EP236: The Microbiome Connection: Optimizing Health from the Inside Out - Jason Hawrelak, ND, PhD

Dr. Hawrelak's Journey to Microbiome Research03:00

It was actually in my final year of my naturopathic training and there was a lecture put on by Professor Steven Myers who's a medical doctor and a naturopathic physician and a PhD scientist and he gave a talk on the role of dysbiosis and leaky gut in chronic disease. This is back in 1999. And he's like piecing together all this stuff which was more so animal studies and things like that at the time. But it just something about the topic is like going hey you know naturopaths have always said it all comes back to the gut. Hippocrates said it all comes back to the gut and here we're piecing together with you know research going yeah it's supporting that and then right after and that was essentially it's coming towards the end of my training and I was like okay I approached him right after the lecture and said I want to research this I want to contribute to that body of the connections between leaky gut dysbiotic you know bacterial ecosystems and chronic disease and so I subsequently did my honors degree and then PhD looking at the role of dysbiosis and we chose a condition that in the late 90s had a bit of research showing there's a dysbiotic ecosystem associated with and that was irritable bowel syndrome. And that was kind of the poster child of dysbiosis back in the '90s. You know, you look at the literature, the stuff on some IBD, the stuff on IBS, but IBS had research from 1980s showing like dysbiotic changes in the ecosystem and you had had probiotic studies going back 1950s showing efficacy for treatment of IBS. We're like, okay, let's choose that as our poster child of dysbiosis and really just gave me a chance to spend, you know, my honors degree was one year. Australia honors degree is like a research degree and we were at clinical clinical trial in that first year you know and then you my PhD went for four years five years of just like full-time just doing microbiome research and reading all the papers and at that time you could read all the papers on the microbiome I think that's the incredible thing is where we've gone from you know I think it was 300 papers published a year on the what we call the microflora back in the day and probiotics and prebiotics you know that topic was you know four or 500 papers a year is quite achievable to read as a PhD student. It's not a big ask. But you go forward now to 30,000 papers published year. It's a different story and it just shows how much that area has boomed at the end of any time.

The Evolution of Microbiome Research06:00

But it's still I said that that lecture just of his and he became my PhD supervisor later on and he guided me through that sort of process. But yeah, I'm just lucky that I chose a topic that I was one passionate about and two becomes this you know everyone's talking about the microbiome now which was not necessarily the case back in the '90s early 2000s. With naturopaths, it was functional doctors. If we had doctors that were talking about the importance of the microbes and conventional medicine for the most part was just ignoring all everything to do with the microbiome like ah they're just bacteria it doesn't matter if you kill them you know it makes no difference at all and there's a small group of microbiome researchers even then who said this stuff is these bugs are important you know it does matter if we kill them antibiotics do have long-lasting impacts beyond just like the short impact on the microbiome composition etc and that you know went from you relatively small group of microbiome researchers now there's like tens of thousands around the world which is really again adding to why we've got such a huge body of knowledge now around the microbiome compared to what we used to have.

Clinical Practice During Research06:30