The Gut-Immune Connection by Emeran Mayer

Author:Emeran Mayer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harper Wave
Published: 2021-04-13T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

The Key to Gut Health Is in the Soil

In July of 1962, when I was twelve years old, my parents agreed to let me spend summer vacation on my Uncle Johann’s farm, in a village some forty minutes north of Munich. This area has long been considered the breadbasket of southern Germany, with large farms stretching for miles, dotted by small towns and villages connected by narrow, winding roads. At the time, these family-owned farms produced a large variety of agricultural products, ranging from wheat and barley to sugar beets and potatoes to milk and meat.

During my visit, we kept a reliable—and reliably arduous—daily routine. We got up at 5:30 a.m. every morning to feed the dairy cows fresh grass and clover, followed by a brief breakfast before going out in the fields again to harvest beets and wheat. At lunchtime, my aunt brought freshly gathered steamed potatoes, which we enjoyed with homemade butter and bread, sitting in the grass next to the wheat fields. (Despite this high-carb diet, nobody in the family was overweight or obese, and nobody had ever heard of gluten sensitivity.) After lunch, we went right back to our strenuous work in the fields. After we’d put in eight hours, we returned home, gathered for a short dinner, went to bed, and quickly fell asleep.

Even though I’ll always remember that summer on my uncle’s farm as a highlight of my childhood, I never dreamed I would return to agriculture as a part of my professional interest and career. Instead I chose to become a doctor and, about a decade after my summer on the farm, started medical school at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. During my training, I became an expert in diagnosing diseases and treating them with a wide range of medications, but I was never trained to give dietary advice beyond eating adequate protein, carbohydrates, and fat or occasionally restricting some of these macronutrients in certain diseases, such as chronic kidney, liver, or celiac disease. I learned firsthand that successfully fighting illness with the latest, most powerful medications, or at least the ones most heavily promoted by the pharmaceutical industry, has always been the primary goal of the Western health-care system, rather than identifying and preventing its root causes. Furthermore, of all the medications a doctor has in his or her arsenal, antibiotics remain the most effective and successful. They protect us from life-threatening infectious diseases, saving millions of lives.

Nevertheless, we’re beginning to see another side to this triumphant story, one that’s been unraveling in our guts. Excessive and unnecessary antibiotic use, combined with our modern diet of ultraprocessed food, has severely compromised our gut health and played a central role in the long-term global health-care crisis of chronic diseases that underlies the current pandemic.

Meanwhile, an eerily similar story has been unfolding in the environment outside of our bodies. Despite the world’s population more than doubling over the last seventy-five years, the rate of hunger and malnutrition has actually decreased in many

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