Generational Adversity and its Effects on the Gut Microbiome

In this conversation, Bridget Callaghan PhD, discusses her research on the gut-brain-microbiome connection and the impact of generational adversity. The study they conducted found that different forms of adversity were associated with unique signatures in the child's microbiome, and some of these microbes were associated with the emotional health of the children. In this conversation, Cindy and Bridget discuss the impact of early environments on children's gut health and microbiome. They explore the effects of COVID-19 lockdowns on children's gut composition and the importance of exposure to germs for developing a healthy microbiome. They also touch on the role of diet in gut health and the challenges of studying and interpreting scientific research. Bridget shares her hopes for future studies, including investigating the mechanisms by which gut microbes influence the brain and behavior. Overall, the conversation highlights the complexity of gut health and the need for a more nuanced understanding of its impact on overall well-being.

• Early life experiences can have a significant impact on health across the lifespan, including physical and mental health.
• The science of the gut-brain-microbiome connection is still evolving, and more research is needed to fully understand the mechanisms and potential interventions.
• Parents should not worry excessively about the impact of their own experiences on their children, as there are many factors at play and individual outcomes can vary. Early environments, including exposure to germs and a diverse diet, play a crucial role in shaping children's gut health and microbiome.
• COVID-19 lockdowns had an impact on the gut composition of children.
• The Mediterranean diet is often associated with a healthy gut and overall well-being, but the research on diet and gut health is complex and ongoing.
• Interpreting scientific research requires understanding that individual studies provide limited guidance for personal decisions, and that scientific knowledge evolves over time.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

This is not particularly surprising, because we know that the first thousand days of life are the most critical for setting up the gastrointestinal microbiome and microbiome sites across the body.

Speaker 2: 0:20

Hello, my dear friend, welcome back to another episode of the Curious Neuron podcast. My name is Cindy Huffington and I am your host. Today we are covering gut health. I've covered the microbiome and the gut-brain axis a little while back with Dr Bridget Callahan from UCLA, but I needed to bring her back because I felt like there was still a lot to cover. So that's what we're discussing today.

Speaker 2: 0:45

Before we begin, I'd like to thank the Tannenbaum Open Science Institute, as well as the McConnell Foundation, for supporting the Curious Nome podcast. Without them, this podcast would not be possible and, by the way, this is not for a salary. It's I don't make money off of the grant that I have for this podcast. It's to support the people that are doing the work for the podcast and editing the podcast for all of us. So thank you to Sadie and Claudia for the work that you do, and I would like to thank you as well, the listener, for supporting the podcast. If you haven't done so yet, please click on that subscribe button, because this is part of the metrics that I do submit to the grants and the organizations, and take a moment to share it on Facebook or Instagram. Share the podcast, share an episode that you enjoyed. Tag me somewhere anywhere, because we do want to grow this audience and we need to grow it to, you know, have another season. It's really important. I also want to ask you to take a moment to rate the podcast. You can rate it on five stars, it takes a few seconds or, if you have a little bit more time, leave a review and you can do this on apple or maybe spotify as well, I'm not sure, but take a moment to leave a review and send me an email at info at curious nowcom. Let me know that you wrote a review, you can send me a screenshot and I will send you a ten dollar coupon to the reflective parent journal that I have. It's thirty dollars, but you can get it for twenty dollars if you leave a review, because that's how important the reviews are. All right, my friends, let friends. Let's move on to today's episode.

Speaker 2: 2:04

Today we are having a conversation with Dr Bridget Callahan from UCLA. She is in the Department of Psychology, developmental Psychology, and her main focus is around our gut, more specifically, the microbiome. Nearly a third of us will suffer from a mental illness during the course of our life and many will experience comorbid physical health problems, for example, gastrointestinal disorders. Early life experiences are known to shape both physical and mental health. However, the precise mechanisms by which such shaping occurs has not yet been established. So Dr Callahan's program of research examines how different early life experiences influence interactions between physical and mental health across the lifespan. So in her lab called the Brain and Body Lab, they undertake such analysis at the level of behavior and neural systems and gastrointestinal bacteria and health, known as the microbiome, and physiology, such as gastric function and heart rate and skin conductance. So it's their goal to use this research to create better mental and physical health treatments, across development and informed by psychology, obviously. So her research is fascinating. I will leave the link to some of her studies in the show notes in case you're interested in learning more.

