The Brain Has Bacteria? What the Brain Microbiome Means for Health and Longevity | William Li

0:00William Li:Welcome to Live Well Be Well, a show to help high performers improve their health and well-being.

0:10William Li:One thing that I've heard you speak about recently is the brain microbiome, which I haven't really heard of before. I mean, it's interesting because we focus so much on the gut microbiome, but we've got the skin microbiome, we've got so many different types of microbiome, the gut, the mouth, all of it. Talk to me about the brain microbiome. Okay. So again, I'm going to come back to my medical school training. And I'm sharing this really for listeners and viewers because, you know, we count on doctors to be up on things. And I can tell you that we were taught certain things that we to believe as truth.

0:47And the nature of science is that things change as we learn more. And what we're learning more about the human body, just when we thought we knew pretty much everything there was to know about the body, we're discovering new nerve cells in the brain, new types of things. heart tissue, new kinds of stem cells. I mean, it's really mind-boggling what we're learning about the body. I will tell you the, again, when I was in medical school, I had to, in the first year, memorize bacteria. And along with the mantra that came along with memorizing bacteria was must kill bacteria. Then you had to memorize antibiotics, must use prescribed drugs to kill bacteria because bacteria are bad and they cause disease.

1:29Well, actually, as it turns out, most of the bacteria that we meet in our lives are not bad bacteria. Occasionally, we meet some bad guys. Most of the time, we are surrounded by and we are inhabited by beneficial bacteria that are good for us. We're surrounded by good guys and occasionally have a bad guy that needs to be put to rest. Now, we were also told in medical school that certain parts of the brain were sterile, guaranteed sterile. For example, mother's milk, completely sterile. There's no bacteria in mother's milk because mother nature said you can't infect the baby, so it's sterile. Totally wrong.

2:10The mother's milk, the first suckle is filled with not only nutrients that we didn't appreciate before, but also bacteria that populate the the baby's gut. So mom transfers back healthy bacteria into the baby just with the first suckle, number one. Number two, we were told that urine was also sterile. And if you had bacteria in your urine, you had a bladder infection. That's still kind of the, the, the wisdom, the prevailing wisdom that's out there, but actually the bladder has its own microbiome. Okay. And it's healthy bacteria. So when you have a bladder infection, it's a dysbiosis. It's a a disturbance of what's natural.

2:49Other sterile parts of the body, human semen was always thought to be sterile. It doesn't have bacteria. You can't have testicles loaded with bacteria. Wrong. We do actually have normal, healthy bacteria that live in the testicles as well. Interesting, right? So let's go to the brain. Of all the places that you do not want to have an infection, it's your brain, right? Meningitis is the lining of the brain getting infected. You have like a brain infection. When I was training to be a doctor was, you know, synonymous with a life-threatening infection that you might not be able to cure, all right, with whatever antibiotics.

3:33Well, it turns out now, because we're looking for healthy bacteria, the brain has its own healthy microbiome. It has its own bacteria, which to me is like a, it's a jaw-dropping thing to think about healthy bacteria living inside our brain. Number one, how does it get there? How do they get there? Number two, what are they doing in there, right? And we do know that bacteria and nerves communicate, like through the vagus nerve. And geez, do we think that the bacteria in our gut hitched a ride up the vagus nerve and like taking an Uber and get dropped off in our brain? Maybe so.

4:11William Li:I love this analogy. Just imagine it. It's a remarkable area of research. And I think it causes those of us who, medical researchers like me get really excited by these discoveries because it means, you know, there's so much more for us to learn that can provide hope to people for good health span, for example, or overcoming disease. I also think that it forces us to assume a kind of humility in the medical community that even though we thought we knew a lot and where we have some tools that we can actually use, how little we actually know about how to heal. And this is why we need to respect Mother Nature, why we need to listen to our bodies, because your doctor can't x-ray everything, blood test everything.

5:00This is why biohacking is a useful tool to monitor. I mean, doctors biohack all the time. We take all kinds of tests, but we can't measure what we don't appreciate yet. And so I think this is why I always tell people the first thing you need to do is to think about, reconnect with how your body feels. Listen to your body because it will be sending signals to you, communicating with you in ways that a doctor's test may not actually reveal.

5:33William Li:Thanks so much for listening. To hear the full episode, there's a link in the description.

5:44Thank you.