Gut Check

00:00:39

Sarge: Out of my way. Get out of the way.

 

00:00:42

Dr. Kaylee Byers: I guess that’s what you get for tampering with the evidence. Oh, boy.

 

00:00:46

Sarge: Avenge me.

 

00:00:51

Dr. Kaylee Byers: You are listening to Nice Genes, the podcast that digests science so you don’t have to brought to you by Genome British Columbia. I’m your host, Dr. Kaylee Byers. Just think of me as Remy the Rat, your chef to cuisine serving a heaping portion of genomics. Have you ever had food poisoning?

 

00:01:10

Streeter #1: I had gone out for dinner with a few friends and I ordered catfish with mashed potatoes.

 

00:01:17

Streeter #2: I was staying in Chile outside, sun shining down, and there was just literally a chunk of wood and they had ceviche on it.

 

00:01:27

Streeter #3: I was 12 on a vacation in Costa Rica and I think I had spaghetti bolognese, which was my first mistake.

 

00:01:34

Streeter #2: And so my friend from Guatemala ate it first and said, ‘It’s perfectly fine.’ And so us two said, ‘Okay, fine.’ We tasted it.

 

00:01:43

Streeter #1: A couple hours later, I felt this intense burning in my stomach.

 

00:01:47

Streeter #3: My family and I had a boat excursion to an island. I was like, immediately I was like, I need to go to the bathroom.

 

00:01:54

Streeter #1: So I ran to the bathroom and basically laid on the bathroom floor for a few hours.

 

00:01:59

Streeter #2: Us two girls got extremely sick and we were running to the bathroom over and over and over again.

 

00:02:04

Streeter #3: And so I went into the bathroom and absolutely blew up the bathroom.

 

00:02:09

Streeter #2: Looking back now, just don’t eat ceviche that’s been sitting outside in the sunshine for hours and hours and hours with flies dancing around it.

 

00:02:17

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Sadly, this is a tale I know all too well. When it comes to foodborne illness, it can feel like some people get sick all the time while others seem to have iron stomachs. So what’s up with that? Today, it’s time for a gut check. From foodborne illness to mental health, we’ll uncover how your microbiome has your back and how genomics could help keep food poisoning off the menu.

 

00:02:45

Dr. Lawrence Goodridge: My name is Lawrence Goodridge and I am a professor of microbiology in the Department of Food Science at the University of Guelph, and I also direct the Canadian Research Institute for Food Safety at the university. And I also hold a Canada research chair in foodborne pathogen dynamics.

 

00:03:03

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Dr. Goodridge studies foodborne pathogens you might’ve heard of like salmonella, E. coli and listeria. He uses genomic techniques to learn more about these bugs that can make us really sick. So naturally, my first question has to be food poisoning. Is that something you experience when you go traveling very often?

 

00:03:20

Dr. Lawrence Goodridge: Unfortunately I do. I have a story. This is about 18 years ago. I took a group of graduate students to China. We wanted to show them the differences between US food production systems and Chinese systems. So prior to the trip, one of the things I told them was try to avoid risky food behavior such as eating foods from roadside stands and things like that. And so we get to China and these students, they do everything I tell them not to do. I, on the other hand, use all of my food safety knowledge I’ve accumulated to that point and guess who it was who got sick?

 

00:03:59

Dr. Kaylee Byers: What are some of the pathogens that are the likely cause of foodborne illness?

 

00:04:04

Dr. Lawrence Goodridge: So many different pathogens and we can break them down by classes. So if we think about viruses first, viruses such as norovirus, another virus is hepatitis A virus. This is a virus that comes from people who are infected. So if they’re not washing their hands during food preparation and they don’t know that they’re infected, then that can be spread and has caused a number of infections. Those are two main viruses.

