Why Parking is Such a Problem & How Microbes Influence Our Lives - SYSK Choice

Are you one of the many people who enjoys a morning cup of coffee? If so, listen to the beginning of this episode which explains why you should smell your coffee when you drink it because it can help you think better and be more productive. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6881620/ In many urban areas, the number one use of land is for – parking. In fact, the United States has 4 parking spaces for every car. So, it makes you wonder then why it is so hard to find a parking spot when you need one. You are about to find out why from my guest Henry Grabar. He is a staff writer at Slate, and author of the book Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World (https://amzn.to/3RyHcbq). Listen and you will understand why parking is such a big deal. Microbes are those tiny organisms you can’t see without using a microscope. This includes things such as germs, bacteria, and fungi. Microbes have a reputation of being something dangerous – that can cause illness. While that is true for some microbes, most of them don’t cause harm and some are even good for you. This should come as good news since you have trillions of microbes on you and inside of you. Here to take us on a journey through the invisible world of microbes is Jake Robinson. He is a microbial ecologist and author of the book Invisible Friends: How Microbes Shape our Lives and the World Around Us (https://amzn.to/44pGRwR) Many people claim to have food allergies – that actually don’t have them. They just think they do. What they really have is a food intolerance and there is a big difference. Listen as I explain. https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/food-allergy/expert-answers/food-allergy/faq-20058538 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Mike Carruthers?

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• 1:27Mike Carruthers?

  Today on Something You Should Know, if you drink coffee in the morning, you might want to take a whiff of it too. Then, parking your car. Parking has changed the way we live and taken up a lot of our space.

• 1:40Speaker 01

  You know, we could pave a small state with the amount of land we have dedicated for parking. There are between four and nine parking spaces per vehicle in this country. There is more space for parking each car than there is for housing each person.

• 1:55Mike Carruthers?

  Also, the important difference between a food allergy and a food intolerance. And microbes, those little invisible organisms like germs and bacteria, they get a bad rap.

• 2:07Speaker 02

  We've had this quite negative, demonizing view of microbes, that microscopic organisms cause diseases, and a few microbes do cause disease, but many of them, over 99%, are actually harmless to us or really beneficial and vital for our survival.

• 2:21Mike Carruthers?

  All this today on Something You Should Know.

• 2:26Mike Carruthers?

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• 4:22Mike Carruthers?

  Hi, welcome to Something You Should Know. I've been a big coffee drinker most of my life. I'm one of those people that really needs to have a cup of coffee in the morning. Maybe you are too. And it's always been thought, in fact, there used to be a marketing campaign. Coffee was the think-drink, that it was supposed to help you concentrate and think better. Well, maybe drinking coffee does that, but smelling coffee has an effect as well. If you take the time to smell your coffee before you drink it, there's some science that says it can have a powerful effect on your brain. Specifically, inhaling the fragrance of coffee can enhance working memory and stimulate alertness.

• 5:05Mike Carruthers?

  So drinking coffee may help you stay alert and be more productive, but drinking and smelling coffee can be even better. And that is something you should know. If you drive a car, there is one big part of that whole experience that you don't think about a lot, except when you have to, and that is parking. Because no matter how convenient it is to have a car, you have to have a place to put it everywhere you go. Parking can be a hassle, it can be expensive, and in some places, virtually impossible to find. Then, of course, there is paid parking and parking meters, which can result in expensive

• 5:48Mike Carruthers?

  parking tickets if you don't feed the meter. See, parking really is a big deal. In fact, did you know that in many US cities, parking is the number-one land use? And it has literally shaped the landscape in many parts of the world. Here to explain how and why you should care is Henry Grabar. Henry is a staff writer at Slate and author of the book, "Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World." Hey, Henry, welcome to Something You Should Know.

• 6:19Speaker 01

  Pleasure to be here.

• 6:20Mike Carruthers?

  So when I think about the subject of parking, it doesn't feel like that's much of a subject, except that, you know, parking is something you complain about, there's never enough of it, you can't find a spot when you need it. So why dive into this topic? Why is this so interesting?

• 6:37Speaker 01

  I think people rarely think about it and sometimes say to me, well, that sounds like sort of a boring thing to write a book about. But then, once you get them on the subject and they start talking about parking, you realize that everybody is full of opinions about parking and actually, everybody spends a lot of time thinking about it. The realization that I had was that I realized I was surrounded by parking. I mean, once you start to see it as the number one land use in many American cities, you can't stop seeing it. And it pops out everywhere. And once you begin to understand its cost and its effect on landscape and the architecture and our travel patterns and our housing costs, you never look at it the same way again.

• 7:17Mike Carruthers?

  So when you say that parking is the number one land use in many cities, explain what you mean, because that's, that's hard to imagine.

