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The Current Transcript for February 27, 2018

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

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VOICE 1: This is our town. We need to know what's going on for us. As much as other newspapers cover farther away, you always need to know what's going on at home.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: It is some of the most important information out there and it is increasingly difficult to get local news. When you get out of major centres it almost evaporates. In the last decade more than 16,000 Canadian journalists lost their jobs. 222 weekly and 27 daily newspapers have closed or merged operations. There are consequences to communities to democracy to discourse. And now there’s an expectation that today's federal budget will offer millions to support Canadian journalism. Can it save journalism and re-ignite news? We've got the debate in just a moment. Also today, few people have been more public with their up again down again weight loss struggles than Oprah Winfrey.

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VOICE 1: Since I've started Weight Watchers, I've lost over 40 pounds; I can honestly tell you I struggle no more.

AMT: The ads for a company in which she has a 10 percent stake are ubiquitous. But it is Weight Watchers pitch to teens that has raised concerns offering free memberships this summer. The company says it will lead teens to a lifetime of healthy stable weight. Critics warn it will set them up for addictions and eating disorders. Hear the debate in half an hour. And the biotech race for microbial medicine where the most important ingredient is the one that's been flushed away.

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VOICE 1: If I was a spokesperson for fecal bugs, I would say “We're there to help you every day. We're not liked because we smell a bit. And yet the cells that line our gut — our human cells — love us.”

AMT: What began as fecal transplants to cure C. difficile is now being studied for the potential treatment of a range of diseases and conditions. We'll tell you more in an hour. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

How to save local news without massive government bailouts

Guests: Edward Greenspon, David Beers

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VOICE 1: Torstar shares now at $1.49 hovering at record lows after reporting another loss in its fiscal first quarter.

VOICE 2: A deal between Postmedia and Torstar saw them swap a number of media properties to close down 36 community newspapers across the country.

VOICE 3: Well today Vancouver's longest running arts and entertainment weekly announced it is halting the presses.

AMT: Across the Canadian media landscape, the bad news just keeps coming. Though today, might just be a good news day depending on who you ask. According to reports, the new federal Liberal budget will include new funding for local journalism: $50 million to be spent over the next five years. It's the kind of government subsidy some have called for years. And the kind of government subsidy others have warned ominously against. As part of our Eye on the Media series, we're going to hear both sides of the argument now and ask just how far $50 million can go toward saving local journalism in this country. Edward Greenspon is the President & CEO of the Public Policy Forum, which produced an in-depth report on Canada's flagging media industry last year. He's also a former journalist with The Globe and Mail and Bloomberg News, among others. And he joins me from Ottawa. Hello Ed Greenspon.

EDWARD GREENPON: Good morning, Anna Maria.

AMT: Assuming the number is accurate, how far would $50 million over five years go to supporting local journalism in Canada?

EDWARD GREENPON: Well I guess it depends which end you look at it through. If you're a media corporation and collectively newspapers have dropped another $200 million of revenue between 2016 and 2017. So they're bleeding quite badly. 10 to 20 percent losses every year. It's a drop in the bucket and not going to change their fortunes at all. If you look at it from a news consumer to some extent and people who care that our institutions of democracy are being covered less by journalists, it can afford to hire 120 to 150 journalists. 150 local journalists are what the BBC has helped finance in Britain and that's 10 to 12 journalist per province and territory, and that would make a difference. So I think it's a down payment on an existential crisis that's much bigger than just this question. The existential crisis is really the coincident decline of the authentic journalism system with the rise of a system that's full of fake news, disinformation, hate, and that's meant to just disunite people.

AMT: Who were those 150 journalists work for?

EDWARD GREENPON: Well it'll be interesting to see. In the leaks that we've seen so far in the newspaper industry where all of our reporting come from so far about this, they talk about it being independent non-governmental outfits. And in the Shattered Mirror we make two recommendations of this sort and I'll be interested to see if they pick up on these recommendations over the coming weeks if not on the budget today. One was the Canadian Press be used as a foundation for setting up a local non-profit news service that would help to manage these journalists and places across Canada that don't receive coverage now, whether that's in smaller centres or whether that's in courts that aren't being covered well or legislatures that in some provinces are not covered. And at the same time we had a mirror image for local Indigenous news that would be managed by the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network. So those are the kinds of institutions that could indeed manage these reporters.

AMT: OK, well let’s bring someone else into this conversation. David Beers is the founding editor of the Tyee, an independent online newsmagazine produced in Vancouver. He's also an adjunct professor in the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of British Columbia. He's in our Vancouver studio. Hello David Beers.

