Bifidobacterium

We're going to talk about those for sure.

Today, we're exploring one of the most important and underappreciated members of the human microbiome, Bifidobacterium.

From Infancy to Healthy Aging, we'll look at why this bacteria matters, why modern life may be depleting them, and how supporting them may influence digestion, immunity, cognition, mood, and resilience across a lifespan.

Dr. Piper, how are you doing today?

What is bifidobactam and why does it matter?

Great question.

Bifidobacterium is a really important genus of microorganisms that inhabit our gut, right? And one of the things that's most important about them is in early life.

They're considered the early life colonizers.

But, you know, the breast milk becomes important.

And, you know, the fertilizer in breast milk is the human milk, all the saccharides, the sugar that's there just to feed some of these important initial strains or pioneering strains of bacteria, particularly Bifidobacterium infantis, which is an important one for immune system development the right way.

And then, you know, as we go along, you know, things like environmental exposures, ongoing skin-to-skin contact.

So I oftentimes tell moms, even if you don't breastfeed, even just having that skin-to-skin contact with the nipple is also providing a lot of good gut microbes.

How does the baby's microbiome or microbiota composition change as they go through that first year or those first thousand days of

life? Absolutely.

So, of course, you know, in those, let's say, first four months of life, that's when we're getting the seeding process going and some of these important microbes like Bifidobacterium infantis.

and bacteroidetes that they're both important ones that we see a gap in our C-section babies, for example.

They love fibers and they are primarily responsible for helping us to digest them and turn them into other things, other nutrients that we can use in our body more readily.

So there was a study where they put people on low-carbohydrate, high-protein diets, so they eliminated a lot of fiber doing this, and the beneficial bacteria, bifidobacteria, dropped by about 50% in just four weeks.

Bifidobacteria is probably my favorite bacteria, and I know I sound like such a nerd saying that I have a favorite bacteria, but the reason it's my favorite, for one, it is very important for human development.

It's the primary bacteria that's given from moms to their infants when they're breastfeeding.

It's very important in early stages of life and it's a keystone species, which means its presence within the gut ecosystem is very, very positive.

It's a biological pathway that the human cells don't have, and that's the argument they use to say, you know, this stuff is wonderful because you don't even have the pathway, so how can we be affected by this chemical? But our gut microbes, many of them, over half of them have a susceptibility from that pathway to glyphosate.

And so, and especially the beneficial bacteria, uh, Lactobacillus and Bifidobacteria, we claimed those two in our paper.

We didn't have any proof, you know, we just had theory.

But now papers have come out showing exactly that, that those microbes are suppressed by glyphosate, and furthermore, their products are suppressed.

That's irrelevant.

The baby's, uh, poo comes out quite hard and solid, like a solid, um, stool, right? Um, and we were, we puzzled over this for a long time, but it appears that parents growing up or mothers growing up in a, in a developed society have intergenerational loss of certain key organisms, um, especially things like Bifidobacterium longum infantis, which are, have evolved to, uh, be perfect for digesting breast milk, uh, and fermenting breast milk from humans, right? These are, these are bacteria laden with genes that are evolved explicitly, this is bacteria evolved specifically to eat breast milk.

Eat the HMOs in breast milk.

In human breast milk.

No other mammalian breast milk, just human breast milk.

In fact, many other mammals have their own species of Bifidobacterium, which are designed just to consume the HMOs in their breast milk, right? Like cows and, and sheep and dogs, et cetera.

And, uh, if you look at, you know, when we take babies that, uh, don't have the right kind of the human, uh, milk oligosaccharide- - degrading bacteria, these Bifidobacterium, they can't digest the breast milk properly.

So all of those sugary liquids or those sugary fibers that are present in the breast milk just go straight through the gut and are pooped out in this kind of very liquidy formulation, [laughs] right? Uh, it's, uh...