Alright, I'm sure you have some questions!
1) What's that splash of colors on the homepage??
That's actually an image of my brain! I perform neuroimaging research at Duke University and acquired these images using our MRI machine.
It's not empty after all!!!
The images on the left illustrate standard MRI images. The images on the right were acquired a bit differently - we programmed the scanner's magnet to acquire what is known as "Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI)". The big image in the middle is a 3D rendering of these DTI images.
DTI images enable us to map out the "White Matter Tracts" in the brain, which gives us a detailed structural map of bundled axons traveling throughout the brain. This DTI imaging technique will also give us numerical values that indicate the integrity of specific fiber tracts in the brain, which we can use to identify various disease states.
The colors simply denote directions that the neuronal fibers are traveling in:
Blue= up-down
Red= left-right
Green= front-back
What about those terms in the title?
2) Let's start with Biome:
For years, the concept of one’s self has been restricted to the human tissue encoded by our human DNA. This, however, is a myopic view of the human body. There is currently a massive paradigm shift in how we view the body and, by extension, our health.
As humans, we are never really alone; we coevolved and continue to coexist with diverse and plentiful non-human microbial species that live within and upon us. In fact, these non-human cells actually outnumber the human cells in our body. The most widely reported estimates contend that these bacterial cells outnumber our own by a factor of 10 to 1 and their genetic code is 100x larger than the human genome.
While this magnitude is still contested, there is little debate that these trillions of microbial cells profoundly influence our health. It’s actually a pretty fair trade -- in exchange for the food and shelter we provide, these commensal species provide us, the host, with metabolic functions far beyond the scope of our own physiological capabilities. As such, our view of the human body needs to be extended to that of the human ecosystem: The Human Biome.
Don’t get tied up in the semantics here, but I like to look at it as follows – at some point in our evolution, we learned that we would not be able to completely shield ourselves from these bacterial species so we did the next best thing; we used them to our advantage and delegated physiological tasks to them. These species were happy to ‘comply’ because if we (their host) died, they would die as well. As a result, we developed an evolutionary dependence on these commensal species.
Now, this science is moving fast, but it’s still very new. While we may not know exactly what species do what, we have the basic understanding that more microbial diversity is generally preferred.
Notably, this is true of any ecosystem – picture a rainforest. Now, this rainforest will be healthier and more robust if it has greater diversity. You can conceptualize this by thinking about what would happen if a “bad species” invaded the rainforest. If the rain forest lacks diversity and only has 3 species, this invader may wipe out the whole rain forest. Conversely, if the rain forest is diverse with hundreds of species, it will be more capable of defending itself and persevering against this invading species.
Our own biome is the same way. We require this microbial diversity and, unfortunately, many components of our current Western lifestyles are actively depleting the diversity of our microbiome.
I encourage you all to watch this short five-minute animated clip from NPR:
3) What's BHB?
BHB stands for beta-hydroxybutyrate. This is the scientific word for one of the main "ketones" in the human body.
Quick rewind: our body (and more importantly, our brain) needs energy every second of every day in order to survive. Humans evolved to be metabolically flexible by having two main sources of energy: 1) Glucose, and 2) Ketones.
There is some debate over which is more metabolically favorable (I'm sure everybody is different), but we all evolved to use both in some capacity. In Western Societies, however, our bodies have become reliant on glucose....the ketone apparatus is essentially rusted over. We've lost this metabolic flexibility and, over time, this leads to widespread health issues.
4) Where does the brain fit in?
Replenishing our microbial diversity and training our body to be metabolically flexible by running on both BHB and glucose is crucial for optimizing brain health.
I look forward to showing you how!