 

On the bacterial side of things, Campylobacter, which is a bacteria that is found in poultry. We have salmonella, which causes a number of illnesses globally. Salmonella can be found by the way, in many foods. People associate them with poultry and other animal foods, but they have caused outbreaks in things like chocolate and flour, fruits and vegetables, meat, dairy products. So salmonella cause a lot of outbreaks and in a number of foods, E. coli, not all E. coli, but certain pathotypes of E. coli like shiga toxin-producing E. coli cause outbreaks particularly in vegetables like lettuce. So if you think about romaine lettuce and maybe four or five years back, there were a number of outbreaks linked to that. That was due to shiga toxin-producing E. coli. Then there’s listeria monocytogenes. This is a unique bacterium because it can grow at cold temperatures. So we put our foods in the refrigerator to stop the growth of pathogens, but listeria can actually grow at those temperatures. They are found in deli meats, things like foods made from unpasteurized milk. Then finally there’s parasites, things like giardia, cryptosporidium, and cyclospora. So those are parasites that can be found in non- potable water and then can get into food.

 

00:05:51

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Giardia, the most adorable of the parasites. I wish I had a photo for you. I recently do pottery and I did a mug covered in Giardia with all their little flagella.

 

00:06:00

Dr. Lawrence Goodridge: I would actually like to see that.

 

00:06:01

Dr. Kaylee Byers:  I’ll get the photo for you and send it to you. So let’s say you eat something with like a salmonella in it. How long until you might start feeling sick?

 

00:06:10

Sarge: Just leave me here Buyers.

 

00:06:13

Dr. Lawrence Goodridge: So the period between consumption and symptoms, it’s called the incubation period. For different bacteria, we see different incubation periods, and by the way, there’s always exceptions to the rule, but most foodborne bacteria, few hours to a day or two, that time is dependent on the concentration of the bacteria and the food and then host factors, how old one is, if there’s any underlying health conditions and so on and so forth.

 

One exception to that period is Listeria monocytogenes. It can take up to 70 days after consumption of contaminated food before symptoms are observed. And so that really complicates foodborne outbreak investigations when Listeria monocytogenes is involved because one of the first things that happens is public health officials will interview people and ask them what they ate. And if I ask you what you ate 70 days ago for dinner, I doubt that you would be able to remember. And so this is a major problem when it comes to outbreaks traced to Listeria monocytogenes. In fact, last year for example, we had an outbreak in plant- based milk here in Canada due to Listeria monocytogenes because the milk was contaminated during its production. It took public health officials months even up to a year to identify the outbreak, because a food vehicle is so uncommon and also the time.

 

00:07:35

Dr. Kaylee Byers: When we get food poisoning, we may think of it going a little something like this. You eat something your stomach’s not used to. A few hours later you start to feel a little uh- oh and next thing you know you’re toilet ridden for a day or two and then you start to feel better. But this is kind of the best- case scenario. Unfortunately, food poisoning isn’t always just a short- term 24- hour thing. The impacts of it can be really serious.

 

00:08:02

Dr. Lawrence Goodridge: I will give you two fairly recent examples. The first is a person who was involved in the Walkerton outbreak of shiga toxin-producing E. coli in the year 2000. That was an outbreak that sickened approximately 2, 500 people. I believe there were seven deaths that came from that outbreak. This was linked to water that had not been properly chlorinated. And so this one person, his name was Robbie Schnurr, by all accounts, a strapping person, a police officer, happened to be in Walkerton, drank some water because it’s a warm day, and became sick with E. coli and never recovered. His symptoms progressed to nervous system infection and other systematic complications. He became bedridden. And in 2018, he decided to end his life because of the debilitating symptoms. So here was this very healthy person who never recovered.

 

The second example is more recent and it has to do with a little boy from British Columbia. His family took him to California, they were going to Disneyland. On the way there, they stopped at a restaurant because they were hungry. His father ordered a salad. The little boy ate some of that salad. The salad was contaminated with again, shiga toxin-producing E. coli. The boy became sick and never recovered. So these are just two stories of people who have had foodborne illness that was not mild. And so really foodborne disease should not be seen as just a simple, you’ll feel better in a couple of days, but we need to really begin to understand its role in causing lifelong symptomatic and systematic conditions.