DAVID BEERS: Hello.

AMT: So what are you thinking? Is the $50 million funding the way to go?

DAVID BEERS: Well it's a drop in the bucket. I mean it's one percent of the budget that the CBC says it needs. It's two percent of Postmedia's projected print and online ad revenues this year — and that's not even mentioning subscriptions. Google will rake in just from Canadian online advertisers this year, $2.6 billion. So it's not going to make much of a difference in the amount of local news reporting that people see. There are some other policies rumoured coming from the federal government that give me more hope.

AMT: Like... such as?

DAVID BEERS: This is something I think Ed and I might agree on which is a new framework policy framework allowing money to flow more easily into non-profit or trust structured local journalism outfits. If Ed's trend lines that he laid out continue we're about to see really the unravelling of these large corporate chains like Postmedia and Torstar which were built on a model that's no longer working. The idea of assembling massive chains across the country and sharing ads across — that's been wiped out by Facebook and Google. So now we need to return to local ownership, stakeholders in the community, and I think the way to do that is with non-profit trust structures.

AMT: So something under charitable trust and using philanthropy to fund some journalism. Ed, do you agree?

EDWARD GREENPON: I know various groups of philanthropists that I've spoken with over last year and a half since beginning to do research in this area, who are interested in supporting journalism. I think there is going to be some middle ground between the public sector that we're accustomed to particularly the CBC and the private sector that is in accelerating decline. I think we'll see a signal in the budget that they'll begin to study how to ease the way for that. Our philanthropic laws are based on 1890 British House of Lord decisions, so they're fairly antiquated and people have done work around. David has done a bit of a work around with the Tyee to be able to access some of that money. But it won't be enough money in itself even that to solve the problem. The question is who is going to be financing journalism in the future if we believe journalism is a social value and if we believe it adds to the vibrancy and is necessary for our democracy. The private sector is having trouble making profit at it and therefore won't have a great incentive to stay with it. And we do need new sources of money. And the only ones that I can see there are: a) philanthropies; b) a redistribution of the kinds of funds that are going into platform companies that do not reinvest in Canadian journalism, and c) would be the public purse.

AMT: OK, we've got a lot to talk about here. Let's look big picture first of all and let's acknowledge that we are speaking on the public broadcaster and this is the CBC which does receive government funding. The very idea of government being in the business of funding all journalism, where do you stand on that, David?

DAVID BEERS: Well the Tyee doesn't receive government funding for its content. You know the Tyee is proudly independent. But there are some roles that government can play. For example creating, as I say, tax incentives for money to flow into local stakeholder-based entities. Part of the problem that journalism in Canada is facing is that the regulators have allowed these companies to merge over and over again so that our media's incredibly highly concentrated; few owners. And those owners of taken an enormous debt. So part of the reason that they're going out of business is not that nobody wants to pay for journalism; nobody wants to pay for their huge debt. I mean Postmedia is owned by a hedge fund. So if these chains can be broken up and these entities can be returned to local public, it won't just be these large foundations that end up flowing philanthropic money into it. I think there should be some philanthropic structure set up so that local stakeholders have more incentive to fund their local media.

AMT: Greenspon...

EDWARD GREENPON: Anna Maria, I agree with half of what David said.

DAVID BEERS: That's better than usual [laughs].

EDWARD GREENPON: We're doing pretty well this morning, David.

AMT: Oh, we're in the grey area oh no [laughs].

DAVID BEERS: [laughs]

EDWARD GREENPON: I don't that the depth of the crisis should be obscured by the particularity of Postmedia's debt which is a problem of long standing going back to Canwest days. Torstar has no debt. And the Toronto Star is in a lot of trouble. I don't think that the [unintelligible] and the Thompson family who own La Presse and the Globe and Mail, respectively, are carrying debt on those properties. But they're having problems and they are undoubtedly — although they are private — losing money as well. So I think the crisis is bigger than that. I do agree completely that we've got to stop thinking about this entirely as governments subsides, government bailouts, and government money. Government needs to set a framework of policy as David says that can allow people to step in and have greater flexibility than they do have to be entrepreneurial, be creative, etc. Government has done that before. There are all kinds of policy. There's nothing new about this. CBC is a policy. The postal subsidy dating back before Confederation which continues to support the magazine industry is a policy. There is something called Section 19 in the Income Act which gives a preference to Canadian publications in advertising in terms of tax treatment. That is a policy. And none of those is the government's fingers inside newsrooms.

