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Copyright: © Richard Jacobs
Did you know that about half of the bottled water on the market has a pH of four? You may be wondering what that even means and why it matters. On today's episode, Dr. Kim Kutsch, owner of CariFree, is welcomed back to the show to discuss what he's learned over the course of his career as a dentist, and how it can greatly benefit your health.
After spending years "drilling and filling" cavity after cavity, Dr. Kutsch finally had enough: he knew he needed to fill in the educational gaps left by the dental school, which meant he needed to understand the root cause of cavities and the disease mechanism at play. Why do some people get so many cavities despite flossing and brushing every day, while others go their whole lives with less-than-ideal oral hygiene and not one cavity? Are genetics or environmental factors at play in dentistry?
"It all goes back to the pH in the mouth," he says. He continues by discussing the interplay between the drop in pH (i.e. the increase in acidity) that occurs every time we eat or drink, and the body's mechanism of compensating for that by coating the mouth and teeth with saliva, an alkaline solution that decreases acidity, bringing the oral microbiome—the collection of bacteria and other microbes that live in the mouth—back to neutral pH, which is about 6.5. When this interplay becomes unbalanced, it can wreak havoc in the mouth. This means that the less saliva someone produces, the less protected their teeth. This is troublesome, considering the fact that roughly 70% of the U.S. population is on at least one prescription medication, and the number one side effect of all prescription medications is dry mouth—a decrease in the production of saliva.
Tune in to learn about Dr. Kutsch's preventative approach to this problem and so much more, including:
Visit carifree.com to learn more.
You leave your house in the morning and are immediately hit with the acidic taste and smell of the thickest air you've ever experienced. You walk by ancient cathedrals and forests and lakes, only to notice them dissolving away and slowly dying from this thing called "acid rain." For Gretchen Cara Daily, Ph.D., this became a part of her ordinary experience as a teenager growing up in Germany. At the time, millions of people were demonstrating in the streets, protesting the environmental degradation and corporate activities which were leading to the slow death of everything beautiful in their lives.
Dr. Daily was strongly impacted by these events, and she's carried them with her as a source of motivation and insight throughout her life and career. She currently serves as Director of the Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford University. "Looking back to my upbringing, we solved the problem of acid rain…and I feel we can rise to the task of changing the way we think about how we live on the planet, how we fit in with the rest of life, and we can crack open a path that harmonizes people and the planet, nature, the climate system, jobs, human well-being, so that's what I'm focused on," says Dr. Daily.
In today's episode, she discusses the enormous value of investing in nature to secure vital natural infrastructure that contributes to our lives in ways we might not even acknowledge, but rely upon each day. This includes everything from our morning cups of coffee to our mental and physical health. She explains the goal of the global initiative called the Natural Capital Project, which is to shine a light on the connections between nature and our well-being, the causes of environmental problems, the importance of making education on environmental science accessible to everyone, and the need to quantify the value of nature in ways that can be integrated into financial and policy decision-making practices.
By tuning in, you'll discover:
· How to create better access to green space in otherwise totally urbanized environments, and how this can improve mental and physical health
· What percentage of humanity now lives in cities, and the projected percentage by around 2050
· How satellite images can indicate the economic status of a geographic region
Learn more by visiting https://naturalcapitalproject.stanford.edu/.
Fedor Galkin, Project Manager at Insilico Medicine, Inc., discusses his work studying the microbiome, human genotypes, and aging/longevity.
Galkin graduated from Moscow State University with a degree in Bioengineering & Bioinformatics. His work focuses on human microbiome aging clocks based on deep learning. Interestingly, the microbiome can serve as an incredibly accurate biological clock, able to predict the age of many people within just years.
Galkin discusses the earliest microbiome aging clocks and recent advances, and the technology that is behind them. Some of these technologies can make assessments based on an individual's blood biochemistry and gene expression levels, etc., but as he states there has never before been a clock that predicts age based on gut microbes. Galkin discusses their work in detail, discussing how they select and look at the microbes.
Galkin explains the correlations and organization in the microbes, and how with age, things fluctuate. He details how they observe the changes that show age, and how certain conditions, such as diabetes will make the gut microbes appear as a much older person. Continuing, the bioengineering expert talks about nutrients, and how supplements, etc. can impact the biological systems. And he explains how their work on the species level is ongoing, but that they hope to delve deeper into the functional and genetic level as well, in their continued study of the human microbiome.
In this podcast:
What is a microbiome aging clock?
How nutrients play a role in the gut microbiome
The role of supplements in biological health
Gregory Kuehn, MBA, President and COO of Prescient Metabiomics, formerly Metabiomics, discusses their innovative work in colorectal cancer treatment and the development of an advanced stool test for cancer.
Kuehn holds an MBA from the University of Colorado and a BS from the College of William and Mary in molecular biology and computer science. Kuehn talks about their advanced work studying the microbiome to predict or associate with disease.
Kuehn discusses their work at Prescient Metabiomics, a pioneer in the development of human microbiome and metagenomic technology. Their groundbreaking research has lead to the development of a non-invasive stool test for the early detection of colon polyps as well as colorectal cancer based on advanced examination of the human gut microbiome. Kuehn talks in-depth about their early work in inflammatory bowel disease, that led them to their current work studying how to prevent colon cancer. Kuehn discusses the detail that they have gone into studying the microbiome, looking at the complex relationships that the microbiome has with the entire body. He talks about biomarkers, toxins, and the functional relationship between the gut microbiome and human health.
The cancer prevention researcher talks in detail about the various hypotheses that exist in their area of research, and why colon cancer has persisted. And Kuehn explains carcinogenesis and the early screening options.