Speaker 2: 3:19

I hope you enjoy my conversation as much as I did with Dr Bridget Callahan. I'll see you on the other side. I hope you enjoy my conversation as much as I did with Dr Bridget Callahan. I'll see you on the other side. Hi, bridget, welcome back to the Curious Neuron podcast. Thank you for having me. It's really good to be back. I think it's the right time to bring you back. No-transcript fascinating and that we needed to talk about. So the title of the paper is Multigenerational Adversity Impacts on Human Gut Microbiome Composition and Social Emotional Functioning is multi-generational adversity impacts on human gut microbiome composition and social emotional functioning in early childhood. It's a mouthful. I'm sharing that with everybody just so they understand. Can you share a little bit about what you do with your research and then we'll link into that article?

Speaker 1: 4:16

Sure for sure, yeah. So I guess in the lab what we're really interested in is to try and understand the way that our earliest life experiences, so things that happen to us in the prenatal life while we're in the womb and in the postnatal period, kind of from birth to really 18 years of age, how these experiences set us up for health across the lifespan, and so we define health really broadly.

Speaker 1: 4:42

in fact, we're very much interested in the intersection between physical health and mental health, or our emotional functioning and the way that our body functions, and so within that we have a really strong interest in the brain gut microbiome access, because this access is very heavily implicated in both many physical health problems as well as many mental health problems, and so it's a really ideal system to look at if you're interested in that intersection between kind of like brain and body or or mind and body and during our first talk, we really kind of described what that was for parents and spoke about you know how to promote that.

Speaker 2: 5:21

We spoke about birth and the, you know, versus c-sections, I believe a little bit. We spoke about the, I think. We spoke about diet and all that. But today I really do want to talk about this study that you had, because this is something that comes, you know, comes up often where people wonder these generational traumas or adversities in early childhood is this impacting or how is this impacting their child or how did this impact them? So what did you find within this research that you were conducting?

Speaker 1: 5:51

Yeah, exactly, I love the way that you kind of corrected and said how is this impacting, because I think that's the right approach to take.

Speaker 1: 6:00

Everything that we do in our lives impacts us, everything that our parents have done in their lives that has some kind of minute, possibly not measurable, but effect on us and certainly affected them as well so I think the question that we had in this paper was more along those lines of how are those experiences that our parents have had that might have been traumatic or stressful, what is the impact of that on the next generation, and particularly on this microbiome? These organisms that you know, as I just mentioned, seem to be so heavily implicated in both our physical and our mental health. And so the idea of this study was to have a look and see whether there was any association just, you know, the most basic level, between the types of experiences that parents had when they were young and then these construction or the structure of the child's microbiome, that next generation child's microbiome, when they were two years of age. So in this study we were really lucky to work with some wonderful collaborators, so shout out to team science. This type of work is really hard to do without a wonderful collaboration team, and so it was using a data set from our collaborators called Growing Up in Singapore, towards Healthy Outcomes, or GUSTO, and so this was a Singaporean data set, and basically what we had in this study was mums who had reported on their experiences with childhood adversity. So from when they were a child did they experience maltreatment, abuse, neglect, those types of things and we had about 20% of our sample. We had a sample of 400 people. More or less around 20% of the sample experienced maltreatment when they were children of the mums.

Speaker 1: 7:42

And then we had mums report of her mental health, so symptoms of anxiety and depression, while she was pregnant with that second generation child and then in the postnatal period, so after she'd given birth, her postnatal mental health and then also stressful life events that had happened to that second generation child from their birth up until two years of age when we took the child stool sample. So the idea here was to contrast and look at all of these different types of adversities in terms of when they occur in the lifespan. So the one that was occurring to the mom when she was a child we call that the preconception adversity it occurred before the child was even conceived, that second generation child. And then we have prenatal adversity and postnatal adversity, so these were directly experienced in some way by that second generation child. And then we have prenatal adversity and postnatal adversity, so these were directly experienced in some way by that second generation child, either in the womb or after birth.

Speaker 1: 8:31

We wanted to look at the impact or the association of each of these different forms of adversity on that second generation child's microbiome. What we found in this study was that each of these different forms of adversity were associated with unique signatures in the child's microbiome and they didn't really overlap all that much. So we thought that there would be more overlap and there really wasn't.

Speaker 1: 8:53

This type of approach that we were doing to look at the microbiome is called like a taxonomic analysis, which means that we are looking at who is in the gut. So I kind of to describe this always, you know, refer back to kindergarten cop, you know, when Arnold Schwarzenegger is in the classroom he's like who is your daddy and what does he do? So this is the who is your daddy part. So we're not asking what they do, which is arguably potentially the more important question, but we're asking who exists in the gut. And so we saw that different microbes were existing in the gut of these two-year-old children related to these different experiences that their parents had or that they directly had themselves. We did see that some of these microbes were associated with the emotional health of these children, both when they were two years old as well as, kind of when they were four years old, but it wasn't, you know, the exact microbes themselves. It was actually kind of their relatives, so at a higher taxonomic level.