AMT: I want to ask a little bit about where this could go. David, I'm going to quote you from the Tyee online right now that says, "The media's situation has become so dire. That government could use its funding leverage to force CBC to become a platform for high calibre independent media." And then you go on and say, "It could institute policies to help flow financing to independent media and largely let corporate media separate the results of its bad decision making over the past decade." So you're talking about a whole new system. We need to look at where legacy media has taken us and we need to think about how we use what we have now.

DAVID BEERS: Absolutely. I mean if the CBC is going to receive a $1 billion in funding compared to $10 million to supposedly fix all the rest of the problems of local reporting then the CBC really needs to see itself as a catalyst for this shift to a whole new media ecology, rather than see itself as just another silo corporation competing with other large corporations. The landscape will not look like that in a few years. There is a problem in Canada around not only money to pay for content and money to pay for overhead; there is a problem in discoverability. How do people find new start-up innovative digital online media? One way they could find it is through the CBC. That's a huge portal that people go to every day and if the CBC partnered more with others, people would realize who else is in the journalism community.

AMT: Let me pick up on the last part of that. Ed Greedspon, do you agree that the corporate media has made a lot of bad decisions over the past decade and has put itself in this situation?

EDWARD GREENPON: Well clearly have made bad decisions. I'm not too sure that there's not a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking here. Among the bad decisions were that the world would suddenly move towards mobile and then it would move to social media and then smartphones would come along and every time...

AMT: But that's old now. We've had smartphones for a while.

EDWARD GREENPON: Yeah. But these are the decisions. The "original sin" as people refer to it was allowing news to go out for free. But they were accustom to advertising supported models, and those held up for 10 or 12 years in that system. So they have made bad decisions. They are living with the consequences of that. The ones who I think made better decisions like La Presse in Montreal which decided to put itself are all online and stop printing newspapers and to build an app that attracted lots of readers. You know they're losing money too. So there is something in the economic model of there is little value in advertising and people don't want to pay for so much free news including the CBC free news round. And therefore you need new sources of revenue. I think we can talk about everything we want to about mistakes in that. But the major point to it is that we need to have reporters on the ground that are digging up stories, who are patrolling the beat of other democratic institutions in the country, and how do we finance that. It's time to figure out solutions. Otherwise we're going to have a bunch of tiny mom-and-pop shop type operations.

AMT: I'd like to play you a clip we have from the publisher of the now defunct Moose Jaw Times-Herald in Saskatchewan, which closed down in December 2017 after more than 125 years in print. Here's what publisher Roger Holmes said at the time about the decision to close it down.

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VOICE 1: There's still a thirst for good local community journalism but it needs to be done in such a way that it can be sustainable. And that's the trick.

VOICE 2: It's not a romantic thing, it is an access thing. It is an access to information about my town. Like generations past I don't start my day with my coffee cup and my newspaper that's not really what my life looks like but I do access the news regularly, I do value the news deeply and I don't think I should value local news any less than I value national news.

AMT: That was publisher Roger Holmes speaking about why the Moose Jaw Times-Herald closed down in 2017 and reader Hannah Elich talking about what that decision meant to her.

AMT: David Beers, how do we get people to cover municipal politics, county politics, and bylaws? That stuff matters in the grand scheme of things. That's where our money goes.

DAVID BEERS: It does and I'll circle back to that really quickly. But it ties in with the set of bad decisions that Ed didn't mention which was this idea of endlessly consolidating these independent or different chains in the country. The idea was called convergence. We're not only going to consolidate all the newspaper chains, we're going to combine them with all the broadcasters and then the idea was share content across all these different platforms. What that means is you don't get local news after a while. What you get is just a few people sitting in Winnipeg or Toronto turning out copy and editing it. Right now, my Vancouver Sun has edited back East. So that is a huge business decision that has basically ruined the local media experience for a lot of people and that's why they don't feel loyalty to their local media. What you're talking about is covering some mundane stuff but basically holding government accountable. When people feel like their local media is very much committed to their local reality and their local interests, they will invest in it. You know we're seeing a huge shift right now towards crowdfunding and subscription driven online media. Online media is a lot cheaper than bricks and mortar print media was and it [unintelligible] expensive so therefore it's more easily funded through subscriptions. The Tyee for example its the largest source of revenue comes from readers who give the Tyee money even though there is no pay wall. They can get it for free.

