Love bugs

Romance on a micro level

Wednesday, September 23, 2020

They were bitter rivals, locked in a disagreement about germs. It was the 1860s. Louis Pasteur believed the microorganisms crawling all over us were disease-causing and should be killed at all cost; Antoine Béchamp believed that not all the bugs were bad and that many of them living in, on and around us were, in fact, beneficial. But when Pasteur proved that the pathogens behind the milk-borne illnesses killing millions of people each year could be eliminated by heating milk, germ theory won. The age of antibiotic development and a “kill-the-pathogen-at-all-cost” mindset was born.
 
It would be well over a century before Béchamp’s proposition would circle back around. His idea that an “inner terrain” of beneficial microorganisms that help protect us from disease is now being borne out in the emerging understanding about our gut microbiome and its relationship to our immune function, an idea that fits right into the more recent shift in mindset to hang onto our health rather than try to get it back once we’ve lost it. While antibiotics are about taking out the disease once it has taken root, cultivating the soil of a good inner terrain is about keeping disease out of the garden in the first place.  As Harvard doctor Jeff Rediger puts it in Cured, his new book on the science of spontaneous healing and recovery, antibiotics are the ambulances waiting at the bottom of the cliff to save people when they go over (and thank goodness for those ambulances!) while a healthy microbiome is the guardrail on the top of the mountain to prevent people from falling off in the first place.
 
There is still much mystery around the nature of that inner terrain and the guardrail it provides. We are learning more all the time about these loveable little bugs that make up our own personal microbiomes and how all our ecosystems interact with and serve each other. In fact, I found out recently it can be downright romantic. This microbial interaction was the reason Christina Pratley, a Northern Light Mayo infection preventionist, theorized her homemade kombucha tasted better than store bought – hers, after all, was built on the environmental microbiome of her family, a particularly delicious microbiome combination as it turned out! In a poignant, poetic way, her theory proved out because five years ago when Christina lost her husband, her kombucha never tasted as good again. Like a vineyard’s terroir, her husband was part of the soil, the topography and the climate. She’s bought her kombucha from a store ever since.
 
There is magic in our microbial relationships. And cultivating a good relationship with our microbiome is a not a bad idea considering the profound benefit of being in possession of a top notch immune system right now. Ever since reading Cured, I’ve been re-thinking all that pandemic cake I’ve been tilling into my terrain. It might be time to give my bugs a little love.
 
On that note, have a great, fizzy day!  In fact, today would be an excellent one to treat yourself to a kombucha, a delicious fermented tea that will bring some probiotic love to your soil.