• 7:26Speaker 01

  There is more space for parking each car in this country than there is for housing each person. I think you can, you can sometimes see this when you, if you look at a satellite image of downtown Kansas City or Columbus, Ohio, or Little Rock, the parking lots really stand out. It is the dominant feature of the landscape. And in fact, we actually require this by law, that many buildings consist, more than half of the property has to be devoted to parking, which is to say, for your square footage, let's say you run a restaurant, for every hundred square feet of restaurant, you have to provide one parking space. Well, a parking space is bigger than a hundred square feet.

• 8:11Speaker 01

  So you're essentially, you're essentially legislating that every restaurant have more space for parking than space for restaurant.

• 8:18Mike Carruthers?

  And those kind of rules apply where? Because obviously, you couldn't make that the rule in New York or Chicago, because there's no room for, you couldn't open a restaurant, because there's no room for those parking spots.

• 8:33Speaker 01

  Well, those are the rules almost everywhere. Now, places like New York and Chicago have decided that they are sufficiently dense that it doesn't make sense to require somebody opening a new restaurant to provide two dozen parking spaces. But that remains the law in most American cities and suburbs. And so when you think about the American architectural vernacular, you know, you're driving down a, you know, six lane road, you've got these sort of stores and restaurants and retail set behind parking lots on each side of the road, that style of architecture is really the architecture of parking requirements. Because if you're required to build that much parking, that's just what the architecture ends up looking

• 9:17Speaker 01

  like. It's like the built American form follows from the requirement of providing parking. And that's how we get what the country looks like today.

• 9:27Mike Carruthers?

  Yeah, with a lot, a lot of strip malls where the front of it is, it's like an L shape and the front of it is all parking.

• 9:34Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 9:35Mike Carruthers?

  And it's really ugly.

• 9:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, I, I find it personally not my favorite type of architecture. And what's funny is I think a lot of Americans share this sense that we don't build things the way we used to, that there's this kind of sense that like, both for residential and commercial architecture, that there was this golden era in American history where we built things we liked, and we stopped doing that. And I would suggest to you that one of the main reasons we stopped doing that was that we imposed the obligation to provide parking. And providing parking just creates unattractive buildings. It creates buildings that are separated from the street by a huge parking lot. It makes it basically impossible to renovate any historic structures, because you have to provide a certain number of parking spaces.

• 10:22Speaker 01

  So you basically have to demolish the building next door. And if you've looked at like a new office building or condo tower in an American downtown, look at the bottom like six to eight floors. I almost guarantee you they are used for parking. And in fact, there are some buildings that like by the number of floors are more than half parking. So what you're really building is a parking garage with a little bit of apartment or a little bit of office on top.

• 10:48Mike Carruthers?

  So I find it surprising that parking is the number one land use in many communities. What else about parking would I find surprising?

• 10:58Speaker 01

  Well, I think one of the ones that that always grabs me right away is that there are between four and nine parking spaces per vehicle in this country. So that means that the national parking stock is only 25% full at its fullest moment. And of course, some of those cars are in motion. So when you think about how full parking is, how hard it is to find a parking spot, there is just an unbelievable quantity of parking in this country. And so I think that that's one of the things that grabs people right away is, you know, we could pave a small state with the amount of land we have dedicated for parking, which

• 11:39Speaker 01

  suggests that perhaps building more parking is not the solution to making it easier to find a parking spot.

• 11:47Mike Carruthers?

  Well, wait a minute. How can that be? Because that is not people's experience frequently, that there's all this abundant parking. It's often very difficult to find a parking spot. So reconcile that.

• 12:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's this crazy paradox, right? So much land for parking, and yet when I need a parking spot, it's so hard to find one. I think there's a there's three reasons that this happens. The first one is that parking is not shared, right? So we talked about how every apartment building, every office, every courthouse, every movie theater has to provide their own parking spaces. Well, in most cities by law, the office and the condo can't double up and share a garage. And they definitely can't share that garage with the people who are going to the sub shop next door. And what that means is that when you arrive in a place that appears to have a lot of parking, you quickly realize that each lot is actually proprietary and belongs to a certain business, a certain apartment, et cetera.

• 12:47Speaker 01

  So it looks like a lot of parking, but when you need one, it's not necessarily available. The second big part of that is that the parking is free. And because the best street parking in most places is free, it becomes really hard to get a spot there. And if you just charge even a little bit for that really good parking, people who would otherwise get there early in the morning and park all day will park a little further away. And then when you show up at lunch, or to run an errand, or to do a delivery, there'll be a parking space available to you. I mean, you might have to pay a couple quarters for it, but that's better than driving around the block 100 times.

• 13:26Mike Carruthers?

  Is there any sense or any statistic about how much the typical car owner pays to park their car?