 

00:09:46

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Canada has one of the safest food supplies in the world, but roughly one in eight people will get sick with a foodborne illness every year. And when you consider that we’re a population of nearly 40 million people, that’s still roughly 5 million cases each year. As we’re recording this episode, there’s a salmonella outbreak tied to pistachios. More than a hundred people have gotten sick across Canada and 16 have been hospitalized. A reminder that even in a country with such strong food safety standards, these outbreaks still happen and can ripple through our healthcare system. The WHO estimates that roughly 600 million people get sick with a foodborne pathogen each year and over 400,000 don’t survive. So food poisoning isn’t always just a rough vacation story, it’s a global health threat. How can something like genomics help with studying foodborne pathogens and their impacts?

 

00:10:39

Dr. Lawrence Goodridge: Genomics is a wonderful way to study these microorganisms and I primarily study salmonella because it’s such a major pathogen, causes 93 million cases of illness each year around the world. Approximately 80 million of that is foodborne and 150,000 deaths. And as I’ve said, salmonella can contaminate virtually any food. This bacterium is also incredibly diverse from a genomic standpoint. So there’s over 2, 600 serotypes of the bacteria broken down into six different subspecies. And so by sequencing the genomes of these bacteria, one can gain insights into bacterial diversity and also into the diversity of ways that bacteria can cause illness. Since 2014, I’ve been doing a major project along with colleagues in Canada on salmonella. And what we wanted to do was really come up with a definition of what a pathogenic salmonella is. And that might sound a little strange because people might say, well, aren’t all salmonella pathogenic? And the answer is, I don’t think so. If you look at epidemiology of salmonella and the types of salmonella that caused human illness over the years and globally, we see that even though there’s more than 26 serovars of salmonella, consistently 10, maybe 20 serovars cause the majority of illness. So that really begs the question, what about the other 2,500 plus serovars? What are they doing?

 

00:12:06

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Here’s where it gets a little complicated. The salmonella that Dr. Goodridge studies called salmonella enterica has more than 2,600 serovars or subtypes, but only a handful of those usually make people sick. Scientists have tried to figure out why often pointing to certain genes as the culprit. The problem? One lab’s results don’t always match another’s. That’s partly because they’ve been testing salmonella in different ways using different models of infection. Think of these models like stand- ins for how the bacteria might behave. Sometimes that model’s in a Petri dish, sometimes it’s in an animal study, sometimes in human cells. While it’s very important to understand how salmonella works in all those systems, it makes it difficult to compare across studies. It’s less apples-to-apples and more apples-to-elephants. So Dr. Goodridge and his team had to devise a method to bring all that data together.

 

00:12:58

Dr. Lawrence Goodridge: What we did was we brought together several different models of infection. We developed a collection of salmonella from around the world and we tested selected strains with all the different models and we look for concordance with respect to if the salmonella would grow in these models, if their concentrations would increase. When we compared their genomes, we were able to actually identify 39 different biomarkers that seemed to be consistently associated with higher virulence in salmonella. So this wouldn’t have been possible without the use of genomics. And interestingly, some of these biomarkers are actually conserved in other foodborne pathogens like E. coli and Listeria and Campylobacter. So this opens the potential door to having a conserved or generic way to control the growth of these bacteria and food. And by that what I mean is not focusing on one bacteria to control its growth at the expense of another bacteria, but approach that would control all of these pathogens.

 

00:13:55

Dr. Kaylee Byers: So basically some of the same genes actually show up across different pathogens like salmonella, E. coli, Listeria, which means instead of tackling each pathogen one by one, researchers could find ways to target that shared gene. Pretty cool. But genomics doesn’t just tell us about these pathogens. It also gives us clues about our own health.

 

00:14:16

Dr. Lawrence Goodridge: More and more data is coming out regarding the gut microbiome. And so the gut microbiome is one of our main defenses against foodborne pathogens. We now understand that the gut is a major organ in the body. Most people don’t think of it like an organ like we might think of as the heart or the kidneys or the lungs, but the gut is actually an organ. And not only is it an organ, we now know increasingly that this organ is responsible for effects on many other organs, one of which is the brain and the effects largely have to do with the microbiome. So this is an exciting area, an expansive area of research that genomics will be a central player in if we are to elucidate all the mechanisms and all the ways in which bacteria in our gut can affect other organs such as the brain.