Speaker 2: 9:52

I was going to ask for a parent who's listening to this. When we say there was a difference in the microbiome composition, what does that mean, Is it? I know often people will look at it as good versus bad, but for you, I'm assuming that there's a lot more to it than that.

Speaker 1: 10:08

Yes, yes, I want us to step away from good versus bad. I don't think there's a possible way for us to say what's good versus bad in the microbiome at this level of analysis. So there are kind of two primary ways that we look at the microbiome when we're doing these types of analyses, these taxonomic analyses. One is a community analysis, where we're looking at the composition of the entire community of bugs that are in the gut. So we can look at this in a few different ways. So one of them is what we call richness or alpha diversity. So that's just how many different bacterial groups are present in the gut and we can correct that for how evenly distributed they are. So it might be that you and I have the same number of microbes represented in our gut, the same different microbial groups, but I have way more of group A and you've got way more of group B, even though they're still both represented in our guts. So that is a metric called richness and evenness of the microbiota. And so if we think to richness and evenness, we saw interesting effects for prenatal adversity and postnatal adversity there. So higher postnatal adversity was associated with decreased richness in the gut. That's typically what we would expect to see with adversity, usually, at least in adults, and really what we know in adults may very well not apply to earlier in development, but usually in adults.

Speaker 1: 11:37

We think of alpha diversity as being a good thing, and the reason that we think it's good is that in the gut we have something called functional redundancy. So this means that we've got a whole bunch of microbes and a whole bunch of things that they do, and some of it so a bunch of jobs essentially, and a lot of these bugs tend to do the same or a similar job. So if you lose one of them, there's still others available to do that job for you. So that's called functional redundancy. That's something that we want, and the more bugs represented in the gut that we have, the more functional redundancy we have. Um, so we have less of that in the context of postnatal high levels of postnatal adversity. With prenatal adversity we saw nothing in terms of how many bugs were represented, but we saw more evenness in the context of adversity. So they tend to have similar numbers of all of the different microbes. The meaning of that we're not really clear on yet.

Speaker 2: 12:34

I'm really happy that you said that you don't have certain answers yet in research, because I do feel that in society they have all the answers. They're all there. We, we know, we know microbiomes very not we, but you know, society knows it very well. They know how to prescribe to you, like some sort of diet or lifestyle, knowing that 100 you will improve your gut. You know and and all of that. And they know the link between, they know how it's linked between. You know the gut brain axis. They have all the answers. So it's really good to hear that and I think it's yeah, it's really weird. I don't know there's somebody out there that knows the answer. But just to say I need to bring this up because I do know that people get answers out there and that you are saying that in research you're still looking for answers. So it's important for us to not see social media posts or you know, blogs or whatever it is, or have some expert recommend to us that we should be doing, you know, abc in order to improve our gut health.

Speaker 1: 13:40

There's a lot more to it than that 100%, I mean there are so many companies out there that can prescribe to you a precise diet. You give them your sample and they give you back a precise diet. And I'm sitting here thinking I researched this and I feel like the science is not exactly there yet, so I'm wondering what they're reading that I'm not reading and I think yeah, they have a special lab somewhere. Yeah, exactly, exactly. I get that the social media posts as well and that's a whole thing that I could get into, but yes, um.

Speaker 2: 14:11

I very much agree this isn't quite there yet yeah, I'm glad that you said that, but these results are truly fascinating and I think for me, it just, you know, what it highlights is that, like you said, there's so much more for us to discover. When it comes to that. What, on your end, you know what it highlights is that, like you said, there's so much more for us to discover. When it comes to that. What, on your end, you know, we haven't spoken now for a few years and have you been seeing new results pop up that are exciting for you and saying like we need to keep diving deep into this, this topic?

Speaker 1: 14:38

Yes, absolutely. I mean, I think everything I've read in this area is really exciting to me. You know some of the work that we're doing in my lab. I find really exciting.

Speaker 1: 14:48

You know the things that we publish and the things that we're currently working on, you know we're trying to make better links or think mechanistically about how the brain and the microbiome in humans might be connected and, more importantly, how can we in humans it's very different than doing this in animal models, but how can we in humans it's very different than doing this in animal models but how can we in humans actually test those associations? So there's a lot of really interesting work being done on that front.

Speaker 1: 15:12

You know what are the best ways to connect, like neuroimaging data from an fMRI machine, a magnet and the sorts of data that we get from, for example, stool samples.