• 13:36Speaker 01

  Most people park for free most of the time. I would say upwards of 90% of the time, people park for free. And when you, in fact, parking, free parking is basically the number one determinant of car ownership and car use. So it's one of the great ironies about parking is that one of the reasons we built so much parking, we required people to build so much parking, was that we were very concerned about traffic. Like, traffic was a total nightmare in American cities in the 1940s and 50s. And the reason for this, people thought, was that there wasn't enough parking. So they built all this free parking, and one of the great ironies is that all that free parking encouraged many, many more people

• 14:21Speaker 01

  to buy cars and drive them everywhere. And as the urban environment degraded with more and more parking lots taking the place of buildings, it became more and more challenging to, say, walk or ride a bike or take transit to a new destination. And so in this way, parking is like, it's like a narcotic, right? Like, the more you have of it, the more you need.

• 14:42Mike Carruthers?

  Well, you know, when I saw your book and I started thinking about this, what I find interesting is, I don't take Ubers or Lyft very often, but I would say at least half of the time that I do, it's not because I don't want to drive, it's because I don't want to park.

• 14:59Speaker 01

  I believe it. I think that, you know, one of the, one of the other statistics that grabbed me when I first heard it is that studies estimate that a third of downtown traffic is people looking for a place to park.

• 15:15Speaker 01

  So that's you, right? That's, that's you, uh, driving around in circles, looking for a place to park. I agree, it's maddening, and it encourages people to, uh, to stop, to stop driving. And that, that just goes to show that if you want to control traffic, if you want to control emissions, cut down on car crashes, on pollutants that drift into the windows of people's apartments, parking is the lever. And I think that's what you're experiencing there, is that the challenge of parking motivates you to find another way to get around.

• 15:47Mike Carruthers?

  I'm speaking with Henry Grabar, and the name of his book is "Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World."

• 15:55Mike Carruthers?

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• 18:51Mike Carruthers?

  So go to shopbeam.com/sysk now. That's shopbeam.com/sysk. So, Henry, does it work when communities, city governments, institute paid parking to replace free parking to discourage people from parking? Does that work?

• 19:16Speaker 01

  In most cases, it does. And here's why. Paid parking works best, these city planners say, when it's not designed to raise money. The point of paid parking should be to organize the way people park and how long they park for. So you push the people who are parking all day into the spots a little further away and the people who are parking for a shorter amount of time can park closer. Unfortunately, in the last, you know, 70 years, many governments have thought of parking meters simply as a way to raise money for motorists. And I think that is not the purpose of parking meters. The purpose of parking meters is to organize parking demand. It's the only way we have because otherwise, it's just a total free-for-all.

• 19:59Mike Carruthers?

  Well, I know there are a lot of communities that, for example, at Christmas, they'll put little hoods over the parking meters and let you park for free. So obviously, that's to encourage more business, which would... What I infer from that is by having parking meters, you discourage business.

• 20:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, unfortunately, I think a lot of those communities have it backwards. The problem with hooding the parking meters is that, let's say, I want to run to Aaron downtown. I'll drive there and I will leave my car there all day, right? And I'll go around and do whatever. In fact, you know who's going to leave their car there all day? Is the people who work in the stores. They're the people who get their first thing in the morning. They may usually pay for parking in a garage or park further away. But when the meters are hooded, they're going to park right in front of the shop. And when you show up at 2:00 PM to do your Christmas shopping, you will find that there is no place to park and you'll get mad. And you might even drive to the suburbs and shop at the mall. So I think free parking downtown is pretty much a losing proposition for business owners if there's not enough parking.

• 21:03Speaker 01

  Sure, if you're in some tiny country town where there's, you know, only 100 people live there, yeah, you don't need to make anybody pay for parking. But in a congested city district, it's the only way to make sure that there are spaces available. And I think most people, they don't like paying for parking. But when push comes to shove, they prefer paying for parking to looking for a space for 20 minutes and then giving up and driving away.

• 21:27Mike Carruthers?

  Is parking a good business to be in?

• 21:31Speaker 01

  I would say it's a simple business to be in. I mean, for decades, parking was the largest all cash business in the United States.

• 21:38Mike Carruthers?

  What?

• 21:38Speaker 01

  And yeah, yeah, because, you know, everybody, you know, the whole, the whole parking industry was just collecting cash in boxes nationwide at sports stadiums, downtowns, airports, everywhere. And this created, obviously, this made it a very lucrative business to be in, especially if you weren't properly reporting your income to the IRS.

• 22:04Mike Carruthers?

  So you said that, you know, if we build more parking, then more cars show up to take it. And so that doesn't work. And then if you charge a lot for parking, people really hate that. So what's the solution where everybody's happy?