 

00:15:07

Dr. Kaylee Byers: We’ve been looking at foodborne pathogens as an outside threat. But what about what’s happening inside? Coming up, the microbiome in all its glory, defending us from bad food and bad moods.

 

You are listening to Nice Genes, a podcast all about the fascinating world of genomics and the evolving science behind it, brought to you by Genome British Columbia. I’m your host, Dr. Kaylee Byers. And if you like Nice Genes, hit follow on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your shows and leave us a review. If you like this episode, be sure to share it with someone who could use a little food for thought.

 

The gut microbiome, I don’t know about you, but it feels like in recent years, this term has gotten a lot of attention.

 

00:15:53

Clip: I’ve decided to dedicate my life to studying the gut and the gut microbiome.

 

00:15:58

Clip: Our guts or rather what we put in them, get a lot of attention these days.

 

00:16:03

Dr. Kaylee Byers:  The gut microbiome.

 

00:16:04

Clip: Microbiome.

 

00:16:05

Clip: Gut microbiome.

 

00:16:06

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Gut science has been referred to as the hottest area of research in all of biomedicine for the last decade. And no wonder. If you count up all the genes in and on our bodies, the vast majority of them belong to microbes. So in a very real way, we are more microbial than human. So let’s stomach some of the science behind these microbes that help protect us. So I would definitely say that I don’t have a strong gut, I have an adventurous gut. Do you think you have a strong gut?

 

00:16:31

Dr. Mary Sco.: I knock on wood and feel that I am very fortunate and very blessed in this area, and I don’t want to jinx myself here because you never know.

 

00:16:39

Dr. Kaylee Byers: To tell us more about the magical wonders of the microbiome is Dr. Mary Sco..

 

00:16:44

Dr. Mary Sco.: I am a family medicine physician and a nutrition expert, and I love teaching people all of the fascinating science of the food that we eat.

 

00:16:52

Dr. Kaylee Byers: So to start off, what is the gut microbiome?

 

00:16:56

Dr. Mary Sco.: So the gut microbiome is basically this half pound of bacteria that we all carry around inside of us. They reside mostly in our large intestines, but also in other places as well. And the truth is we could not survive without this bacteria. They help us digest our food. They form the lining of our gut. They help us outcompete bad bacteria that we encounter on a daily basis. And the gut microbiome is basically like the thermostat that controls the level of inflammation in our bodies.

 

Also, the microbiome is impacted by so, so many things beyond just what we eat. The number of antibiotic courses that you’ve taken in your lifetime are going to impact your microbiome. How you were born, whether you were born vaginally or by C-section, that impacts the microbiome, how you are fed, where you breastfed, where you formula fed? Did you have a pet when you grew up? Did you live on a farm or did you live in a city? All of these little things ultimately produce the microbiome that we carry around with us. So everything that we’re exposed to is influencing it in one direction or another.

 

00:17:57

Dr. Kaylee Byers: So it sounds like it does a lot. You’re talking about half a pound and I think some other sources even say it’s closer to four pounds. But regardless, it’s a lot of bacteria in there.

 

00:18:06

Dr. Mary Sco.: There’s trillions of bacteria in the microbiome and there’s this mix of bacteria that are good and helpful and bacteria that are bad. So every time you eat, you’re not just feeding you, you are also feeding these trillions of bacteria. So unfortunately a lot of tasty foods, things like processed foods, sugary foods, alcohol, many animal products are the preferred food for our bad bacteria. So when we eat more of those foods, we grow more of those bad bacteria. But on the flip side, plant- based foods, things like fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts, feed our good bacteria.

 

00:18:42

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Inside our gut, trillions of bacteria are part of a constant dance. Some partners move in ways that support our health while others can throw us off balance and the food we eat can change that rhythm. There’s one ingredient in particular that really puts the boogie in our biome.

