirty book, okay. Yeah, I mean, I guess the title's a bit misleading. It should be Let Them Eat the Microbes that you find in dirt. But really, the idea of the book is to write a layperson book. So the science is there, but it's not up front and center. We don't have references so much in it. And it's to basically educate parents, anyone of interest, really, the effect that these microbes are having on kids early in life and knowing that, how can you do better things for your child to help them raise them with your microbes instead of without them, which is what we're trying to do now? So what do microbes do for me? I know that microbes are part of the deal, and if I had no microbes, I could not live. Yeah. But what do they do for me? I do a lot of things. So they live all over us. The numbers are astounding. At least as many microbes in and on you as are our human cells, there's 15 times more genes than genetic material. So I love to tell my students they're more microbial than human, which they always get upset at. And they live, like I said, on the skin, scalp, armpits, wherever it's moist, urinary tract. Most of them live in the intestine, especially way down low in the intestine. And I don't jokingly say diaries, my bread and butter, because that's where we're at. So we're gonna restrict this for fecal content. But to put it in perspective, if you had one gram of feces, which is basically kind of the tip of your finger, there's more microbes in that in your intestine than all the people in the world. So it's just there's 100 trillion microbes in and on us. What kind of microbes are they? All sorts. Most of them, especially in the gut where there is no air, they live, they call it anerobes. There's no air, so they metabolize differently. But they're very different. And the microbes on your scalp are very different than your armpit, than in your intestine, because these are different environments. And what's interesting is everyone's different. There is no conserved human, there's no one species that's found in all people. So they're very different. So they're, even though you and I are 99.9% genetically identical, our microbes are at best 50%. So I argue that's what makes us individuals, that's what makes us different. It's not like a great way to do a CIS. You can make an identification of somebody that would be unique in the world by taking a profile of his microbes. They're already doing that. They're actually pretty good at digging up dead pigs and checking out their microbes change. You can't really identify which one it was. The other things they do is they help break down our food. So they do most of your digestion, especially plants and fibers and nuts and legumes and all the things your mom told you you should eat, you never wanted to. They don't do much with white shirt and white flour because that's already broken down, which is actually bad diet-wise. They help us develop our immune system and that's why they can push you towards allergies and asthma or other ways. And probably the most fascinating area I'm finding these days is they affect the brain and they affect how the brain develops. And there's animals that don't have any microbes in them. We call them germ-free animals. Their brains are screwed. They actually do not develop normally. So they're part of our normal development. So then all the brain diseases such as ADHD and autism and stress and anxiety and depression, these things now all seem to have microbial lengths too. So we knew they were there. Ever since Anthony Van Lievenhoek made the first microscope 330 years ago, but we didn't know what they did. And the last five years as sequencing came online, so you don't have to grow them. We now realize they're there and that's where this world is just exploding. Yeah, wow, really interesting. So how do I get my microbes? Am I born with them? Yes. So generally thought it's thought the fetus is sterile but there's some argument not, they can find. So basically your mother's very first birthday present for you is, it's gross, is basically a big gulp of vaginal and fecal microbes. Sounds terrible, but that actually is really important for setting up life. And if you're born by cesarean section, your microbes will be more like the mother's skin than the vagina. And the reason that's important is vaginal microbes and fecal microbes are the one that break down breast milk and do this. And so if you're born by cesarean section, you don't have these. And also the simple fact of born by cesarean section puts you at much more risk for getting asthma and obesity later in life. We need to learn much more about the microbiome, how it works, how it relates to our health. We have many exciting discoveries ahead of us. It's a great area for scientific research and careers. So this is a call to arms for all prospective science students. Consider microbiology and cellular and molecular research on bacteria, fungi, viruses, and plant and animal toxins. The discoveries to come will benefit science, food, health care, and the welfare of our species in general. And guess what? The complete video of Brett Finley's remarks at the campus center will be posted on pbrc.hawaii.edu. The website of the Pacific Biosciences Research Center at UH. Watch for it there. And now let's take a look at our ThinkTech calendar of events going forward. There's so much happening in Hawaii. Sometimes things happen under the radar and we don't hear much about them, but ThinkTech will take you there. Remember, you can watch ThinkTech on OC 16 several times every week to stay current on what's happening in government, industry, academia, and communities around the islands and the world. ThinkTech broadcasts its daily talk shows live on the internet from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekdays. Then we broadcast our earlier shows all night long and on the weekends. If you missed a show or if you wanna replay or share our shows, they're all archived on demand on ThinkTechHawaii.com and YouTube. The audio is on ThinkTechHawaii.com slash radio. And good news, we're now posting podcasts of all our shows on iTunes. See our website for links. Visit ThinkTechHawaii.com for our weekly calendar and live stream and YouTube links or sign up on our email list and get the daily docket of our upcoming shows. ThinkTech has a high-tech green screen First Amendment studio at Pioneer Plaza. If you wanna join our live audience or participate in our shows, write to ThinkAtThinkTechHawaii.com. Give us a thumbs up on YouTube or send us a tweet at ThinkTechHI. We'd like to know how you feel about the issues and events that affect our lives together in these islands. We wanna stay in touch with you and we'd like you to stay in touch with us. Let's think together. Call into our talk shows live. While you're watching any of our shows, you can call in to 415-871-2474 and pose a question or participate in the discussion. We'll be right back to wrap up this week's edition of ThinkTech. But first, we wanna thank our underwriters. That wraps up this week's edition of ThinkTech. Remember, you can watch ThinkTech on OC16 several times every week. Can't get enough of it just like how he does. For additional times, check out oc16.tv. For lots more ThinkTech videos and for underwriting and sponsorship opportunities on ThinkTech, visit ThinkTechHawaii.com. Be a guest or a host, a producer, or an intern, and help us reach and have an impact on Hawaii. Thanks so much for being part of our ThinkTech family and for supporting our open discussion of tech, energy, diversification, global awareness, and the human biome. You can watch this show throughout the week and tune in next Sunday evening for our next important weekly episode. I'm Elise Anderson. And I'm Kaui Lucas. Aloha everyone.