THE MICROBIOME SUMMIT : The New Path to Health
Diet, Farming & Lifestyle: Microbiome Impacts
Dr. Chris Lowry, PhD
A diverse microbiome is Important for overall health. But it’s becoming increasingly hard to cultivate a diverse microbiome due to modern farming practices. So how can we increase our diversity? In this interview, Dr. Chris Lowry provides helpful diet and lifestyle tips to introduce more diversity into our lives, as well as how current farming practices are changing the microbiome of plants.
- TRACEY:
- We are here with Dr. Chris Lowry from the University of Colorado, Boulder. Thank you for joining me here today, Chris.
- CHRIS:
- You’re welcome. It’s a pleasure to be here.
- TRACEY:
- Thank you. We have spent a bit of time with you in other segments just talking about old friends, the built environment, and you have some interesting, you know, ways of looking at and through your research diet, farming some tweaks we can make to our lifestyles. Would you mind sharing some of that information with us? I’ve learned some interesting things from your research, just in terms of how I should be looking at my food now.
- CHRIS:
- When it comes to food and our diet, one of the important things to keep in mind about are microbiome and health benefits of our microbiome is that a key factor is the diversity of our microbiome and you can think about diversity in many ways but one of the simplest ways to look at diversity is how many different species do you have in your particular microbial ecosystem, in your gut and throughout your body. And for the most part, the more diversity you have in your microbiome the more stable and the healthier that ecosystem is going to be and the more likely that you’ll be able to maintain being healthy over a long period of time. The diet seems to be a major contributor to that overall microbial diversity and so studies that are looking at the factors that determine overall microbial diversity, one of the main factors, the most important factors, is the number of different plants that you eat. At first, that may not be intuitive until you realize that plants, every plant that you eat has its own microbiome and an example that I like to cite is a three- to four-leaf spinach plant has over 800 different species of bacteria inside of it. Many of these are called endophytes. You can’t wash them off because they’re in the passages and channels inside the plant. They’re inside the plant cells. They’ve established symbiotic relationships with the plant to maintain the health of the plant. When you eat the plant you eat the microbiome and when you’re eating fresh plants those are living bacteria. That’s how the fermentation process works. When we ferment food like cabbage to make sauerkraut that’s taking advantage of the fact that there are bacteria in the cabbage that can proliferate under certain circumstances and contribute to the fermentation of the plants. A lot of probiotics are derived from this fermentation process and allows the specific bacteria to proliferate and grow which we then can consume. So, this idea of plants as a source of biological diversity in our microbiome seems to be really important.
- TRACEY:
- Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I never really thought of the fact that every time I was eating spinach I was also eating 800 different types of microbes that could be having an effect on my body in different ways. I mean, we’ve always thought we want to have higher fibre for the microbes to eat but not the fact that we’re actually ingesting those microbiomes with the food. So, we’re getting a bonus.
- CHRIS:
- Yeah, they’re both important, actually. Plants contain that fibre which is all-important in terms of the gut microbiome and the reason being that fibre is essentially indigestible plant matter than our systems can’t digest but certain bacteria can and it turns out that the bacteria that can use this indigestible fibre as food are the good bacteria. For example, Bifidobacteria which is a genus of the Actinobacterium phylum, massively expands following administration of prebiotics – that’s indigestible fibre that you would find in plants, for example. And different types of fibre may benefit different types of microbes but the bottom line is that you can take control to some degree over what types of microorganisms can thrive by having a high fibre diet, which then serves as food for certain types of bacteria.
- TRACEY:
- Right. Fascinating. So, can you elaborate a bit more on what’s happening with our current farming practices and are they negatively affecting perhaps the microbiomes of the plants that we are eating?
- CHRIS:
- The first thing to recognize is the studies have certainly shown that the microbiome of the plant is different depending on the soil in which the plant is grown. You can imagine that’s not difficult to understand, especially for root-based vegetables that are underground. Even plants that are above ground that are pulling bacteria up through the passageways and channels of the plant are pulling specific bacteria from the soil into the tissues of plants. So, the soil does matter when it comes to plants and not long ago I don’t think I could really say much about the effects of modern farming practices on the microbiomes of plants. Maybe I still can’t say anything about that but certainly a group in The Netherlands recently looked at the microbiomes of what they called organic farming, soil that is associated with organic farming processes and soil that is associated with modern farming practices. And what they described was that the diversity of the microbiome in the soils that are used in organic processes or organic farming is much greater than you find in soil that is subjected to modern farming practices. This should be of concern to all of us because depending on where you buy your food, if you’re not growing it yourself, much of that food may be produced under these modern farming conditions because that’s certainly the way to get the highest output from farming. But that may not be the best when you’re thinking about the microbiome of those plants and consequences for your health.
- TRACEY:
- What are some lifestyle tips that maybe you can impart on us, maybe changes that you’ve made in your life to incorporate your great, vast knowledge of everything that you’ve been studying.
- CHRIS:
- Well, certainly with the American Gut project which is being run by Rob Knight at UC San Diego – and as an aside I would encourage everyone to send in their samples to the American Gut project and find out what their own microbiome looks like. Apart from that, one of the questions on the American Gut project is how many different plants do you eat. You know, that ranges from zero to over 30. There’s seems to be some benefits to eating larger numbers of different types of plants, at least according to this analysis. So, one way that’s impacted my own lifestyle is I make sure that I eat more than 30 plants, different types of plants, every week, which isn’t really that hard to do. But who knows what the optimal number is. Certainly, more is better.
- CHRIS:
- One question that people often ask is whether cooking the plants or heating the plants has an impact on the potential benefits of plants. I’m not sure we have a good answer to that question but I would just emphasize that to get benefit from bacteria from your diet, the bacteria don’t necessarily have to be alive. In fact, our major research effort using Mycobacterium vaccae, all of our studies to date have used a heat-killed preparation of these bacteria and this heat-killed preparation has a profound effect on our immune system and outcomes that are immune related. So, just, you know, it’s not just having the live bacteria that’s important. Even having dead bacteria that have the right components or constituents or the ability to modulate our immune system in a particular way can be helpful. So, yeah, it’s great if you don’t like eating fresh vegetables then at least eat some cooked or prepared vegetables.
- TRACEY:
- Right. I think that’s really important for us to understand. Thank you so much, Chris. I’ve learned so much. I am going to start counting how many different species of plants I have in my diet on a weekly basis. That’s great information. Thank you.
- CHRIS:
- You’re welcome. It’s been a pleasure.</li.