 

00:18:59

Dr. Mary Sco.: So fiber is the preferred fuel of the good bacteria that live in this community of bacteria in our gut. And every time we eat fiber, the bacteria then eat that fiber and then ferments it and produce these byproducts. Those byproducts actually move into our bloodstream and before they get there, they actually interface with our immune cells. It’s a little known fact that 70% of our immune system actually lives in our gut just outside the wall of the gut right next door to the gut microbiome. So when you eat fiber, you feed the good bacteria, the good bacteria send signals over to the immune cells, and then those immune cells amplify that signal. It travels throughout. The body can ultimately reach our brain. And when those signals reach our brain, they can even impact things like neurotransmitter levels. So that’s how the fiber you eat can ultimately influence what’s going on inside your brain.

 

00:19:51

Dr. Kaylee Byers: The fiber we eat sets off a chain reaction in our gut microbiota that can reach your central nervous system. In other words, your gut and brain are in constant conversation.

 

00:20:01

Brain: Hey, gut.

 

00:20:02

Gut: Hey, brain.

 

00:20:03

Brain: How’s it going?

 

00:20:04

Gut: Pretty good, how about you?

 

00:20:05

Dr. Kaylee Byers: And food is one way they stay in touch.

 

00:20:08

Brain: I’m starving.

 

00:20:09

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Gives a whole new spin to having dinner on your mind. Scientists call this the gut- brain axis or the gut- brain connection.

 

00:20:16

Dr. Mary Sco.: So the gut- brain connection is basically this bi- directional relationship between our brain and between our digestive tract. The most classic example that everyone can relate to is the phenomenon of butterflies in your stomach. Everybody knows how a psychological experience, maybe you’re a little bit nervous, maybe you’re a little bit stressed, can translate into the feeling of an upset stomach. That’s very familiar. That’s because of the gut- brain connection.

 

00:20:43

Dr. Kaylee Byers: This phenomenon is something that’s been talked about for longer than you might think. Let me just get this old history book here. And back in 1907, Nobel Prize-winning scientist, Élie Metchnikoff, was credited for being the first person to hypothesize the bacteria in our intestines, played a role not only in our gut, but could improve overall health and delay cognitive decline. At the time the science was more hunch than hard proof. But that didn’t stop scientists and marketers too from promoting the idea that fermented foods could boost not just digestion, but overall well- being.

 

00:21:20

Dr. Mary Sco.: There’s an image of an advertisement from the New York Times in 1932, and believe it or not, in 1932, probiotic yogurt was being advertised in the New York Times specifically as a way to improve mood.

 

00:21:33

Clip: Your attitude towards things is influenced by the condition of your intestinal tract. So sharpen your mind with yogurt and kind and mental decline will be left behind by yogurt.

 

00:21:42

Dr. Mary Sco.: And it actually goes back even further because in the 1600s there was this scholar at Oxford and he was looking into what were all the causes of what at that time was called melancholia, what today we would call depression. And he also concluded that what we eat is one of several factors. So for a long time humans have recognized that diet plays this important role in mental health, but it hasn’t been until very recent times that we’ve had the very rigorous data to demonstrate that this is in fact true.

 

00:22:10

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Unlike scientists a century ago, we’re just starting to have the robust scientific information to confirm what we have always suspected. The good food is good for your mood, she says after not eating anything, first thing this morning, drinking a giant cup of coffee and feeling anxious.

 

00:22:25

Dr. Mary Sco.: There has been some remarkable research investigating this in recent years. One of the landmark trials that studied this was a randomized controlled trial done in Australia. They took 60 people with moderate to severe depression and they put them on what they basically called a modified Mediterranean diet. And what they found was that after 12 weeks on this diet, one- third of those patients were able to put their depression into remission. When you deconstruct the Mediterranean diet and ask, well, how did it do this? What caused this? Ultimately you’ve got a lot of fruits and vegetables, a lot of whole grains, things like oats, barley, brown rice, and a lot of beans and a lot of nuts. The common denominator amongst all of those foods is fiber. And as we discussed before, fiber feeds our good bacteria, our good bacteria talk to our immune cells, and then those immune cells amplify those signals that eventually reach the brain. So this is why we think that this trial, which just changed people’s diets, could actually help some people put their depression into remission.

