Gut Health

PODCAST: "Children and Probiotics" with Kiran Krishnan on Healing Quest Radio

Just Thrive is again proud to be featured on Healing Quest Radio with microbiologist Kiran Krishnan, and hosts Judy Brooks and Roy Walkenhorst!

Below is the podcast transcript, or scroll to the bottom for a link to listen to the live podcast...

INTERVIEW WITH KIRAN KRISHNAN: CHILDREN & PROBIOTICS

Judy Brooks: Hi and welcome back to Healing Quest. I'm Judy Brooks.

Roy Walkenhorst: And I'm Roy Walkenhorst. The focus here on Healing Quest is integrated health, including mind/body medicine and how it can help us achieve optimum well being, and that optimum well being includes the little ones in our life.

Judy Brooks: Well, we're bringing this up now because of recent research showing that commonly used household cleaners may be making children over weight. Wow. I mean, that's amazing. We're talking about toddlers here. The study in the Canadian Medical Journal said the chemicals in disinfectants and detergents were altering the microbes in the gut of young children leading to overweight toddlers.

Roy Walkenhorst: Now, babies living in household that used eco-friendly cleaners had very different gut microbes and were much less likely to be overweight as toddlers. So when it comes to protecting those precious little tummies in our life, the subject of probiotics logically comes up.

Judy Brooks: But are probiotics a good idea for kids, and if so, at what age should we start them? Well, fortunately, we know just who to ask about all of this. Microbiologist Kiran Krishnan of Just Thrive Probiotics, and he's been on the show a lot with us because he's just got so much great information, and we have been big probiotic fans for a long time. 

Roy Walkenhorst: And more and more research is being done showing how important our GI tract is, how microbiome as it's called for adults and now it turns out really, really important for children as well.

Roy Walkenhorst: So Kiran's on the phone with us, and we're pleased to welcome him from his home base in Chicago. So, Kiran, thanks for joining us here on Healing Quest and helping us really understand I guess, frankly, the magnitude of what the Canadian scientists found, which is that, gosh, moms who are just trying to keep their kitchen clean could be using cleaners with chemicals in them that could have a really big impact on their kids. Is that true?

Kiran Krishnan: Yeah, absolutely. It absolutely is. Thank you for having me as usual. In fact, this is a follow up study to other studies that have been done with this topic. They've shown that households that use chlorine based cleaners, for example, or cleaners that are very strong anti-microbiol, tend to have kids that have higher incident rates of allergies, asthma, and even infections. And there is this whole idea of the hygiene hypothesis, which we may have talked about before, where what we're doing is replacing our daily exposure from beneficial or benign bacteria to harmful chemicals. 

Judy Brooks: Better with chemicals.

Kiran Krishnan: Yeah, exactly. We totally flipped the script on how we are supposed to interact, and we very quickly forget that for the vast majority of human evolution for 99.99% of the time that our species has been on the earth, we've been in constant osmosis with the microbial world around us. And there's significant benefit to that. And then when we replace that interaction with interactions with really harsh chemicals to create this notion of cleanliness and so on, we really can do harm to our bodies. So it's really exciting that large research institutes are recognizing this and doing studies on it.

Roy Walkenhorst: And that harm could be seen or manifested very early in life. I mean, toddlers could be overweight as a result of this.

Kiran Krishnan: Yeah, in fact, that's one of the outcomes. So obesity is driven by an anti-m