Microbiome Diversity: Tiny Health's Approach

This is our Tiny exclusive webinar, Microbiome.

Diversity for Gut Health. Yeah. Welcome, everyone. My name is Amy. I'm based in Santa Cruz, California, and I've been working for Tiny Health for a couple of years now. I'm one of the microbiome specialists. So I may have met some of you on a call or maybe meet you again in the future on a call, if I've met any of you on a call. You know, I use a lot of analogies to describe and talking about gut health because there's things that we just can't see, right. When we're talking about the microbiome, it's very intangible to kind of think about all of the different functions, why it's so important too. So that's how I'm going to start us off today. When we think about microbiome diversity and resiliency, I think about a couple of things. One is, you know, just the kind of concept of within our gut, it's home to about 2 to 6 pounds of bacteria. And I put the picture of a pineapple because a tiny pineapple is about 2 pounds, larger ones about like 5, 6 pounds. And next time you're at the grocery store for yourself, you know, if you have a young child, have them hold one. And then that's kind of gives a good perspective of what you're thinking about from all the different, you know, bacteria that, that live and kind of, you know, make up the gut microbiome. Now, we also refer to the gut microbiome as an ecosystem too, Right. And a little bit of what we're going to talk about tonight is how to make that ecosystem diverse. And then when you have a diverse ecosystem, it's also a resilient ecosystem. So I always use the analogy too, of ecosystems. That's a picture of Costa Rica, one of my favorite places. And if you think about like all of, like the flora and fauna and these beautiful places too, that's what I like to think about and thinking about our microbiome. Okay, this is just a quote. Emoryn Mayer is our new medical advisor at Tiny Health. And when I first got into learning a little bit more about the microbiome, I loved all of his books about the gut microbiome connection, gut brain connection. He has a new book, the Gut Immune Connection. And this is just a passage from his book in that he describes the diversity and richness of the gut microbiome in developed countries has been steadily decreasing over time. So that's a little bit about what we're going to be talking about is how to keep our microbiomes diverse and resilience and kind of combat that modernity that that's kind of happening to our microbiomes. So in terms of the approach we use at Tiny Health, it's a lot more of a feed, feed, feed approach to the microbiome in terms of how to support keeping it in balance. I think of that as bringing in more beneficial bacteria by way of, you know, things we'll talk about tonight. Time outside in nature, having a wide variety of those prebiotic foods, you know, limiting some of the gut disruptors and just really kind of bringing in more to push out any of the disruptors. The kind of outdated mindset is more of the like weed seed feed approach, right. Where we might use something strong to kind of focus on like eliminating some of the disruptives and, you know, really kind of focus on more of the bringing in the good to push out the bad.

I'm going to jump in here if you don't mind really quick because I do see this online a lot in different chat groups and things like that. People will say, you know, my test, whether they're talking about Tiny Health or other kind of gut tests that they've done with a GI doctor or something. Oh, my test identified this particular, you know, microbe, this, this bug that's a pathogen that I need to get rid of or just in general, like gut. The gut craze about like getting rid of parasites with cleanses and like different things. You know, people are all about trying to like, eliminate the bad. And it's such a different approach, right, to do where we're focusing more on nurturing the good, the beneficial bacteria.

Right.

Instead of just like doing a cleanse or taking all kinds of supplements that are going to kill off or a kill protocol.

Right.

Of. Of the bad bugs.

Yeah, definitely. I mean, we have a blog post all about parasite cleanses and kind of more of the nuance in that. You know, in some cases that might be necessary. I always give the example of like a probiotic in Germany where they actually give people E. Coli. Some E. Coli is good. It's commensal. You know, there's different kind of approaches there and we don't want to take out the good diversity. You know, even in terms of, for, for kids, we really only use like spices, garlic. We might use something like oil of oregano if we really need to eliminate some disruptives in an adult. But even we put that as like a last resort. So it really is a shift in mindset the kind of weed seed feed approach is definitely more outdated. And the kind of feed, feed, feed one is a little bit more of, you know, kind of where the science is at in terms of thinking of just like we picture that guy think about Costa Rica all the time. We want that ecosystem there, right? We want that diversity to stay. We don't want to take out the diversity too.