Colleen Cutcliffe explores how your microbiome spreads through air and surfaces, and why stable blood sugar matters more than you think. Dogs increase household microbial diversity. Poor glucose control compromises mitochondrial function and raises infection risk, while stable blood sugar lowers all-cause mortality.
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One of my favorite headlines of all time was from a Wired magazine article a while back, and it said, you are surrounded by a cloud of fart and skin bacteria. You read that, you're like, oh, my God, I'm so horrified. I have to read this article. And what they were saying is, you can actually sequence the error in a room where someone's been and two hours after they've been in there, just by analyzing with a lot of expensive tests what's in it there. You can identify the person if you have the microbiome signature. So we're carrying this all around us. It's unavoidable. It's a part of the human condition. And no amount of hand sanitizer is going to make any difference in that. So I feel like if I charge myself up with all of the best bacteria, they become a part of essentially the world around me as well as a part of me. One of my companies, Homebiotic, makes bacteria that eat toxic mold for a reason. I spray them around my house because I'm really sensitive to toxic mold and stuff is trash. So I'm really hopeful that we get lots of people taking really good probiotics because, honestly, our sewer system will have better bacteria in it. Like, they become a part of the world around us. And it feels like no one's talking about the biome around us as much as it should be. But when you take things like pendulum, inevitably, eventually they become a part of your family, whether you like it or not. Have you studied anything about transmissibility of good gut bacteria? How long does it take to make them part of the environment?
Yeah, we haven't, but what you're talking about is really interesting. There's definitely been work done. You're sitting in a room, and there's probably other rooms that are on the same ventilation system. And there have been studies showing that if you take the air in your room and you look at the rooms where the air ventilation is all circulating in that your microbiome in those rooms will look more similar than another room which could be in your same building that's on a different ventilation system. And so it is true that your microbiome is passing through your vent system to other people that are on that same ventilation system. Those are passing back to you. There was a cool study that was done around people looking at their microbiomes of people that have dogs versus people who don't have dogs.
Right.
And in this study, they showed that if you have a dog, you tend to have a more diverse microbiome than if you don't have a dog.
Have you seen what dogs lick?
Have you seen what dogs lick and how dog owners behave with their dogs? I mean, I'm a dog lover and those dogs are in my bed. We're snuggling. We're definitely exchanging microbiomes all the time. And so you can imagine that you think about your immediate family, pets included, your microbiomes start to converge based on how much you're interacting with each other and really sharing foods and, you know, hugs and all of that.
I kind of laugh at the idea that some people are doing now. They're saying, I'm going to create this bubble. I'm like, there's a bubble, it's called the Earth. We're all here and we're all sharing this stuff. And that's just kind of how it is. And you really don't have much control over it because it's just fundamental to being alive where that stuff moves around. And the trick then is to have a resilient system. And the number one factor for resilience from an immune perspective, and you know what I'm talking about, without actually saying any specific names of anything here, is blood sugar regulation. Because if you have diabetes, you're at massive risk of dying from all those killers we talked about. And any kind of infectious agent, whether it's bacteria or viral. Right. So lack of blood sugar regulation equals an immune system that cannot turn on power in the mitochondria when it's necessary to fight something. And so you fix your blood sugar regulation, you lower your risk of all cause mortality. In other words, you're harder to kill when your blood sugar is more normal. True statement.
Absolutely. Managing your blood sugar is at the core of so many health issues, including very much your immune system. And you talked about the other big killers, diseases, those are all linked to each other. I mean, think about it. If your body is spending all of its time trying to figure out how to manage these blood sugar spikes out of control, it's not spending time and energy on these other things. And so you really are more vulnerable and susceptible when you're not managing your blood sugars properly.