• 22:20Speaker 01

  Well, I think one solution is the one that we did in the United States, which is you build so much parking that there's not really anything left to drive to. And that's kind of what happened in a lot of American downtowns. They were obsessed with this idea that to compete with the suburbs, they needed to provide as much free and ample parking as possible. And it turns out that if your number one priority is free parking, downtown is never going to beat a mall in the suburbs. It's just never going to compete. And so, you know, one solution we ended up with is you build so much parking that it's not hard to find a spot, but also there's not that much to do because your town is mostly parking.

• 23:06Speaker 01

  The other option, which I think is coming into fashion now, is to try and find ways to manage demand for parking. So that could take the form of parking meters, trying to discourage people from maybe parking all day on Main Street or encouraging them to carpool instead of the whole family, everyone driving down in their own car. And the other element, I think, is to help people try not to drive so much if they want to, right? Like, obviously, many people depend on their cars and need their cars to go about their business in America. It's a vast and sprawling country, I recognize that. But lots of people actually live within a pretty close distance

• 23:50Speaker 01

  of the errands they do every day, whether it's taking the kids to school or going to work or going to the coffee shop or going to the grocery store. The average trip in this country is under three miles. So that's a distance that could be done on a foot or electric bicycle or on a golf cart or something like that, or on a bus. And unfortunately, those modes of travel have become really challenging. And one of the reasons I think that it's so hard to not drive everywhere is, in fact, precisely because of parking. I mean, you see this trade off in major cities where cities will not build protected bike lanes for people to get safely from destination to destination on a bicycle because they are afraid of taking away a lane of parking

• 24:35Speaker 01

  that's used for parked cars.

• 24:36Mike Carruthers?

  But if you take away parking for buses or whatever, bike lanes, you add to the traffic because now people are having to keep driving to find a place somewhere else to park their car, which clogs the roads, which upsets drivers, which upsets bicyclists. So you're really creating more trouble.

• 24:58Speaker 01

  That was the thinking for most of the 20th century in most US cities. And I get it, it's really intuitive. This idea that if you take away parking and most traffic is people looking for parking, then you are going to create more traffic, make people mad. They're going to leave and go to the suburbs. But I think what the parking reformers are arguing for is not so much, let's get rid of all the parking, but let's manage it, you know? Let's price the busiest parking. Let's get rid of some parking spots where it makes it possible to create a way for people to get around another way, in a bus, on a bike, et cetera. And, and, you know, let's, let's, for example, direct people away from the main street

• 25:42Speaker 01

  right in front of the shops and into the public garage a few blocks away if they're parking for more than three or four hours. Like, those are the kinds of policies that can both, I think, reduce demand for parking, but also ultimately for people who are looking for parking, make it easier for them to park.

• 26:00Mike Carruthers?

  There are people, again, I kind of put myself in this category, who just hate to pay for parking. It's kind of like ATM fees or high gas prices. It isn't that it's necessarily a lot of money. It's the principle of the thing. Like, I guess that's that kind of entitlement that, you know, it's a public street and you should be able to park on it and, you know, not charge me for it and give me a ticket when my meter runs out and now I've got to pay 50 bucks. And that I, I, there's something about it that just really rubs me in. And I think a lot of people the wrong way.

• 26:36Speaker 01

  Why do you feel that way about parking and not about, say, any other good or service you consume?

• 26:43Mike Carruthers?

  I didn't say, I, I haven't, I have the same thing about ATM fees and high gas prices. So it isn't just parking. It's, there's something about it, though, that, you know, that public street is just as much mine as anybody else's and, and, but I even don't like valet parking. I mean, I don't, I, I just think it's such a ripoff because I can park my own car. Just give me a spot, I'll be fine. I don't need you.

• 27:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, I I get it. I, you know, I don't like paying for parking either. Nobody, to be sure, nobody likes paying for parking. I think the question is not, do we want to pay for parking? The question is, do we want to accept the trade offs that come with free parking everywhere all the time? And in the case of basically the last century of American planning, we've learned that free parking for everyone all the time is a recipe for traffic congestion, high housing costs, ugly architecture, dangerous streets, and ultimately, a place that's less accessible, not more accessible.

• 27:49Mike Carruthers?

  Well, it would seem that there's gonna have to be, for any of this to work, some sort of collective mind shift about this whole thing, because I think people who drive cars believe that if they drive a car somewhere, they're entitled to a place to put it. Even if they have to pay for it, there should be a place to put it. Otherwise, they're not gonna drive there. And it's an entitlement almost. And to change that mindset is, seems like it's gonna be hard.