Speaker 1: 15:22

I think there's a lot of interesting work being done on different microbial communities. So you know, the gut microbiome is definitely the darling of the microbiome world. Everyone loves the gut microbiome, and I do too, but it's not the only microbial community that exists on our body. In fact, we've got lots of different microbial communities and some of them may be just as important, or maybe more important for mental health. We really don't know yet because we haven't investigated that right. So one of the things we're doing in my lab at the moment is, um, doing a deeper dive into the oral microbiome. So these microbes that sit in our mouth, that kind of seed, the gut microbiome because there's a direct link between the two via the alimentary canal and um, yeah, just thinking about how those might work together or separately to influence our mental health you mentioned that link with your previous study, um, with social, emotional, you know, functioning in children.

Speaker 2: 16:14

What do we know from research in terms of that link? You and you said it again you know right now, in terms of the brain, gut access and the connection for somebody who's never really heard about this before, what is known out there regarding this connection yeah, um, I think it depends what literature you look to.

Speaker 1: 16:31

So if we're looking at the animal literature, I think we know a lot more. So, for example, there are some really cool studies done looking at, like fecal microbiota transplants between animals with different behavioral types. So you could take a really outgoing rat and then a really inhibited rat, so like an anxious rat, and a kind of social butterfly type of rat or mouse actually mice but whatever and you can take the poop from one and give it to the other and vice versa, and in some circumstances you see a bit of a transfer of those behaviors. So the social butterfly, you see a bit of a transfer of those behaviours. So the social butterfly mouse becomes a bit more timid and the timid mouse becomes a little bit more outgoing. These findings, I think, in animal models tell us that the microbiome may be causal and may be sufficient in order to change or shift around behavioural phenotypes or behaviours that we have. So I think that's really exciting. There's a lot of work being done on animal models, mapping, you know, the precise neural pathways, going all the way from changes in the gut microbiome to say you know specific receptors activating the vagus nerve, activating various you know, neural systems in the brain that then influence behavior.

Speaker 1: 17:46

I think there's a lot of really interesting mechanistic research that shows that there is a very um important direct connection between our emotional health and these microbes. What we know in humans is very different, you know. So, um, like, what we have in human studies are really just correlations at this point. So, yes, in humans our emotional health is tied to our gut microbes. We have lots of evidence for that now, both in adults and children. We've got evidence that adversity seems to shift around the gut microbiome. But again, just emphasizing that this is for the most part all very correlational. There are some studies looking at probiotics and prebiotics and different changes in emotional health that exist in humans and those are promising. But they are small sample sizes and there's a lot more that needs to be done there before we can be confident of the results.

Speaker 2: 18:40

Got. It Is part of these studies and correlations. What we had spoke about the first time. We chatted around kids with stomach pains or undiagnosed issues, but referring to, you know, having a lot of these stomach issues and possibly struggling with their mental health.

Speaker 1: 18:58

Yeah, so that's some of it. So there's definitely a lot of correlational work showing links between gastrointestinal symptoms and mental health symptoms, so like anxiety and, um, gastrointestinal pain. Lots of work on that front, um, but I kind of was referring more to the work on just correlations between the microbes that exist in the gut, kind of like the, the study that we were talking about before.

Speaker 1: 19:19

So there are these microbes that exist in the gut and they seem to be associated with the way that we think and feel about things in our environment. Um, but they're just, as you know, correlations and just associations at this point, so exactly figuring out how that works in the human, we've got a lot more to do on that front if a parent is listening to this and and knows that they experience adversity and now worry because they have their own child.

Speaker 2: 19:42

I know that this is something I always want to bring up because as parents sometimes especially as new parents we tend to worry about lots of things, and this is some of the research that might feel heavy on a parent, knowing that their own trauma or experiences might have impacted their child. What can we do as parents? We hear about diet, we hear about all these quick fixes, but truly, what is there that we can do as parents if we want to protect our child as much as we can?

Speaker 1: 20:12

This is such an important question and I want to address it in a couple of different ways. So the first one is to just talk again about the mechanism. So when we published our study looking at generational adversity in the microbiome, I think a lot of people thought that what was happening potentially was that the microbiome of the mom was changed by her experience of adversity and then somehow that was directly getting transferred to the child.

Speaker 2: 20:37

That may or may not happen.

Speaker 1: 20:38

but I think there are many other pathways via which the second generation child's microbiome might be changed as a result of the mum's experience with maltreatment when she was a child. So, for example, people who were maltreated as children often not always, but often will experience emotional health problems themselves throughout their lifespan and into adulthood. And we know there's a huge body of literature talking about emotional health of the parent and its impacts on the child. We know that people who experience maltreatment also have changes to biological systems like the HPA axis or the stress response system, which itself is tied heavily to the microbiome, the immune system, again heavily tied to the microbiome. So we think that probably more of those pathways are at play here than a direct transfer from mothers to children. And the second thing to note is that it's kind of a bigger comment about how to read literature and how to take in this information that we get from the scientific world.

