Campbell, thank you so much for being here with us today on the Altone Protein podcast. How are you doing? Great.

Thank you so much for having me. I'm really looking forward to chatting with

you today. I'm so excited to discuss your research and findings and really start a discussion or a dialogue here on the podcast about the microbiome because we have examined and discussed a little bit about the potential cross talk between the mitochondria and the microbiome. I know it's such an emerging field, but I really haven't focused in on it that much as a topic on the podcast. There are so many interesting connections with metabolic health and obesity and everything. What would you like the public to know about the research that you're doing? I think you're one of the pioneers in the space of studying the exercise and microbiome connection. Thank

you for that compliment. I don't know if I feel that way, but I feel like we have so much to answer. We're trying our best to think of great questions and hypotheses to generate and to go there. I think it's emerged and that it's really important that and I just recently gave a talk about this bi-directional aspect of exercise in the gut microbiome or microbiota, depending on what word we're talking about, the bugs will use microbiota. Just that exercising individuals have a unique gut microbiota that's different from sedentary folks. That's pretty consistent across multiple studies in animals and in humans. It's always great to see that translational aspect of research. When you see an animal, you can then replicate in the human model. That's really important to know that that's a valuable finding. What's been really interesting and emerging over the last couple of years is just the aspect of the microbiota being intact, meaning you have a complete microbiota being necessary for exercise capacity and exercise tolerance and being able to perform exercise. There are studies that have been recently done looking at the two predominant models, especially in animals where you either give them lots of antibiotics to clear out their microbes or use a germ-free mouse, which we like to say is kind of the mouse in the bubble, where it's not exposed to anything. And consistently, you know, you show that those germ-free animals and those antibiotic-treated animals have a much lower ability to exercise compared to those with a complete gut microbiota. I'd say the human studies in that area still need to really be done. A lot of the antibiotic human literature that's out there really does look at when athletes get sick and start taking antibiotics. So you can't really tease apart, for example, is the antibiotic that's maybe making them not exercisers because they don't feel great, that they're not exercising great. So, eliminating the confounding variable of the illness and testing antibiotics usage in athletes independence of that would be really exciting and novel and move the direction forward because the number of athletes taking medications of all kinds is

high and, you

know, figuring out if that's going to impact their gut microbiota and then subsequently impact their performance is going to be a really exciting area to

look into. Yeah, it's extremely exciting, especially, you know, because there is so much new research coming out and new findings. So, in terms of the effect that the microbiome has on the human, the refer to as sort of the host, would you say it's a symbiotic relationship? Would you categorize it that way?

Yeah, yeah. I would definitely say it's symbiotic when the microbes are kind of doing their job. They have a variety of functions that can help the host. There's lots of immune tissue in the gut. We call it the galt, the gut-associated lymphoid tissue. So, it's responsible for recognizing friend versus foe. I have boys and boys get into dirt and at least minded when they were little and I'm sure it somehow got on their face and they probably lick their face. So, the gut sees that dirt for lack of a better word as it's coming through the digestive tract. As you know, it's being inhaled as they're playing and it's like, okay, was that gut-associated immune tissue is going to say, okay, is that a friend? Is that a foe? What microbes, you know, or how do we activate a response to see how to combat that if it is a foe? So, you know, that's one really big thing. That immune system is really tightly linked to inflammatory responses. So, do those microbes help with inflammation and in a symbiotic relationship? There's probably a balance of, you know, pro and anti-inflammatory because, you know, both can be good. I think most people think pro-inflammatory always has to be bad, but that's not necessarily always the case, right? You need some inflammatory response to fight off some of those infections. Energy harvesting, we know things like, you know, complex carbohydrates and fibers don't necessarily get digested like other carbohydrates do in the earlier parts of the intestine and have to make it all the way down to the gut microbes in the colon to be changed into short-chain fatty acids. And so, there's lots of these incredible functions that the microbes do to help the human. And then on the opposite side of that, since we're interested in diet and exercise, you know, things that we do that are beneficial to our health tend to be also beneficial to our microbes. So, you know, they like to eat the food that we give them and vice versa. Then they give us, you know, this immune response and this, you know, inflammation regulation and this, you know, energy harvesting that can work to our benefit. So, I think you could say that that's a pretty nice, you know, symbiotic relationship.

That's great.