• 28:22Speaker 01

  I think one thing to drive home about parking is that it feels like it costs nothing because it's free for you most of the time. But building parking is actually really, really expensive. Like, just building a parking lot can cost five, $10,000 a space, and building a parking garage can cost $50,000 a space. And if it's underground, it can be up to $100,000 a space. And so, when we ask for more parking, we are folding in hidden and massive costs that aren't paid for by drivers when they show up at the parking garage, but they're paid for by everybody else. If you rent an apartment in a building with a 50

• 29:05Speaker 01

  space parking garage, the cost of building that garage is folded into your rent, whether you drive or not. And I don't think that's fair.

• 29:14Mike Carruthers?

  Well, after listening to you, I don't, I don't think I'm gonna look at parking quite the same way again. I've been talking to Henry Grabar. He is a staff writer at Slate, and the name of his book is Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Appreciate it. Thanks, Henry.

• 29:33Speaker 01

  All right. Thanks a lot. Take care.

• 29:36Mike Carruthers?

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• 33:12Mike Carruthers?

  Shape Our Lives and the World Around Us. Hi Jake, welcome to Something You Should Know.

• 33:17Speaker 02

  Hi Mike, thank you very much.

• 33:19Mike Carruthers?

  So what are microbes? What does that word "microbe" mean?

• 33:23Speaker 02

  So a microbe is any organism that you essentially need a microscope to see. So any living thing that's invisible to the naked eye. So these include things like bacteria, fungi, also known as fungi, fungi, depending where you are in the world, algae, these tiny organisms called archaea. And so these prefer extreme environments, things like hot springs, but they also occur in the human body too. There's protozoa as well, so these are tiny animal-like creatures. And some consider viruses to be microbes too. But there's a debate about whether they're alive or not, and most people would say that they're not alive.

• 34:03Speaker 02

  And so microbes are everywhere, they're inside us, they're on us, they're in the environment around us, in the soils, on plant leaves, in the air. So yeah, they're essentially any organism that you wouldn't be able to see with the naked eye.

• 34:17Mike Carruthers?

  So things like germs, those are microbes because you can't see them. Anything you can't see is a microbe.

• 34:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, anything that's living is a microscopic organism, or a microbe for short.

• 34:27Mike Carruthers?

  And you study them, why? What is it about them that fascinates you? And why is it important to shine a light on this?

• 34:37Speaker 02

  So over the kind of last 150 years or so, we've had this quite negative, demonizing view of microbes. Because germ theory suggested that microscopic organisms cause diseases. And a few microbes do cause disease. But many of them, over 99%, are actually harmless to us, or really beneficial and vital for our survival. And so I'm trying to change the narrative, along with many other people, that, you know, we need to look at microbes in a more positive way and try and understand their functional roles in keeping us alive and all of our life alive on the planet.

• 35:13Mike Carruthers?

  Isn't that interesting? That the general sense is that microbes, little germy things, are bad for you when you say that, you know, 99% of them are not. So I wonder how they got that reputation.

• 35:29Speaker 02

  Sure, I mean, we didn't know much about them until the 19th century. Germ theory kind of, you know, is this leading theory that suggested that we really need an explanation for why so many people had diseases and why so many people were dying. And so it's just sort of, it created a storm from there, I guess, that, you know, microbes are bad. And we didn't have the technology to understand that microbes can actually do good things as well. And they're really complex communities of life. And so the last sort of 10, well, between 10 and 30 years, we've developed much more advanced technology in order to understand them at the community level.

• 36:06Mike Carruthers?

  So I have all these microbes, probably millions, billions of microbes in my body, yes?

• 36:13Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm, yeah.

• 36:14Mike Carruthers?

  How'd they get there?

• 36:15Speaker 02

  Trillions.

• 36:17Speaker 02

  So they get there from largely from the environment around us. So when we're born, we we pick them up from our mothers, we pick them up from our food, we pick them up from spending time in the natural environments around us. And so we're we emit actually with this kind of constant flux between our bodies and the environment around us. So we emit emit a million biological particles every single hour. So every one of us is kind of surrounded by this microbial cloud that's emitting from our body. But we're also ingesting and we're also inhaling millions of microscopic organisms every single day. And so again, it's this kind of two way exchange between our bodies and our environments.

• 36:55Mike Carruthers?

  And these microbes, trillions, you say, that I have in my body, do they all play a role? Or is this just very benign they're passing through? Or why are they there?

• 37:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, so many of them will be benign. So many of them will just be fleeting. But some of them will play really important roles in keeping you alive. So some microbes are really important for digestion in the body. So what you eat, it needs to be broken down in order so that you can use the the micronutrients. Some microbes are important in cell signaling. And so they produce chemicals that allow our cells to communicate. So every cell in our body is needed, requires these chemicals in order to communicate with each other. And the thought to be important in brain health, lots of different things in our bodies. Yeah, so they play important functional roles in keeping us alive.

• 37:46Mike Carruthers?