 

00:23:24

Dr. Kaylee Byers: So just by changing diet studies are showing promising links between what we eat and our gut microbiome and mental health. That doesn’t mean researchers can say a high- fiber diet eases depression, but there seems to be an association and it’s something worth chewing on. As for how we can actually shift our microbiome for the better, Dr. Sco. likes to think of it as steps on a ladder.

 

00:23:47

Dr. Mary Sco.: So the first step, the simplest way is what we’ve been talking about, which is the food you eat every day is going to determine which bacteria flourish and which ones don’t. So you eat fiber- rich foods, you’re going to promote the growth of good bacteria.

 

00:24:00

Dr. Kaylee Byers: The second step is choosing foods with active ingredients, those probiotics or fermented foods

 

00:24:06

Dr. Mary Sco.: You can consume the bacteria itself. When you eat those foods that contain that bacteria naturally, you’re just naturally boosting the number of good bacteria that you have. So that’s another route. Of course that’s been extrapolated into supplements. You can consume a probiotic supplement that can deliver those good bacteria that can then change your microbiome.

 

00:24:24

Dr. Kaylee Byers: But the third step takes things up a notch and it’s a little more drastic. Not to mention maybe a little controversial. As scientists look for ways to tweak our microbiome to support mental health and other conditions, they’ve started exploring some rather a particular methods.

 

00:24:40

Dr. Mary Sco.: This is what has been called fecal transplants. The idea is the waste that we produce every day is teeming with bacteria that represent our own microbiome. So the idea is if you take the waste of a healthy person and you transplant it into someone who is unwell or struggling with their health in some way, there is the possibility that this acquisition of these healthy bacteria could potentially improve their health. And when you look at the trials, this being tested in humans for a wide range of health issues, this has been shown to be beneficial for things like Parkinson’s disease, inflammatory bowel disease, and of course things like anxiety and depression.

 

00:25:19

Dr. Kaylee Byers: But here’s the big caveat. Researchers still have a lot to learn about these approaches, if and to what extent they work, what the potential side effects are and so on. Many of these studies are based on relatively small sample sizes. So one study alone is in proof. We want to be careful here. This isn’t as simple as saying, if you want to treat your symptoms and anxiety, just eat more fruits and veg. Mental health is complex and diet is just one tool in the toolkit, but a promising one to take with a grain of salt. Our guts and the trillions of bacteria that make up our microbiome are incredibly versatile, helping us stay healthy and even supporting mental well- being. And circling back to foodborne illness, a strong microbiome is a good defense against harmful pathogens. So if like me, you often get sick while traveling, your gut bacteria might be why. So is there a role that the microbiome can play in terms of protection from foodborne illness?

 

00:26:15

Dr. Mary Sco.: Absolutely. There are very, very elegant studies that have been done in animals where they take these rats or whatever they may be, and they wipe their microbiomes clean with antibiotics, then they expose them to bad bacteria like E. coli, the kind of thing that might make you sick from foodborne illness. And what they show is that when you don’t have that healthy microbiome present, the E. coli can move in. There’s real estate available, it grows, it multiplies, it replicates, it takes over your microbiome, makes you sick.

 

Whereas if you have more of those healthy bacteria present, it can’t move in as easily. It has to out- compete them. They’re already living there. They’re not making space for the E. coli. It’s harder for the E. coli to grow and thrive and survive and make you sick. Sometimes people will come to my office and they’ll be like, everyone in my family ate the same food. I got sick and no one else did. And the microbiome explains why foodborne illness can affect different people differently because if you have that resilient microbiome, it’s going to be harder for that little dose of E. coli that you might have consumed to take hold. So the microbiome plays a big role in foodborne illness and who’s more susceptible and who isn’t.

