[SOUND] How important is nutrition or most simply food for our health? Well, it's very simple, without food, no life. And it's really fascinating that a long time ago, a very famous European scientist Hippocrates, already indicated. In a very short sentence, let food be the medicine and medicine be the food. So this explains that food is essential for our life. We need it as building blocks and we need it to create help to help health to protect against all kinds of awful components in our environment. So food is essential nutrition is key for our health. So, as indicated, food is essential, for a healthy life. Both mentally, as well as physically. But how is this food entering our body? Well, it's quite. The major port of entry for food is the gastrointestinal tract. Yeah, starting with your mouth, then your esophagus, your stomach, and your whole gut system. It's an essential organ. It's the organ where we absorb the nutrients in our body. The nutrients are transported via the circulation through our whole body, so that's one aspect. Another aspect is that within the gastrointestinal tract, we have unique mucus layer. Which is essential because food is not always, always fully healthy, there are also some danger signals in food. There are some toxins in it or some pathogens in it like dangerous viruses and bacteria, you need to protect yourself against these danger signals. And for that reason, we do have a mucus layer in our whole gastrointestinal system. This is called the mucosal barrier. The mucosal barrier is essential to keep our body healthy. Again because intestinal tract is a very complex organ system since the system is acting with the environment. Food is not always healthy. There are all kinds of danger signals. We need to get rid of it, but we also need to absorb the proper nutrients in order to keep our body healthy. Well one important aspect of the gastrointestinal tract is that we also have unique immune system in this gastrointestinal tract. I'm an immunologist so I'm studying the impact of food but also drugs and environment on the immune system. And what you have to realize that again the gastrointestinal tract is the major port of entry for all this danger signals. So for that reason we need to have a very efficient immune system on one hand to get rid of this danger signals, such as salmonella, and listeria that might be present in your food. On the other hand, also organize the immune response in a way you are not reacting to peanuts or cow's milk. Because if that happens then that might turn into an allergic reaction. So it should be in balance. That the uniqueness of the gastrointestinal tract and the immune system that is present in that organ system. When we talk about a gastrointestinal tract, we talk about stool, we talk about poop. And we know that this is filled with microbes. When I was a medical student quite some time ago, in the early 80s, I was trained that our body is sterile, so no microbes, no viruses within our body except in a gastrointestinal tract. Honestly now we know, now we realize that this is not true. We as human beings but that's true for all animals for and even for plants. You know that we are living in symbiosis with microbes. Some of these microbes can be very dangerous leading to disease such as salmonella in an an effected egg with many others that are present in our body, in the gastrointestinal tract, but also in our lungs, and also in our skin, play a key role in keeping our body healthy. Play a key role in training and educating our immune system in order to be as efficient as possible so, it's fascinating. It's fascinating that it's now accepted by the scientific world. That microbes are essential for a healthy life. And maybe that's one of the reasons that there are many companies both in pharma as well as in food working on concepts that can influence your microbiome. Has a different types of microbes in your body, leading to loss of success in both the food business but also in the farmer business. So again microbes in our body are essential, they keep your body healthy, they keep your, well, physical, chemical barrier optimal and they train your immune system, essential so our body is not sterile. There are lots of microbes, there lots of viruses and we need them. So I talked a little bit about the gastrointestinal tract, about nutrients, food. I talked about microbes and the immune system. It's all within our gastrointestinal tract. Essential. And I also said that it might be possible to influence this microbiome to keep your body healthy, to keep your immune system healthy and efficient. Well there is one nutrition that is really optimal in influencing and stimulating the healthy microbiome leading to a healthy immune system and a healthy body. Well, this nutrition that is human milk, breast milk. We know that human milk is filled with unique structures that serve as the food for the health promoting microbes, these structures are called prebiotics, prebiotic fibres. It's really fascinating how many different prebiotic fibres are present in human milk. More than one or 200 different types. All that are unique function on microbes and indirectly on the immune system and on the your mucus layer in the gastrointestinal tract. Now we even know that in this human milk, the optimal nutrition for early life, you can also find microbes, there are living bacteria in this milk. My goodness, living bacteria and also the food Bifidobacteria, the non digestible fibers the prebiotic fibers they are all in there. So how smart is it to think of these concepts of probiotic fibers, food for the health promoting microbes and probiotic, so they help promoting microbes, to combine them a new concept for both farmer and food. In order to keep your body healthy and to keep your immune system healthy. So there are plenty of new concepts under development, unique innovations aimed at the development of a healthy microbiome thanks to the development of new prebiotic fiber that are also present in your milk. But also thanks to the isolation and combination of unique microbes that together can serve as a fantastic concept to create a healthy body early and later in life.