  And do we all have basically the same microbes in our body? I mean, what are the chances that the microbes in my body are more or less the same as the ones in your body? Or are they really different?

• 38:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it'll be likely very different. So you'll likely have different species in there, depending on how you treat your body, how what kind of food you eat, whether you exercise regularly, whether you spend time in certain environments, how much pollution you're exposed to, these kind of things, these all affect your your walking ecosystem. So your body is essentially a walking ecosystem. And yeah, so your microbiome will be quite different to somebody else's, but it might be more similar to someone you you live with because you're kind of exchanging microbes with the people that you interact with every day. So yeah, it would likely be quite different to mine because I'm at the other side of the world, not interacting with you.

• 38:39Mike Carruthers?

  And if you were to, you know, crack each of us open and take a look, like, is one better than the other or they're just different?

• 38:49Speaker 02

  Defining a healthy microbiome is an ongoing debate at the minute. So it's kind of difficult to define and sort of extrapolate to everybody across the world. So each of us have different requirements and one microbiome might look different to the other, but it might not necessarily be healthier than the other. So there's an ongoing debate at the minute. It's likely that our microbiomes will be very different, but everybody has kind of different requirements and different species. But there's also a concept called functional redundancies. So even though you might have different species in your body to mine, they may have the same functional roles, you know, in providing chemicals and all sorts of different compounds our bodies need.

• 39:29Mike Carruthers?

  So we hear things like, you know, oh, you should take probiotics and then because that's good for your microbiome. And what is, is that all nonsense? Or is there some science there or what?

• 39:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, so there is some science. It's some of it's conflicting. So we need more evidence, need more randomized control trials. But there is some evidence that suggests that taking probiotics can improve the balance, the ratio of, you know, healthy or good microbes to these opportunistic pathogens for sure. And it makes sense as well. And, you know, prebiotics are really important as well. So these are the foods that your microbes feed on. And so having diverse prebiotics in the form of diverse vegetables and fruits, et cetera, provides the nutrients that a healthy gut ecosystem requires. And so that's good for you as well.

• 40:16Mike Carruthers?

  Well, what about the supplements, the probiotic supplements? Because they can be quite expensive. Are they worth it?

• 40:23Speaker 02

  I think this decent evidence, but not, it's not compelling necessarily. And it's mostly, I'd advise to take a more holistic approach. So, you know, having a more diverse diet with lots of different colored fruits and vegetables, spending time in biodiverse environments, these kind of holistic approaches. It's likely that supplements will have a small effect. But again, it's, I'd advise to take more of a kind of lifestyle holistic approach to your health.

• 40:50Mike Carruthers?

  How do these microbes in our bodies affect things like our thinking, our mood?

• 40:57Mike Carruthers?

  Our cognitive function, that kind of thing.

• 41:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it's a really exciting field of research at the minute on the microbiota gut-brain axis. And it's thought that microbes in the gut can communicate with the brain by various different pathways. For instance, releasing certain chemicals and compounds that tinker with the cells and the fibers of our nerve cells that link the gut to the brain and vice versa as well. It's thought that the brain can communicate with the gut and its microbes via what's called a vagus nerve. This is the largest cranial nerve in the human body. But there are other pathways as well. It's early days, early research, but it's really exciting. And it's thought that these microbes can produce these chemicals that do have an effect on our brains. So for instance, they could affect our moods.

• 41:44Speaker 02

  So experiments have shown that animals, non-human animals, that is, have shown that gut microbes can influence feeding decisions, sexual preferences, mood, how attracted or averse an animal is to a particular smell,

• 42:01Speaker 02

  and even the types of environments that animals choose to spend time in, which is quite incredible, really. One recent study showed that gut microbes in mice had a direct significant influence on their desire to exercise by regulating chemical signaling in the brain, particularly related to dopamine. So yes, microbes, we need more studies in humans, but microbes could potentially influence all sorts of behaviors.

• 42:27Mike Carruthers?

  So when we talk about microbes in the human body, it seems like the conversation is always about the gut, but aren't there microbes everywhere?

• 42:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we have distinct microbial communities, for instance, on our skin, in our airways, you know, under our armpits, the microbial community is going to be different to the microbial communities in our guts. And they all play really important roles, important functional roles in our health. So microbes on our skin play an important role in our immune system, protecting it from those few pathogens that do cause disease. So if you have a diverse microbiome, then it's more likely to, you know. They're more likely to say, you know, there's no room at the inn and boot out these opportunistic pathogens that try and invade our bodies. And the same goes for the gut microbiome as well, with the gut microbiome is the most, the sort of the the densest habitat on our body, so it has the most number of species.

