[CLIP] Are We Too Afraid of Germs? Immunologist Dr. Steven Templeton on Healthy Infections

There was an era of what I call the only good bacteria is the dead bacteria. And the advent of antibiotics was hailed as just something that was going to cure every single infectious disease. And antibiotics would be something we'd be encountering in daily life, and things like toothpaste and candy and things like that that would make our lives better and sort of sterile and bacteria-free. And obviously, we know that that's not something that is desirable and would definitely have serious tradeoffs, is treatment of livestock and other things where antibiotics have been used heavily. It's definitely downsides to those types of large environmental, large-scale uses of antibiotics. Nobody would argue that that doesn't have a tradeoff now. But then the idea that other things might have tradeoffs, infection with respiratory viruses, is something that that idea was starting to get into the scientific discussion a few years ago, but then took a direct pause sometime in 2020. And part of my goal was to kind of revive that as not necessarily for healthy people, being exposed to viruses, being exposed to respiratory viruses, colds, flu, that type of thing, is just part of normal life and actually strengthens people and allows them to deal with similar infections that have with viruses and other pathogens that have similar structures. Part of the book was to revive that idea and bring it into the context of the pandemic that we just had. Yeah, and you're not saying that you want to take the most lethal pathogens and consume them necessarily to see if you make it. Basically, it's a way we think about our relationship with all these small things, which sometimes in big concentrations can cause us harm. I think you actually say there's more bacterial cells or micro cells in the body than human cells. Do I have that right? Right, in order of magnitude. That's 10 times different. 10 times. Well, so that's fascinating. I certainly didn't know that. What are these cells? And why is there so many of them? Are they really a part of us? And that's something that was gaining a lot of traction in sort of the scientific world and even in newspaper articles and science articles, science communication articles. In the last 10, 15 years, and I think putting it in the context of something like the COVID pandemic was something that was going to be unique and others hadn't necessarily thought of up to this point. So one of the things I was fascinated to learn as I was reading was how important a role these various microbes, for lack of a better term, play in our development and in our lives and all the way from birth. And in fact, helping us gain immunity to help us in gaining some sort of protection even from other diseases. And there's this very complex interplay and you chart a lot of the different pathways of that. Right. And it's not, these are emerging areas. You always hear some hot new study that shows that you might be able to treat autism with some sort of probiotic treatment. These are things that haven't necessarily panned out. But there's a lot of promise there with various first world diseases that there are some components of microbial exposure or lack of that might someday be able to be mimicked or induced in sort of a therapeutic way to lower things like allergies, autoimmune type diseases, intolerance, things like that, like gluten sensitivity, stuff like that could be related to. And there's a lot of evidence that's related to some sort of microbial, what we call dysbiosis. That means the microbes in our body are not in sort of the sort of form that they should be in composition that they should be. How to sort of relieve that is another matter once you start getting into therapeutics, because there's been a lot of research in this area that's had promise but hasn't really panned out. But I think it's really fascinating to think about how, although we can't avoid exposure to microbes, we are better at it than we ever have been. And there has been a trade-off to that, which I talk about quite a bit in the book. Right. And some of the trade-off is that some diseases, which weren't a big issue, are suddenly a big issue. Absolutely. You can show the maps pretty clearly with autoimmune diseases, asthma, that type of thing is completely inverse in first world or developed countries versus developing countries. If somebody moves before the age of 10 from a developing country to a developed country, they then take on that susceptibility to those first world diseases. The converse is also true. If somebody moves before the age of 10 to a developing country, they get that lower susceptibility. So it's definitely something that occurs earlier in life, and that's the critical time point. Most of us have missed that, so we're stuck with whatever environment that we grew up with. One thing that I'm reminded of, there's been an observation that's been brandished about recently, I believe the numbers are accurate, but there's just a lot lower incidence in any of these first world diseases among the Amish, for example. So have you thought about that? Yeah. So I talk about a study, it was very interesting in, I forget what journal it was in, comparing Amish with a similar religious community called Hutterites, which are not as averse to modern conveniences, right? So you have two, I guess, semi-isolated communities, but they have completely different views on modernity and how to utilize things of modern life. Their microflora, the microbiota in their guts were very different. Their predisposition to inflammation was much lower in Amish communities, and their exposure to microbes in their home environment was much higher, obviously, because they're growing up on farms, they're exposed to cattle, they have large families. I've seen that talking to people in Indiana. We had a woman, and I talk about this in the book, who delivered our second child at a home birth, which is very rare in places like Indiana because it was illegal for a very long time. But she had delivered for Amish women, and she talked about the kind of environment that she would deliver a baby in, and it would make a lot of obstetricians cringe, having people in the house that clearly had whooping cough and things like that. It's fascinating to think that these folks are not unhealthy. They're living at this level, but they still have some advantages to it. Not that everyone should go back and live like Amish people. I'm not certainly in favor of that, but I think there's some interesting things that need to be researched and considered in future possibilities for therapies for first-world diseases.