Speaker 1: 21:41

So there are actually two different things happening in the scientific world. So there are actually two different things happening. These are two very different worlds. So in the science world, what I'm trying to do usually is to create a simple or not to create, but to uncover or discover a simplified mechanism for, say, an association between the brain and gut. So is there an association there? What's one of the pathways via which this could function, et cetera. And the idea is that ultimately, you understand that there are it's much more complex than you are getting out in this one particular study, but you're hoping to get more information and make an incremental step forward, figure out different ways that we might be able to get at this system. And then I think, when you're a parent and you know I'm a parent- and I read literature.

Speaker 1: 22:24

Sometimes I'm like it's you know there are scary things out there and so when you're reading it and you're like, oh my god, I'm being exposed to adversity and now you know what sort of damage am I doing to my kid and now I've got a. This is another thing that I need to worry about and certainly when our study came out and it got a lot of press, I had I saw of these comments that parents had like oh no, yet another thing I need to worry about, and I think you know from the scientist's perspective.

Speaker 1: 22:49

I want to really emphasize that I don't think this is something that we need to worry about at all. This is something that is hopefully going to help us find a multitude of additional ways that we can maybe turn the the knot, turn the dial a little bit to help our children thrive and function in the best way possible. Everything that we do impacts our children, for the better and for the worse, and so if we can figure out a way that, um, you know, say, for example, probiotics or nutritional interventions or something else related to the microbiome can be used in a way that helps children, then that's a good thing. There's nothing in this paper that is deterministic, so this does not say that every single person who has been exposed to adversity is going to like pass on something to their child.

Speaker 1: 23:43

There was also a headline out there that suggested that something like child's microbiome forever changed. Um, right, that's awful, and we did not. I don't think it was called two years old forever, but, um, you know, I think there's a lot of stuff out there that's a misinterpretation. So you know, you know, based on this one study alone. If a parent was to say to me, well, what does this tell me about my child? I would say very little, very little. I think the research literature as a whole is beginning to fill in more of these pieces, and we always need to interpret any one piece of literature in terms of the much wider body of things that we know about that system.

Speaker 2: 24:27

Thank you for saying that. I knew that we had to bring this up because this is one of those topics, especially when it comes to these early environments and what we can or what we may or may not do with our child that may or may not lead to certain things right. It becomes very heavy as a parent because we tiptoe around certain things and we're always afraid to do something that will lead to anything negative in terms of consequences right For a child, and sometimes we don't even realize. And I just feel that we need to have this conversation so that parents can realize, like you said, it's, it's very, it's a very small piece of this very huge puzzle that you're trying to figure out and many people are trying to figure out. So it's information and I think it's important that we have this information because, you know, I think just being informed is important, but we also have to know when to let it go and not use it not, you know, think that it applies to everything that we're doing. So it's important.

Speaker 2: 25:21

You know, I remember when we had First Spoken as well, we spoke about that early environment in terms of I guess I'll use the word they use at the beginning, because it just helps us really as parents understand it, but that richness of the gut or the microbiome. When it comes to that early environment, I remember you were saying how important it was to be exposed to certain things, but then COVID happened. I'm curious to know what that was before. So I'm really curious to know if studies have come out and I think I ran across one of your studies but what are we seeing in terms of how this impacted children and their richness, I guess, or the composition of their gut?

Speaker 1: 26:04

Yeah, absolutely so. Again, another wonderful team science study. So this one we did in collaboration with Dr Natalie Brito and her student, sarah Vogel, at NYU, and so they were in the fortunate, slash, unfortunate position of having started a research study collecting microbiome samples before we knew about COVID, and then they continued to collect them remotely after COVID had happened, so while people were in early lockdowns. And so you know, from a purely scientific perspective, I think all scientists were kind of, you know, a bit shocked, as was everyone during the start of COVID, like, oh, this study that I, it was going to be, this perfect study that I was going to do, is now ruined because now we've got this enormous global event right in the middle.

Speaker 1: 26:56

But I think it was a really nice opportunity for us to think. Actually, here we have a natural experiment that has occurred, so we have people pre-covid, onset and during covid who are literally living these very different lives and we have microbiome samples from each. So what do we find? And not surprisingly, there was an impact of covid 19 related lockdowns on the microbiomes of these young children in the first two years of life, in fact I think in that study, in the first year of life. This is not particularly surprising because we know that the first thousand days of life are the most critical for setting up the gastrointestinal microbiome and microbiome sites across the body. But here we had less richness in the guts of children who were being raised primarily during the COVID-19 related lockdowns, so who had been born after the lockdowns, and this is one of my kids I have a.

