The gut microbiome is the seed of disease—and the seed of a return to healing and health.
Core Thesis
Birth is the primary seeding event of life. Beyond that obvious fact, birth is the primary seeding event for the human gut microbiome, and this early microbial event primes and programs the immune system throughout the individual’s life. Moreover, it programs metabolic signaling. The seeding event of birth toils the soil of disease or health—the direct and applicable impact is long-term cancer risk.
The changing demographics of cancer are not merely a coincidence. It is something we have toiled for decades. Inadvertently, through industrial agriculture, layer after layer of environmental toxicants (pesticides, herbicides, and insecticides), and processed/ultra-processed foods have prepared the soil that has produced disease, and we are reaping what we have sown. We have Pharmed disease and pharmaceutical dependency instead of Farmed health and wellness.
“A picture is worth a thousand words.”
—unknown author
For me, life begins at conception. Yet, this first miraculous event is unseen, and thus the life impact in picture is unknown. For others, life begins with the first visible, pressured breath and cry of life at birth. Beyond that, another picture of life occurs, is unseen, and its immediate and its lifelong impact is just now being debated—the life of the gut microbiome begins at birth.
Despite the sentinel event of birth to the gut microbiome, research now indicates that seeding begins before birth. There is a concept of Epigenetic Transgenerational Inheritance of Pathology. This concept has changed how we view inheritance. Epigenetics is translated as “above genetics”. There is no debate about whether DNA, your genetic code, or your total genome is inheritable. Yet, the changes in expression of our human DNA, genetic code, and total genome to life are now known to be equally inheritable. In essence, the human experience of one’s life, stress, trauma, love, family, faith, community…alters genetic expression and is, in fact, inheritable. To be clear, it would take thousands to tens of thousands of years to see a viable shift in genetic coding inherited across generations, as in genetic drift. Yet, the lives we live, the food we eat, the people we create community with, the single events of stress, trauma, food, love, family, faith, and community, the simple choices we make, change the expression above our genetics that is immediately inheritable.
Maternal nutrition is the initial seeding event of gut microbial inheritance. A recent review of maternal diet, particularly high consumption of ultra-processed foods, linked gut microbiome changes induced by ultra-processed foods to metabolic reprogramming in their children. Obese mothers and mothers with excessive weight gain, like that found in high-fat diets, were strongly associated with increased child obesity. More than simple obesity, a high-fat maternal diet changes the very structure of the fat molecule, the crown structure, increasing pro-inflammatory interleukin-1β (IL-1β) signaling. Though not identical, a high-fat diet and an ultra-processed diet have significant overlap. Don’t forget that chronic inflammation is the bed in which cancer lies. It is the unhealthy maternal diet that seeds changes in her gut microbiome, which initiates the seeding event at birth, if vaginal, that programs the dysbiotic gut microbiome to produce an imbalanced immune system, chronic inflammation, altered metabolism, and an increase in disease. Maternal nutrition patterns, high-fat and ultra- processed diets, are one of the few mechanisms that help explain the acceleration in the changing demographics we see in cancer today.