EDWARD GREENPON: Anna Maria, I agree with David that the model of future is going to be much more community-based, community-owned, and probably not profitable. I sometimes talk about a Saskatchewan Roughrider model that's going to be the future which is a community-owned football team and the only community-owned sports franchise I think it in Canada. So that's fine and its fine as long as people pay. When you ran the clip of the reader in Prince Albert and when you ran Roger Holmes, who by the way was an independent community-based publisher who also can't quite make a go of it; but her clip reminded me of a lot of the focus groups that we did across the country in our study and people said "I respect news. I respect journalism. I really need journalism. I get most of my news off Facebook." And then they would take a pause and say "Except if it's really important." And if it's really important they go back to news organizations they trust. They name individual journalists who they trust. There is a trust for the news system out but they want it to be kind of like the fire department. They don't want to have to pay for it directly. They don't want necessarily have to engage with it every day. But on those days when they feel they need it they want it to be there. So how do we finance that?

AMT: And we're almost out of time. But David Beers what can we learn from the Tyee?

DAVID BEERS: The Tyee is local but it's also quite regional. It's very focused on B.C. And what you see for example with the Vancouver Sun was the fact that it's hooked up to this huge national chain that's very dependent on national advertisers. The biggest for example being major oil companies. You'll be reading your local newspaper and you wouldn't really see your own concerns reflected in it. The reason the Tyee is able to get so much of its readers support in financial hard cash contributions is every day we wake up and we just figure out how to defend and hold accountable our local region. And I think that's the power of the Internet. And I think that's where we're headed. I think it also redefines the idea of local. There are many locals. For example not everybody is interested in maybe what goes on down in City Hall. But they may be interested in their local communities’ cultural scene.

AMT: Right. OK, we have to leave it there. Thank you both for this conversation today.

EDWARD GREENPON: Thank you.

DAVID BEERS: Thank you.

AMT: Edward Greenspon is the President & CEO of the Public Policy Forum. He was in Ottawa. And David Beers is the founding editor of the Tyee and an adjunct professor in the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of British Columbia. He was in Vancouver. Let us know what you think. Tweet us. We’re @TheCurrentCBC. Find us on Facebook. Go to our website cbc.ca/thecurrent. Click on the Contact link. Stay with us. The CBC News is next. Then, we're talking about teens and food and how to make sure that relationship is a good and healthy one. That's up next. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

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Critics warn Weight Watchers' free teen membership could lead to eating disorders

Guests: Katy Weber, Alyson Schafer, Dr. Tracey Bridger

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AMT: Still to come… it's one of the most pressing medical problems of our time: antibiotic resistance. But a solution may be arriving, from an unusual quarter. In about half an hour from now, we'll check in on the growing body of research around fecal transplants. As well as the next wave of the research, that may not require "donations" of fecal matter at all. But first, weighing the pros and cons of teenage diets.

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VOICE 1: A standard breakfast for me is I'll have yoghurt and a piece of fruit. I track everything on my weight watchers app. I'll log in. I’ll track my banana. And you’ll notice that bananas have zero points because it's a fruit. But I track it anyway because you get rewards.

AMT: That's a British dieter, diligently tracking the 'points' of everything she eats. She's following the Weight Watchers system. Just like people around the world have for decades now. But the American-based company has packed on a lot of attention and controversy after announcing a new program. It will be offered this summer. It's completely free. And it's for teenagers, aged 13 to 17 including here in Canada. Here's just a bit of the negative, and positive, reaction online.

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VOICE 1: Wake Up Weight Watchers. You’re giving away free eating disorders.

VOICE 2: I wish I had this kind of eating education as a teen. I would have a much healthier outlook on nutrition.

VOICE 3: Stop encouraging teenagers to hate their bodies for profit.

VOICE 4: Weight watchers has never been a diet. Don't apologize for offering something amazing to obese children. Child obesity is at the highest rate it's ever been

AMT: In a statement, Weight Watchers writes that the goal of the program is "to help those who need healthy habits to develop them at this critical life-stage: this is not about dieting." But as you heard there, public reaction has been mixed. We're going to hear a few perspectives on this starting with Katy Weber. She is a health coach, and the author of Worth It: A Journey to Food & Body Freedom. And she has also been a Weight Watchers member, and group leader. She joins us from Rosendale, New York. Hello.

KATY WEBER: Hi

AMT: What do you think of this new Weight Watchers program aimed at teens?

KATY WEBER: Oh gosh. Well I think the first thing to say is this is in fact a diet. Any program that goes out of their way to try to convince you that they're a "healthy lifestyle" is a diet. And we know that dieting is the number one predictor of weight gain. So I am really against this with this incredibly vulnerable susceptible age group.