Speaker 1: 27:52

COVID baby. So again, this is something that you know is a research finding that you interpret both as a researcher as well as a parent when it, you know, is directly related to your particular situation. Um, so yeah, we found that these children who were, you know, perhaps not seeing very many people, maybe only seeing their parents not going to parks, not, you know, looking the subway pole, as I've seen children, do on the subway before.

Speaker 1: 28:20

um, yeah, I'm trying to peel a piece of gum off a seat and consume that and all of the other weird and wonderful things that young children do. There was less of that happening and that was reflected in the microbiome.

Speaker 2: 28:33

I'm assuming that's going to change as well. Past you know that those lockdowns, because I just think of myself and friends that I'm surrounded by we've changed a little bit after the pandemic in terms of even having a new baby. You know, I think before the pandemic I had two kids. I had three kids before and you know you would allow people to hold them, you weren't afraid of anything. And now I've seen friends saying I'd rather you be masked. You know, even if things have passed, but it's still around and we didn't have that hesitation before. So I'm assuming it's something that will continue in terms of the differences pre and post.

Speaker 1: 29:07

Very much so. Yeah, I very much agree with that.

Speaker 2: 29:11

So to the parent who's also worried about all that, should we be trying our best to step back from those worries to help our child build up that richness? Is it something that we should not worry about in terms of isolating them and even thinking about daycare? Is that something that helps them build that richness?

Speaker 1: 29:31

Yeah, so germs are definitely important, so we need to be exposed to germs in order to develop a good microbiome as well as a good immune system, but exactly how many germs and and what sort of germs we need to be exposed to it's.

Speaker 2: 29:46

It's kind of unclear.

Speaker 1: 29:47

You know I am I'm done with hand, foot and mouth disease in my house.

Speaker 2: 29:50

I don't want it again.

Speaker 1: 29:51

I'm going to do everything I can to not get that, as with covid, you know it's a huge illness that takes forever to get over. So I'm going to avoid that at all costs. Um, illness like significant illnesses, I think you just try to avoid with the knowledge costs. Illness like significant illnesses I think you just try to avoid with the knowledge that you will be exposed to many things and you'll just have to deal with those. I think we certainly don't want people going out in the world and trying to get sick.

Speaker 2: 30:16

We don't need to eat that gum off the subway floor. That's fine. That's a good change. You can deal with that Right. That's a good change. That's fine.

Speaker 1: 30:20

That's a good change. You can deal with that Right, that's a good change. But, that being said, you know it is important to expose ourselves to the world. So what is the world? You know? Like dirt outside environments. Those are generally thought to be good for the microbiome. More than anything, eating a wide variety of foods is very important for the microbiome. I have a child who's currently in the beige phase, so only eating crackers, it would appear.

Speaker 2: 30:49

Bread pasta yeah. Bread pasta crackers yes, and not even sauce on the pasta anymore.

Speaker 1: 30:54

The sauce must be separate.

Speaker 2: 30:56

So you know.

Speaker 1: 30:58

I'm a microbiome researcher. I know that food is very important and this beige diet is not doing anything for his microbiome, but that's okay because I know he's not going to eat beige food forever. I think more than anything, being a researcher who studies these types of things, so the impacts of adversity on the microbiome, the impacts of diet and environment on the microbiome it's actually made me more relaxed, because I think more than anything. Most of the time, things are fairly, you know, good and normal. It's only when things are really really stepping outside of the realm of normal, in which case we know that these are not helpful for our functioning and and we want to understand, um, how they are impacting our health so that we can figure out ways to improve them. I think most parents are coming at this from an optimization perspective, so I want to give my child the best possible outcomes, whereas much of the science is from a preventing the worst possible outcomes perspective. Yeah, different orientation.

Speaker 2: 31:57

I think it. I know that it must be reassuring to a parent who just heard this thing. Well, if she's okay with the beige phase, then I can breathe tonight, I can sleep tonight because it's okay and they're right. My kids now are four, six and eight and it's a phase and it might come back at some point and they get out of it. You know, it's just part of them exploring different foods and now I have kids that eat Brussels sprouts. I don't know how that happened, but they like it. It'll, it'll. You know, we just have to keep showing them different types of foods and that's important to be OK in those phases as well.

Speaker 2: 32:33

Can we just talk really briefly, just because you mentioned the diets again. This is something that society seems to have all the answers to. I think we had mentioned last time the importance of a Mediterranean diet. I see people and doctors that go on these like shows or podcasts and talk about like the only way is a plant based diet and there's nothing else that will help you. Are you also seeing a lot of these misconceptions around our gut health and around diet and all of that seeing a?

Speaker 1: 33:04

lot of these misconceptions around our gut health and around diet and all of that.

