Dr. Suzanne Devkota

The education of our immune system by a microbe starts from the moment we're born.

Looking at the early life microbiome, the first year of life tells you a lot about the interactions with the immune system and the gut microbiome.

There's...

a lot of research now on this really critical window where a baby is born essentially sterile, no microbes, until they get the first bugs from their mother.

And immune cells, as more bacteria start to colonize the gut, so do more immune cells start to develop in the intestines as well.

And what's really interesting is there's this weaning period, weaning meaning when you go from breast or formula on to

your native diet or table foods or adult diet.

And that introduction of food, you had this rapid expansion of immune cells in the infant.

And a lot of that is attributed to the more diverse foods you eat, the more diverse microbes that colonize the gut.

And so there's this beautiful evolutionary conserved interplay between

microbes colonizing immune cells growing, which you want.

That's a good thing.

You want diverse immune cells so that when you grow up and see different foods, as Tim said, and different life exposures, you don't react and auto-react.

And so there's a lot of studies saying, okay, what happens when we mess that up and we give babies a lot of antibiotics early in life or something like that?

And studies show that their immune system doesn't develop as well as their microbes don't also.

And the hypothesis being, could that be predisposing infants, children to autoimmune conditions, airway allergies, food allergies, and so on?

So I think we study a lot what happens in adults, the defects that happen in adults, but a lot of it starts very early in life.

Yeah.

There are certain things you can, you know, you have to slowly introduce diversity in, but there's a window where you make choices about what you can expose a baby to and training a diverse palate, right?

And spices and flavors and trained diversity in food, you know, preferences early actually will