• 43:25Speaker 02

  And it plays various other roles, you know, like breaking our food down. So it's important in digestion as well. But yes, like you said, there's a lot of microbial communities in different parts of our bodies, in our mouths and our skin, etc, that also have really important roles in keeping us alive.

• 43:39Mike Carruthers?

  So you said we have trillions of these microbes in us and on us, yes?

• 43:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, so around 100 trillion bacteria, I believe. And I think there's many more viruses as well.

• 43:52Mike Carruthers?

  And how long do they typically last? And then, and if and when they die, where do they go?

• 44:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, so microbes have a really short lifespan, but they also are able to kind of reproduce rapidly as well. So they'll, they'll, they may die, you know, within hours or days. But they also rapidly reproduce, they replace themselves as well. And the same kind of predator prey dynamics that you see in ecosystems, you know, for example, when a lion hunts down an antelope, these same principles of ecology apply at the microscopic scale as well. And so we have these turnovers of microbial communities as a result of predator prey dynamics. So viruses will hunt down bacteria, much like, again, the lion would hunt down an antelope. So these, these viruses called bacteriophages specialize in hunting down bacteria.

• 44:44Speaker 02

  And in fact, this is quite an interesting statistic. So every 48 hours, half of all the bacteria on the entire planet are killed by phages. So that's quite mind blowing to think about.

• 44:56Mike Carruthers?

  And what, I'm sorry, what is that word again?

• 44:59Speaker 02

  Phages, yeah. So some people call them phages, but in the UK we call them phages. And they're called bacteriophages. They're like these tiny little spider-like spaceships from Mars. If you, if you Google them, you'll see what I mean. They have these landing gear and they land on the bacteria and then inject their DNA into the bacteria and it ends up killing them. So.

• 45:20Mike Carruthers?

  So I've heard, for example, that you're supposed to let your kids play in the dirt, that the microbes in soil and that the microbes in the environment, that we don't want to be too clean, that we want to interact with these microbes. Can you talk about that?

• 45:38Speaker 02

  So Professor Graham Ruck, he's an immunologist from London, he put forward what's called the old friends hypothesis. And this suggests that we've co-evolved with these microorganisms, these specific microbes, over hundreds of thousands of years. And they've played a key role in shaping and regulating our immune system. And that's why they're called old friends. And it's important that we're exposed to these old friends in order to, for them to regulate what's called our innate immune system. And our innate immune system is also known as nonspecific immunity. And so it will attack anything that tries to invade the body in the absence of proper regulation. So it'll attack ordinarily innocuous substances like dust and pollen. And in extreme cases, it will attack our own cells as well. And that's

• 46:23Speaker 02

  what manifests as an autoimmune disease. And so we need to be exposed to these different microbes from the environment in order to, for them to play this regulatory role in our innate immune system. But it's also really important to be exposed to as many different microbes as possible as well, in order to train what's called our adaptive immune system. And so Graham Ruck likens the human immune system at birth to a computer. And so we, at birth, we have our, we have the hardware, which is analogous to the cellular structures of our immune system. We also have the software, which is analogous to the genes that encode for proteins and functions that allowed our immune system to function. But the thing

• 47:04Speaker 02

  that's missing at birth is data. And much like a computer model, a computer system requires data in order to be trained, in order to be functional, so does our immune system. And so by being exposed to as many different species of microbes from a young age as possible, and we're able to build up this large repertoire of what's called tiny immune cells. And these, these are memory cells, remember all these different shapes and sizes of microbes, and allow us to mount a much more efficient immune response to pathogens in the future. And so these are two, two of the reasons why we need to be exposed to the microorganisms in the natural environment from a young age as well. Because as I mentioned earlier, it's the, the period between sort of zero and two

• 47:48Speaker 02

  or three years old, which is when our gut microbiomes are most plastic or most able to be colonized from the microbes in the environment. So it's important that our kids spend time in natural environments, you know, playing in the climbing trees, et cetera.

• 48:04Mike Carruthers?

  So I assume i- if we all humans have these microbes all, all over us and in us, every other living thing must too that we see.

• 48:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. So I like, there's a phrase I like to use, it's all the nature you can see intimately depends on all the nature you can't see. And by this, I mean that, you know, the animals, the plants, everything that we can see intimately depends on these symbiotic relationships with the invisible world. And so microbes are really important. They live, live in and on plants. So they live in the soil, on plant roots, inside plant roots, everything you can think of microbes live in on. And as I said, just like the human body, so this has been quite a human centric talk, but just like the human body, how microbes play these core functional roles in keeping us alive, they also play these important functional roles in keeping all other animals and plants alive too.

• 48:58Mike Carruthers?

  You know, as I was looking through your book, I landed on something that I, I'm not sure exactly how this fits into this discussion, but I'd never even heard of this about nutrient density and how it's.

• 49:11Mike Carruthers?