Speaker 1: 33:09

Yeah, I think you know I'm certainly not a nutritionist and I don't really look at diet all that much in our research like we always control for it, but you know it's not the primary thrust of our research. So you know, my perception is that within the nutrition world, and specifically as it relates to the gut, microbiome there's we know, a fair amount, and we know that leafy greens are really great for the gut. We know a lot about the prebiotics, so these things that we can't digest but that we eat because they feed the bacteria in our guts. So we know a lot about that. We know a lot about probiotics. We know a lot about the mediterranean diet, which does seem to be really quite good for a variety of different health outcomes, and at the same time we also know that studying diet is one of the most difficult things to do because you largely have to rely on people's reports of what they ate which are notoriously biased, so it's just hard to remember what you ate.

Speaker 1: 34:02

People don't know anything about serving sizes. There's a tremendous variety of foods that people eat a lot of packaged foods, whatnot so it's just again hard to say that much, even about the literature that exists. So beyond, yes, Mediterranean diet does seem to be the best evidence that we have for a good or healthy diet, and diet does seem to be the best evidence that we have for a good or healthy diet. That seems good. Plants are very important for microbiome health. Whether they need to be the only thing that we're eating versus having some plants and some animal products in there as well, I think the jury is still out on that. And again, I'm a meat eater.

Speaker 2: 34:39

I eat lots of dairy, even though it does not agree with me. You know, it's something that maybe, if the evidence is a little better, I might change my behaviors a bit more.

Speaker 1: 34:54

I think there's other reasons to follow a plant-based diet, but I don't know that the microbiome is like the one.

Speaker 2: 34:59

Right, I get that. Given the research that you've done, what are some things that you've discovered and found that you're like, wow, I really wish people outside of academia knew about this. This is really important stuff. I'm assuming what we just spoke about in terms of your one of your recent studies, but is there anything that to you stands out that you just wish was out there?

Speaker 1: 35:19

That's such a great question. I think it's honestly, I think the thing that I wish was out there a little bit more is that kind of topic that we were talking about before, about the different ways to consume science. As you know, a member of the public and understanding, you know that science was never designed to be. This is one study that I've done in 100 people and this is going to tell you individual person like Cindy, this is going to tell you how you should live your life. Um, yeah, that's not the way that science works.

Speaker 1: 35:52

Science, you know, in order to make an individualized recommendation, we need to have multiple different studies, multiple levels of evidence, and we need to be collapsing kind of across those to see what the trends are and then doing interventions and seeing whether those work, and then you know, after all of that, um, kind of coming to to an answer and you know even then the answer is probably not going to be that individualized. So it's frustrating, you know it's a frustrating place to be in because, of course, you know, things that we read about in the scientific literature are exciting and we want things to move faster, and I think things should move faster. There are a lot of kind of systematic or not systematic systemic issues in science and policy that prevent research from moving faster.

Speaker 1: 36:38

So I'm with you you know the average person, with your level of frustration with the speed of things and at the same time, the main thing is just how to consume science. I think if you read a scientific study and you're like that's really interesting, that's almost where it should stop.

Speaker 2: 36:57

So maybe it inspires you to eat a little bit healthier, and that's great, and that's a really good thing and you should be interested in it.

Speaker 1: 37:04

You should be hopeful for the future that things are going to continue in in that direction. But you know any one study is not going to give you too much guidance about how do you live your life yeah, and I think that as a society, we are looking for those answers.

Speaker 2: 37:18

We're looking for quick fixes. We're looking for answers so that it could inform us and tell us exactly what to do, like the recipe for a diet, the recipe for the right exercise, the recipe for parenting. But it doesn't exist. And even for parenting, you know, when I started Curious Neuron I was I came out of research. I was studying schizophrenia and emotions, so I just was curious about studies around parenting and child development and started summarizing that for parents.

Speaker 2: 37:46

And very quickly after I started doing that, people wanted answers and prescriptions and, and you know, like recipes for certain things, and I I hesitated to continue because I didn't want to become somebody that I wasn't.

Speaker 2: 37:58

I was just summarizing the studies and saying here's something interesting that I found. Perhaps you will find it interesting as well, and I'm happy that I kind of continued in that direction. And didn't you know it would have been easy to start prescribing things and saying you need to do it this way or that way, or else who knows? You know like I didn't want to put the fear in people, but it is so important for us to talk about this because it's it, it's people are looking for that and I think there are lots of online you know, even researchers that are online giving those prescriptions, and people love it. They, they, they just take it in. So it's we have to mention that. Yes, I want to be mindful of your time and I think this was such a great conversation, given the work that you've done as well. I love to know what are you hoping to see, or what sort of studies are you or coming up next for you, and what sort of questions are you asking in your lab?