 

00:27:22

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Amazing. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show and share some of this dietary knowledge with us. Really appreciate it.

 

00:27:27

Dr. Mary Sco.: It’s my pleasure.

 

00:27:29

Dr. Kaylee Byers: We’ve looked at how foodborne pathogens can make us sick and how a resilient gut microbiome can protect us, even influencing our mood all along the way. And while bacteria like E. coli are often portrayed as the villain, most strains are actually friendly residents of our gut helping with digestion and crowd control. Only a few specific types make us sick. Microbes act in all kinds of ways. To really understand how they behave and how to keep ourselves safe, we need to think bigger. Why should we use a holistic approach to study foodborne illness? Why should we think about our connections to the environment and to animals and to each other?

 

00:28:08

Dr. Lawrence Goodridge: Most foodborne illnesses are zoonotic in nature, so they’re spread from other animals to humans. All the pathogens that I’ve described today come from animals and are amplified in animals. And since we derive a large amount of food from animals, that’s one reason. Studying them can help in our control in humans. With respect to the environment, many of these organisms are also in the environment, and that could be because they come from gross contamination, for example, from the tons and tons of manure that’s produced from animals which we then put in the environment. So that can get onto plant- based foods. And so understanding that dynamic is also important. And then we have to overlay all this with climate change because climate change is leading to species of insects and even bacteria appearing in places that they never did before. Insects in particular can carry those bacteria and spread them even further afield.

 

00:29:08

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Quick plug here. We actually dug into this in our last episode on vector borne diseases. So go give it a listen if you haven’t already.

 

00:29:15

Dr. Lawrence Goodridge: And so if we don’t study these diseases in a one health approach, we risk missing many of the causes of contamination or many of the reasons for why these microorganisms are persistent in the environment. And if we don’t have that complete picture, how can we really come up with effective and sustainable ways to control them?

 

00:29:35

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Dr. Goodridge, thank you so much. I learned a lot and I really appreciate you sharing some of what you do with us.

 

00:29:42

Dr. Lawrence Goodridge: Thank you so much for inviting me.

 

00:29:44

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Everything really is connected, from the food on our plates to the animals around us to the climate we live in. Most of the microbes in that mix are our allies, keeping us healthy and balanced. But a few bad actors can spoil the whole recipe. And while genomics is helping us sort out which bacteria are friends, and which are foes, we’ve still got to play it smart. Wash your hands, cook your food, and when in doubt don’t you put it in your mouth.

 

00:30:07

MUSIC: Don’t you put it in your mouth. Don’t you put it in your mouth. Don’t you stuff it in your face. Don’t you stuff it in your face. Though it might look good to eat.

 

00:30:17

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Our guests for today were Dr. Goodridge, professor of microbiology and director of the Canadian Research Institute for Food Safety at the University of Guelph and Canada Research Chair in Foodborne Pathogen Dynamics. We were also joined by family physician and nutrition expert Dr. Mary Sco.. Special thanks to all who shared their food poisoning stories. I see you. I hear you. You are not alone. You’ve been listening to Nice Genes, a podcast brought to you by Genome British Columbia. If you like this episode, go check out some of our previous ones wherever you listen from, share it with your friends, and leave us a review. You can also DM the show on social media by going to @GenomeBC. Gut health gets plenty of attention, but not every corner of medicine has had the same share of the spotlight.

 

00:30:57

Shirley Weir: I went to my doctor and I thought, this is going to be empowering. It’s going to be a great appointment. I land in there and I’m like, I think I’m showing the first signs of menopause. And she looked at me and looked at my chart and she said, oh, you’re 41. You’re too young. And for a minute, I sat in her office and I thought, surely you need to suck it up.

 

00:31:19

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Up. Next time. We are diving into one of those overlooked frontiers, menopause, exploring the science behind a life stage that half the population experiences, but everyone should understand. As always, thank you so much for listening. And a word from the wise, stay away from any shady guacamole.

 

00:31:39

Sarge: Yeah.