This video a US interview on The Agenda
Interview on Lateline (excerpt)
TONY JONES: Indeed. Let's look at some of the areas you focus on in your book and the first one is the possible link between obesity and gut bacteria. Are there studies which show the difference between the gut bacteria of obese and normal weight people?
GIULIA ENDERS: Yes, there are plenty of studies, actually. And we see, for example, that there are some bacteria that can be found in people with higher weight. I would - I like to call them the "chubby bacteria" because we see that they can actually harvest more calories out of the food you eat. And we see that overweight people, they - when they go to the toilet, there are less calories that they excrete and other people, they just excrete more of the calories they take and up and - and then we see that there are things like diversity. Having a more diverse ecosystem will actually be a very protective thing for people struggling with overweight. We see that some diets, when they work on a person and they don't work in another person, there was a study that showed that it worked when it altered the gut flora. So all those things are interesting and I think in terms of diversity, also interesting when we think about the definition of what is clean and what is cleanliness, because we see it's more diversity and not trying to sheltering off things that might be not good all the time. It's really more a balance thing of trying to get the good stuff just as well as protecting from the bad. (Lateline ABC July 2015)
TONY JONES: Now, from early on in your book you looked at the connections between the gut and some mental illnesses and you were inspired in fact by the suicide of a fellow student, who, as it turned out, also had very bad halitosis and I think you made a connection with that person and wondered whether that sort of connection might exist with other forms of mental illness, whether there was a genuine connection between the gut and the brain. Is there real science around this now?
GIULIA ENDERS: There is and I was really surprised because this was an event that of course touched me and it really didn't - those things, they stick with you. And it was the reason why I got into reading more about this area and then I found that there was already a huge area and people doing great research on this topic. And I think the idea behind it is not so crazy when you think that the brain is very isolated. It has a bony skull and a thick skin around and it needs to get information to know how am I doing, to put together this feeling of how am I doing. And it gets information from eyes, ears, from all sensory cells around the body it can get it's information, but the gut really is our biggest sensory organ. It has - it knows all the molecules from the food, knows the hormones in our blood, it can test them with receptors, then it is the host to those trillions of bacteria and to all the things they produce. There's two-thirds of our immune system. So it really has a lot of information to gather and send up to the brain. And we see especially with people with irritable bowel syndrome or also inflammatory bowel disease that they have a higher risk of having anxiety or depression. And I think this is information that we are now really researching how much can it influence, how big is the piece of the cake. But I think the information that we are already have this as a theory that we are looking into that, that's pretty neat and that's a very new thing to follow up. (Lateline ABC July 2015)
GIULIA ENDERS: There is and I was really surprised because this was an event that of course touched me and it really didn't - those things, they stick with you. And it was the reason why I got into reading more about this area and then I found that there was already a huge area and people doing great research on this topic. And I think the idea behind it is not so crazy when you think that the brain is very isolated. It has a bony skull and a thick skin around and it needs to get information to know how am I doing, to put together this feeling of how am I doing. And it gets information from eyes, ears, from all sensory cells around the body it can get it's information, but the gut really is our biggest sensory organ. It has - it knows all the molecules from the food, knows the hormones in our blood, it can test them with receptors, then it is the host to those trillions of bacteria and to all the things they produce. There's two-thirds of our immune system. So it really has a lot of information to gather and send up to the brain. And we see especially with people with irritable bowel syndrome or also inflammatory bowel disease that they have a higher risk of having anxiety or depression. And I think this is information that we are now really researching how much can it influence, how big is the piece of the cake. But I think the information that we are already have this as a theory that we are looking into that, that's pretty neat and that's a very new thing to follow up. (Lateline ABC July 2015)
You can find the interview with Tony Jones at ABC here (If it is still available)
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