AMT: What was your own experience as a teenager?

KATY WEBER: I went on my first diet when I was 14. I went on Slim Fast. I remember even as early as age eight thinking that there was something wrong with me because I was taller and bigger than the rest of the girls in my class. I remember we all had to weigh ourselves in French class — in front of the whole class — in the fourth grade. And when I realized I weighed more than any of the other girls in the class I was mortified. I mean I knew even at age eight that this was something to be ashamed of and that I needed to fix that.

AMT: What made you join Weight Watchers?

KATY WEBER: I joined Weight Watchers late in life. I joined after my second child. And the stubborn baby weight wasn't going anywhere and I sort of really wanted to get my pre-baby body back and all of that [laughs].

AMT: Did it work for you?

KATY WEBER: Oh it worked great. I lost a lot of weight — more than I think I'd ever lost on any diet before. I thought it was the greatest thing that had ever happened to me. So much so that I became a leader and worked as a leader to help others. And it was while I was a leader that I started to see how unsuccessful this program is in the long run. Yes you lose a lot of weight in a very short period of time if you do the program correctly. The problem is the damage that does to your body and likelihood of you gaining it all back and more.

AMT: And so what was the turning point for you in changing how you saw this?

KATY WEBER: I actually developed a pretty bad binge eating disorder while I was working at Weight Watchers. And I had a really bad binge on a New Year's Eve and woke up New Year’s Day and weighed myself of course because that's what you on New Year’s Day. I was mortified and I thought, ‘you know I really have to solve this binge eating problem of mine because if can stop binge eating that I can start being a good dieter again'. And it was through my research into what exactly binge eating is and how it's not a problem it's actually a symptom of a deeper problem which is dieting and food restriction. And that's when I read the book Health at Every Size by Linda Bacon. I really started to understand how our bodies fight back against food restriction and extreme weight loss.

AMT: Katy Weber, stay with me. I'd like to introduce someone else. Alyson Schafer is a family counsellor, and a parenting author. She's with me in Toronto. Hello.

ALYSON SCHAFER: Hi.

AMT: And I should do full disclosure I too am one of those people who have joined Weight Watchers in the past. But this isn't about me. So Alyson what do you think of Weight Watchers offering a program to teens?

ALYSON SCHAFER: Well I think that Weight Watchers is one of the well-researched programs that takes a pretty balanced approach at weight loss. So if you're somebody who's trying to lose weight like I did when I was a teenager to be able to not have the expense I think is a great idea. I think it's a credible program. I remember having to give up half my allowance money to pay for my programs. My parents weren't willing to help me. They would even drive me. I had to walk there. And so it was a bit of a lifesaver for me. So my take is if the program is anything like it was back in the '70s making it more accessible is great.

AMT: So your parents didn't really buy into your idea of wanting to lose weight?

ALYSON SCHAFER: I wanted to lose weight and then my doctor suggested that I lose weight which was sort of the kind of confirmed that I really did need to lose weight so that sort of embarrassing that he said that. But my parents take on it was to look after that then. In hindsight I think I was appreciative in that I always felt that my parents really didn't care what I weighed or how I looked. It felt like unconditional love. But I wish I had more support actually and the support that I got, I got from Weight Watchers. And I did learn a lot to differentiate my weight gain going through adolescence, hitting puberty, putting on a lot weight. I had three older brothers and kept eating like they did. I didn't realize how many calories were in things. I didn't understand anything about the food groups. I had a lot of education to catch up on. And I liked that it shaped not only the nutritional education part but it was about changing your attitudes and where the cravings come from. And I think that's very different than somebody who is already perhaps set up to have an eating disorder in that reaching for food is a solution to creating a reward system around some pain point. I think I really didn't know how to eat or cook. It's just different

AMT: So what do you think would be beneficial for teens joining the kind of a program like the one we're talking about?

ALYSON SCHAFER: I think you're going to get the education. You're going to get that group support. I like the fact that it's a diversified group of people. I think to get a bunch of teens all together in a room that have all the same issues with food is probably not great. But to be with middle aged men and young mums trying to lose weight or whatever. Everyone gets to hear everybody else's perspective. And I think it's very normalizing that you're just on this journey to learn.

AMT: Ok, Alyson Schafer, you stay with us as well. Let's bring Dr. Tracey Bridger into the conversation. She's a pediatric endocrinologist in St. John's. She's also the Medical Director of the Janeway Lifestyle Program, which is a program designed to help kids, teens and their families in Newfoundland and Labrador develop healthier lifestyle habits. Welcome Tracey Bridger.