Speaker 1: 38:55

Yeah, I guess. So some of the questions we're asking in the lab are actually we're moving more in the direction of mom's health, understanding that moms are important just because they're important, because they're humans and they deserve to be important, regardless of the children and their health, but also because mums are a critical link, as are dads a critical link in these intergenerational patterns. So what happened to you, how you transition into parenthood, is going to therefore influence your child, and maternal mental health is at an all-time low Maternal mortality is at an all-time high even, you know, within the United States, it's very scary statistics, especially for people of colour, women of colour.

Speaker 1: 39:41

So it's a kind of scary place to be in for mums. And you know, the other type of research that we do is kind of looking at maternal mental health and the kind of cognitive load of motherhood, so how much mums have to think about and how much stress is put on mums. So it's interesting to kind of see the way that the two things that we research intersect in in terms of you know, on the one hand, this is something else for mums to worry about, but we're we're also, you know, looking at things and and saying you know, mums are worrying too much about too many things and it's too much um. So that's one thing that we kind of do is look at, yeah, these intergenerational patterns and really focus on mum's health, and I'm very, very passionate about that.

Speaker 1: 40:29

I think, in the microbiome space, where I'd like to see things moving forward, are in humans trying to get more of those mechanisms. So we've done a lot of correlations now and I think it'd be really important for us to try and understand, you know, exactly how these microbes that are changing in the gut with adversity, how it is that they might be influencing our behavior. So, taking the microbiome measures, looking at metabolites, these products that are produced by the gut, like short chain fatty acids or neurotransmitters that are produced by the gut, how are those getting to the brain or how are those influencing the brain? What circuits in the brain are they influencing, and then how might that be related to behavior? So really trying to map that with greater precision, which is a challenging and long process, but that's kind of where we need to move next.

Speaker 2: 41:17

I agree with you and I think also from my perspective, that having this community of parents that I get to speak with when it comes to emotions, it's just so different.

Speaker 2: 41:27

And our mental health. You know, I feel that as a system or a health system, we're so we're very reactive, but I feel that there's so much out there especially with early, you know, with postpartum phases and lots of studies that follow parents in the first few years there's so much out there that would help us turn this into more of a preventative healthcare system when it comes to mental health. I think that, you know, with the parents that I speak with, we were not given certain tools when it comes to our emotions and mental health, and now we are seeing ourselves as parents having to teach this to our kids and that's why I try to, you know, talk to parents about that. But from your perspective, it's so interesting to see that there's so much left to understand. When it comes to the inner aspect, you know, I think we spoke about this very quickly through email. But when it comes to emotions, you know, I often hear people say, well, I just have to learn how to label them, but I don't know how to label them. What does it?

Speaker 2: 42:21

feel like to be angry or frustrated or disappointed, and I think of different studies that I read and some work or books that I'm reading to inform that, and it always gets me thinking. Like I had published an episode saying about what if the word anxiety didn't exist, how would we describe the feeling? Because I don't think that we're in touch with the interceptive aspect of emotions. So, hearing everything that is still left to discover and that we still have to understand this connection.

Speaker 1: 42:53

There's still so much, when it comes to emotions and our mental health, that we need to understand 100% I mean yes it's I said a lot sorry, but yeah, it's so true, it's like a lifetime of work and I think that it really emphasizes to me.

Speaker 1: 43:13

You know what we were talking about before with you know, what can you take away from one study, is you know? I think sometimes people hear about these things and they get overwhelmed, like, oh, this is another thing to worry about, this is another system. I read things like this and I get very excited because it's like okay, this is yet another piece of the puzzle, this very big and complex puzzle that we need to solve over time, and we will not solve in my lifetime, and that's okay. And you know, over time the findings will coalesce into pieces of evidence that we can really use to change or to make recommendations about ways that we should live our lives. But, um, you know, maybe we're there yet for some of the things and not there yet for some of the other things, and we'll just have to wait and see right.

Speaker 2: 43:56

Thank you, rigid, for taking your time to chat with me today. I absolutely love your research and we're going to share all the links, and there's already a blog post up on the website. I will put all of those links in the show notes. Please take a moment to subscribe to the podcast and to rate it again. Thank you, bridget, and I hope we get to chat again soon. Maybe not in two and a half years, maybe sooner.

Speaker 1: 44:15

Thanks so much, cindy, it's a pleasure.

Speaker 2: 44:17

I hope you enjoyed our conversation. Please take a moment to rate and review the podcast, subscribe to it, and you can follow us on Instagram, at Curious underscore Neuron or Curious Neuron, on Facebook or the Reflective Parent page, which is a private page. I will add the link to all of these in the show notes. Thank you for listening. I'll see you next Monday. I hope you have a beautiful week. Bye, thank you.