#32 Trust Your Gut: Dr Camilla Stokholm on Microbiomes, Inflammation and Arthritis

the best projects the best projects happen like this don't they they really really do it when there's a need for something and then it just naturally organically expands and yeah it's wonderful work that you're doing so thank you for for sharing that and in terms of the microbiome then so for for a listener who maybe has no idea what the gut microbiome is and they've heard it here there and everywhere also tim specter's book is fantastic that diamond i love that book And what is the gut microbiome then in kind of the simplest terms you can for a podcast?

Yeah, I think most people have heard of it now, although I say that I still meet people where people ask you, what do you do? And I say, oh, I sort of work in the gut microbiome and they have no idea what I'm talking about.

So for those people, I would say we've essentially... been training nurses, doctors, anyone in the medical world to look at the body in a kind of single dimension and about a decade later yeah maybe over kind of the last 20 years we've realized that there's a whole second dimension that we just never knew about and some people say it's like you've got a whole new organ that was just never mentioned we just never stumbled across it and that's your your microbiome and people talk about the gut microbiome but actually you've got lots of different microbiomes on and in your body and it I suppose the easiest way to describe it is that during our evolution, we formed these human cells, but they weren't just human cells that then kind of created this big mass.

They were a collection of various different organisms that bumped into each other, got on really well and then actually carried on growing together.

So and these different organisms evolved.

actually fed into our whole biology and formed this mass called a human being that we always thought was just human cells.

But if you break it down, only half of the cells are human.

The other half are these bugs, this kind of microbiome.

And they're made up of people, mostly researched the bacteria, but there are lots of different types of other bugs.

We've got viruses, parasites, fungi, archaea, so other bits and pieces that we haven't researched as much.

And if you again, if you break down the human body and you look at just the DNA, I think it's 99 percent of the DNA in the body is actually from this microbiome.

So we're more microbiome than human in some ways, which is mind blowing.

And they they because they've been part of our evolution and they influence our biology, they essentially impact every aspect of your health.

And this is why I say the medicine has previously been one dimensional.

What we're realizing is that the microbiome has almost made it 3D and we can see how everything interlinks in ways that we never knew about before.

It's actually quite mind blowing.

Thank you so much for that description.