DR. TRACEY BRIDGER: Thank you.

AMT: So I guess just to start with you. What do you think? What was your immediate reaction when you heard that Weight Watchers was aiming at teenagers for this program? They're doing a whole big advertisement right now, but they're aiming at teenagers.

DR. TRACEY BRIDGER: The first reaction I had was my heart sinking a little bit. I deal with this issue day in and day out. And I just thought the weekly weigh in, the diet — they can call it whatever they want but people are thinking of it as a diet — can be very unhealthy. And the research is very clear about that that dieting can lead to either eating disorders or if not just an unhealthy relationship with food, body dissatisfaction, you name it. Now what's unclear is what their program is going to be. It can't be what the adult program is. Teenagers are nothing like adults. Their bodies are changing. Their hormone levels are changing, their bone density; there are many different things that are changing in their body as well as their brain. So they say they're developing different sort of approach but it is unclear. They haven't given any details yet about what the program's going to actually look like.

AMT: Do you think teenagers should be dieting at all? Should anybody be dieting Tracey?

DR. TRACEY BRIDGER: No. Dieting has been shown over and over again not to be helpful. Now that's not saying that people should just eat whatever they want without a care in the world. Anybody of any body size needs to eat healthy and we need to have a diet that is healthy that we can possibly make it and that we can live with for the rest of our lives. Teaching children and teens about healthy eating is actually not a bad thing. And teaching families about healthy eating is not a bad thing. But it's how we go about doing that is the important thing. The other thing that we always have to keep in mind and something that I think about all the time when I'm counselling families is we're sending them back out into the world that isn't nearly as healthy as it was when I was growing up. In terms of food marketing and lots of mixed messages out there. So the more we can do with our food environment and our physical environment outside of the individual family I think is critical as well.

AMT: Now I gather you've had your own experiences with Weight Watchers Tracy Bridger.

DR. TRACEY BRIDGER: Yeah. I was about 20 and I didn't need to go but like many young people were, I was obsessed with it. They actually pulled me out of the line and said, “I don't think you need to be here.” And I convinced them that I wanted to stay and it was an eye opener. It made me really focus too much on what the scale was saying even though I didn't have any extra weight on at all. I was obsessed with it and what I was eating. And it was very clear that it made a difference about who was leading or facilitating a group. And I think this is one of my worries about this program which we have no idea what it's going to look like. One of the things that we've found here in our program is who is in the group but also who's leading the group is very important. So that person needs to be trained very well about how to run a group. What do you do when issues come up? What do you do if someone in the group talks about some kind of weird diet that they say really helped them? How can the leader talk about what the science is actually saying? How can they make it a safe place so that people aren't judged and that people are focusing on their body size? All those sorts of things. So that's my biggest worry. What's it going to look like in the community? Who are going to be the leaders and facilitators and how well-trained are they going to be? I've just seen lots of horrible things out there that can do a lot of damage. I'm sure there are good people as well but it can be very damaging. I mean it's better than a community running a Biggest Loser contest which we see all the time and those are horrible. But we need to make sure that it's full of people who know what they're doing.

AMT: So what do you suggest — I want you all to jump in here — to a teenager who actually does want to lose weight? We heard those clips of people saying "Don't body shame." But what about someone who truly wants to do this, where did they turn? How would you help them go forward?

DR. TRACEY BRIDGER: And you can't ignore those people and say "Don't worry about it." The evidence is very clear here that the focus can't be on the scale. It's not that weight doesn't matter at all because it does. But it's one part of our health and many other things matter just as much or a lot more. The focus needs to be on health behaviours and what they're able to reasonably do. So like getting a good night sleep, knowing about the food choices, knowing how to look at food advertising, and knowing what mass marketing of trying to do. But we can't forget about the mental health piece as well. So this would be how do we help teens feel good about themselves and the body that they have because realistically they might not end up losing a lot of weight and lots of times we don't even want them to do that. So the focus should never be on the weight but on other things. And then the weight ends up being what it will be. So if you can live the healthiest life that you can reasonably do for the rest of your life hopefully your weight will be where it needs to be — whatever weight that is.

AMT: Katy Weber, what kind of advice would you give to a teen client who's worried about weight?