  Diminishing since over the last several decades? Can can you explain what that is and some examples and then how it fits into this discussion?

• 49:20Speaker 02

  We've degraded over the last century. We've degraded the soil so much through adverse farming practices, et cetera, and these monoculture fields and not not applying principles of ecology to our agriculture. And so we've and so in order to have soil health, in order to have soil, healthy soils, we need to think about the biology of the soil. It's a really important factor. So the microbes in the soil play really important roles again in decomposition, in providing nutrients for plants, et cetera. And because we've had this soil degradation over time, we're actually losing the the micronutrients in the soil. And then the micronutrients that would ordinarily transfer to the plants and the the fruits

• 50:04Speaker 02

  and vegetables that we eat are becoming less dense because of this degradation. And so in relation, how it relates to this this conversation is that we need to understand the microbial ecology of the soil and protect it in order to protect the the nutrients of our foods, basically.

• 50:23Mike Carruthers?

  I'd never heard of that. And according to you, it says you would have to eat four carrots today to get the same amount of magnesium from one carrot in 1940.

• 50:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's mind blowing.

• 50:35Mike Carruthers?

  How come I never heard of this?

• 50:37Speaker 02

  I know, it's I don't know. I've never heard it until I researched it for the book, to be honest. But there's some figure about apples as well with iron content, I think, that's quite mind blowing as well.

• 50:46Mike Carruthers?

  26 apples to get the same amount of iron from a single apple in 1940. That's amazing.

• 50:52Speaker 02

  It is amazing. It depends on where the apple's grown and where these vegetables are grown. So, you know, organic or regenerative agricultural principles, well, that figure probably doesn't apply to those situations. It's these kind of mass monoculture agricultural situations where the nutrients will be less dense, essentially.

• 51:14Mike Carruthers?

  So when people take an antibiotic to help kill whatever bad thing is causing them to be sick. An antibiotic will kill lots of things, I assume lots of microbes within the body. So can you talk about that?

• 51:29Speaker 02

  So we have these broad spectrum or more specific antibiotics. Particularly the broad spectrum ones, these will destroy lots of different microbes that are living in your body and many of these may play those important roles in keeping you healthy. So if we take antibiotics regularly, then we're essentially napalm-ing that rainforest regularly. We're destroying the gut ecosystem. So it's going to have a really detrimental effect on your health and your immune system. You can bounce back again by applying more holistic principles to your life, you know, make sure you have a diverse diet, lots of fruits and vegetables, exercise plenty, you know, spend time in biodiverse environments, these kinds of things.

• 52:14Speaker 02

  But the longer, the longer you live, the longer it takes to bounce back from these, these events. And so as you're, when you're much younger, you're more likely to, your gut ecosystem's more likely to recover much quicker than when you're older.

• 52:28Mike Carruthers?

  What would exercise have to do with it?

• 52:31Speaker 02

  So exercise has been shown to be really important in providing certain chemicals that gut microbes need in order to select those more beneficial microbes as opposed to pathogens. It's also good for bowel movement, so it moves toxins and away from building up in certain areas. And also, if we think about the microbiota gut-brain axis, so this two-way communication system linking our brains to our guts, exercise is really important for our brains and our moods, et cetera. So it's likely to have an important role in our gut ecosystem as well via our brain and vice versa. So there's various ways in which exercise is good for our microbes.

• 53:11Mike Carruthers?

  Well, it is amazing to think of all this little tiny microbial life going on around us and in us and we're so unaware of it and yet there's so much going on. I've been talking to Jake Robinson. He is a microbial ecologist and the name of his book is Invisible Friends: How Microbes Shape Our Lives and the World Around Us. And there is a link to that book in the show notes. Appreciate it, Jake. Thanks for taking the time.

• 53:37Speaker 02

  Cheers, Mike. Thanks for having me on.

• 53:42Mike Carruthers?

  A lot of people who think they have a food allergy actually have a food intolerance. If you suddenly, for example, develop a reaction to a certain food or beverage, you're probably intolerant, not allergic. Allergies generally start in childhood and they might even disappear over time. Allergies involve the immune system and are generally more serious. Food intolerances tend to increase with age and are more of a digestive matter and usually just a nuisance. The most common food intolerances are lactose, gluten, and MSG. A lot of people develop intolerances for sulfites too.

• 54:23Mike Carruthers?

  That's the compound found in beer, wine, and champagne and is sometimes added to dried fruit or canned foods as a preservative. If any of those things make you itchy, congested, or swollen, you're intolerant, but not allergic. And that is something you should know. This would be a good time, in fact, there would be no better time, for you to leave a rating and review of this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. I'm Mike Carruthers, thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.

• 54:56Speaker 03

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• 55:23Speaker 04

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