In this podcast:
The mechanisms of cancer development
How the microbiome can potentially provide insight into disease development
Stool tests for cancer, how do they work
You might be familiar with slacklining as the art of balancing and walking on what looks like a thin string between two anchor points, but it can actually involve much more than that, such as sitting, kneeling, laying down, backbending, side planking, squatting, and every move you might associate with yoga. How is that even possible? The answer might best be answered by yoga and slacklining teacher, Dustin Lindblad. She joins the podcast today to discuss how she became involved in slacklining, the myriad benefits she's gained from slacklining, and why it's not as esoteric or impossible as it might initially seem. In fact, most people who have a true desire to master it, can. Tune in to discover:
"We call them neglected tropical diseases…but the truth is, they're really diseases of extreme poverty; you ordinarily do not get a neglected tropical disease unless you live in extremely impoverished conditions where there's environmental degradation, poor-quality housing, inadequate sanitation," says Dr. Peter Jay Hotez, Dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine. He continues by explaining that contrary to what many people may think, these diseases are not rare, and they're not found only in developing countries: they are global health issues found right here in the United States, and affect hundreds of millions of people worldwide. Despite these numbers, the major pharmaceutical companies aren't focused on developing drugs or vaccines to combat their spread. As a result, these responsibilities fall on the nonprofit sector. Dr. Hotez discusses the efforts within this sector and by the National School of Tropical Medicine toward implementing vaccination for some of the most common neglected tropical diseases, including hookworm infection, Chagas disease, and schistosomiasis. In today's podcast, you will discover:
Press play to hear the full conversation, check out Dr. Hotez's book, Forgotten People, Forgotten Diseases: The Neglected Tropical Diseases and Their Impact on Global Health and Development, and learn more by visiting https://www.bcm.edu/education/schools/national-school-of-tropical-medicine/.
"I certainly believe that without our microbes, our immune systems wouldn't be primed, we wouldn't be able to digest many of the foods that we consume…and we wouldn't be able to protect from pathogens, so they basically do it all," says Dr. Jonathan Clayton, assistant professor (better known as "The Monkey Doc") at the University of Nebraska.
Despite a growing amount of evidence suggesting that the human microbiome impacts us in significant ways, there's still so much we don't know. For instance, what can be learned about site-specific microbial communities within our body, or even throughout a single organ such as the skin? What can be said about the relationship between the gut microbiome and the brain, or between stress and the microbiome? How does diet impact the microbiome? How quickly can the microbiome change in response to different environmental stimuli? These are just a few of the questions that Dr. Clayton is interested in answering.
By tuning in, you'll hear his take on all of this and more, including:
"In the developed world in the last few decades, there's been a tremendous increase in the number of people who have chronic illness…if you look around you, every other person probably has some kind of chronic illness, whether it's some kind of autoimmune disease, metabolic, neurologic…[or] cancer," says Guru Banavar, Chief Technology Officer at Viome. The point he makes is hard to refute, but is it equally as hard to explain what's contributing to the rise in chronic illness? According to Banavar, chronic illnesses are driven by the gut microbiome, and if for no other reason, that's why we need to take a closer look at it. At Viome, chronic disease prevention is the central focus, and they believe that in order to do this, we first need to understand gene expression, and harness the power of the right kinds of foods and supplements—the kinds that work with and are required by the gut microbiome for the activation of important microbial pathways. The team at Viome is conducting microbiome research using stool samples from about 100,000 current customers and delivering app-based, personalized recommendations for what to eat to mind your microbiome. Tune in to discover:
Pancreatic cancer is one of the most aggressively malignant cancers that exist; despite all the knowledge we have about the mechanisms at play in pancreatic cancer and many attempts at finding a treatment that works, the survival rate is only nine percent in five years after diagnosis. In the Department of Clinical Cancer Prevention at the University of Texas, Dr. Florencia McAllister's goal is to change this by developing better preventative and therapeutic strategies for pancreatic cancer. She is focused on understanding the interaction between the immune system and very early-stage cancer. How is it that cancer can emerge in the body yet remain undetected by the immune system? And if we can answer this question, can we also figure out how to change it? Part of this research involves a look at the microbiome of pancreatic tumors and a comparison to the microbiome of the gut. What, if any, are the associations between the gut and tumor microbiomes, and between the bacteria in tumors and the immune response? Answering these questions is the crux of Dr. McAllister's work, and she joins the podcast today to discuss all the details. By tuning in, you will learn:
We're living in an age of unprecedented access to genomic data; all we have to do is send off a sample of saliva in the mail to a company like 23andMe or Ancestry to get a comprehensive report containing information about our ancestral lineage, diseases we might pass on to our children, and diseases we might develop during our lifetime. There's no question that understanding genomic data affords a great benefit to many people, but there's a tradeoff that's critical to acknowledge, and it's one of privacy. Where does our information go once in the hands of these companies? Can it really be deleted at the press of a button, as we are led to believe?
If you have been under the impression that you have control over your genomic data, even after it's been tested by a company, you aren't alone. Most people don't realize that once a sample of DNA undergoes health-related genomic data analysis, federal law dictates that it must be saved. In other words, it would be illegal for a company like 23andMe or Ancestry to delete it. If this were more widely understood by the public, it might change the frequency and ease with which we hand over our DNA. This might be particularly true if we were more cognizant of the fact that our DNA doesn't just contain information about ourselves, but about those related to us. Kristen V. Brown, reporter with Bloomberg News, joins the podcast to discuss all of this and more, including:
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