KATY WEBER: Yeah I agree with Tracey. I mean I think we need to teach children and especially teenagers who are still growing that there is absolutely nothing wrong with the size of their bodies. We know that the children who are viewed as overweight by their parents or their doctors tend to gain more weight across childhood, irrespective of their official BMI. So we need to change the fact that paediatricians are telling parents the BMI number of their two-year-old and suggesting that perhaps this two-year-old is a little chunky and we need to cut back on sweets. I mean this is where it's all beginning. It's this sort of ingrained obsession with fat and our fear of fat that is really leading teenagers to say to themselves "There's something wrong with my body. I need to lose weight." So if we get to the point where they feel like there's nothing wrong with their body and that they don't need to lose weight in the first place especially when they're still growing then we can teach them that weight loss is not the primary measure of success when it comes to health. Because when you tie health to a number, you assume this idea that weight loss automatically gets us closer to this allusive "healthy body," and the more we weigh the further we must be from healthy. The belief that somehow weight loss is going to increase our health when we know study after study actually says the opposite that it has nothing to do with weight. The BMI scale itself is wrong 50 percent of the time when it's measuring the health of somebody who is classified as overweight or even moderately obese. So I think really what we need to be doing is separating the idea that a number on a scale and a number on a BMI scale that has anything to do with our actual health. So that comes into changing the way we represent bodies in media and showing young girls that a healthy body looks many, many different ways. I mean when I work with young children I talk to them about a flower garden and a flower garden looks fine when there's one kind of flower. But it looks beautiful when there are tall flowers and short flowers and fat flowers and little tiny flower. We need to show them a wider variety of bodies in media.

AMT: Alyson Schafer is listening intently and you do want to jump in.

ALYSON SCHAFER: I'm nodding yes. Well I completely agree with all the comments that have been made so far. I'm just saying from my own experience when I did the program, my alternatives at that time were the things like the Slim Fast shakes and taking laxatives and crazy stupid things like that. So to me I felt like they did address health. I did see food as having a relationship with me that was healthy. It was the beginning of my education and I thought that my leader in my group at that time was very successful in writing my course and I certainly agree that all stakeholders are needed to make some changes. So to the point about the food industry, we know that our food is latent with sugars in ways that try to make it more satiable and more desirable so that we want to eat more. When we look at food that is fed to children it doesn't look food that’s fed adults. Baby food that comes out of squeeze tubes and goldfish crackers — these are all things that are really manufactured for a child's palate that aren't necessarily the best food choices. So I think everybody needs to take part in this, including I don't mind a parent of a two-year-old saying, “I want to make sure that I start developing my child's eating habits as being healthy and well-balanced,” and not with a sight to as you say get the numbers down in the BMI or get the numbers down on the scale. But to the point of well-rounded healthy, organic, and without additives, the best that they can eat. So I think everyone has to participate in this.

AMT: Dr. Tracey Bridger, what does the medical research say about how best to help teenagers have a healthy body weight when we know there is a problem in this country with childhood obesity? We're told there is. Is it wrong?

DR. TRACEY BRIDGER: No. I like to look at it as sort of more than just weight but sort of chronic disease risk factors all around which would include inactivity in children for example. It's a complex issue. So anyone that would say, "Oh there is one thing or this thing.” I don't think is involved in the field. But for parents it can be a big struggle. I think as healthcare professionals and others and this would include the media, whatever we can do to help change the environment we live in with the food industry and with government I think that would be very helpful for families. So when they go they know what maybe perhaps healthier choices are. But it comes down to starting at a very young age and helping to teach families what a good way to raise a healthy child is. Parents need to be good role models themselves and eat healthy as best they can in fact they can afford because we know food insecurity is a big issue as well. And the expensive food can be very challenging for a lot of families. But it also comes down to not just the food but also the activity. Keeping a very close eye on screen time. This is a huge thing I think for a lot of kids. So this needs to start at a very young age. Getting a good handle on how much screen time or how much they should and shouldn't have. And sleep is another big thing. So these are the things we need to start teaching our kids’ young age

AMT: We're just starting to talk about how sleep is important for weight. Alyson, how do parents navigate this? I mean is there is there a better way to handle this. Like I know it's just easy right and wrong. But how do they handle that?

ALYSON SCHAFER: So I agree. I think there has to be a constant conversation with our kids about how they are being manipulated by media images. Again, about the food industry. Kids like to know what's going on in the big world and kind of get a handle on it and say “Ha. They're not going to manipulate me. I know they're putting extra calories in that big gulp and supersizing everything.” So I think we can bring them into the conversation about the cultural issues and what they have to navigate. We want to stay away from beauty. It's not about beauty. It's not about weight and the number as per say. But it's about health and it's about balance and it's about the things out in our real world that we have to teach them so that they can navigate those things independently without projecting our own worries about them getting fat. This is the message they're going to pick up. It also means we really have to watch what we're modelling in terms of saying, "Do I look good in this? Oh I put on five pounds." We toss up these little comments and those land very loudly with our children.

AMT: Katy…

KATY WEBER: Yeah. I mean that's what I think the real issue here is the company of Weight Watchers. I mean even if we don't talk about the billions of dollars that this company stands to gain by recruiting teenagers as lifelong members who become yo-yo dieters who struggle to stay at a certain weight. If Weight Watchers were to change their name, if they want to get rid of scales altogether, if they were to stop airing commercials where they say a person's name and immediately underneath they say the amount of weight they've lost; I mean if we can really create a program that is this inexpensive for young people to learn actually healthy habits irrespective of the scale then this would be wonderful. I mean I don't think anyone is arguing against healthy habits for teenagers. I think the big problem is just this billion dollar industry that is profiting off of diet culture and the profits off this idea that our bodies aren't good enough the way they are and that we need to constantly be changing them as opposed to caring for them.

AMT: Tracey Bridger, I'll give you the last word on this.

DR. TRACEY BRIDGER: I love what Alyson said about parents saying things about themselves. Kids are listening. So if you take anything away from this remember that your kids are listening to you so please don't make comments about your own weight or other people's weight or beauty or how they look because they'll remember that forever.

AMT: We have to leave it there. Thank you for all — I was going to say weighing in but that's a really bad pun.

[Sound: laughing]

AMT: Thank you for being contributing to this conversation.

DR. TRACEY BRIDGER: Thank you so much.

AMT: Dr. Tracey Bridger is a pediatric endocrinologist and medical director of the Janeway Lifestyle Program in St. John's. Alyson Schafer is a parenting author and family therapist in Toronto. And Katy Weber is a Canadian author and health coach. She was in Rosendale, New York. We invited Weight Watchers to speak with us, but they were not available. If you have some experiences or thoughts on weight loss and healthy living, tweet us @thecurrentcbc, find us on Facebook or email us from our website, cbc.ca/thecurrent. Coming up in our next half hour, adapting to a new reality of antibiotic resistance with a little help, from our poop. The promising science of fecal transplants coming up. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

[Music: Theme]

'Poop pills' cured Canadian woman of C. difficile

Guests: Karen Shandro, Dr. Tom Louie, Emma Allen-Vercoe

AMT: Hello I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

[Music: Adaptation Theme]

AMT: For Karen Shandro, it all started out as a simple sinus infection. But after a round of antibiotics, she found herself with something much worse. A nightmarish condition that made her life all but unbearable. Karen Shandro had come down with C. difficile. The antibiotics she'd taken had done some damage to her gut, leaving her susceptible to a new infection. If you're squeamish — just a warning now that I'll be asking Karen what it's like to live with C. difficile and it isn't pretty. In the end, there is a happy ending to Karen's story — though it has an ick factor too. After taking more and more antibiotics to try to beat back the infection, Karen was enrolled in a clinical trial. The experimental treatment is known as FMT — fecal microbiota transplants. These transplants of feces are one way medicine is hoping to adapt to the growing problem of diseases that are resistant to antibiotics. As part of our series Adaptation, we've reached Karen Shandro at her home in Ardrossan, Alberta. Hello.

KAREN SHANDRO: Hello

AMT: What kind of shape were you in by the time you first heard about that clinical trial?

KAREN SHANDRO: I was actually in very bad shape. I presented to the emergency department of my local hospital and when my husband came home from work he took one look at me and I think he literally thought I was dying. I was so dehydrated and disillusional. I was in so much pain because in those 24 hours I probably had an episode of diarrhea — multitude of episodes of diarrhea — probably 20 times. So he called an ambulance and off to the emergency department I went.

AMT: So tell me a little bit more of what it's like to actually have C. difficile.

KAREN SHANDRO: We've all heard probably in our lifetime a GI upset involving diarrhea, stomach cramps, and bloating. And I don't want to make light of that that's happened to anyone. But C. difficile diarrhea is a determined, aggressive, persistent ugly bacteria and the toxins create havoc on your gut. The diarrhea comes without warning. The episodes last anywhere from five times to 20 times in a day. So not to be graphic but it’s explosive. It's raunchy. So what happens to your body physically at least from me I wanted to eat less and less because anything that I ate would go through me. I had no appetite. I had no desire to eat and cook anything food-related. I don't know how else to describe it but it was horrible.

AMT: You're making us understand quite clearly I think. But this went on for two months.

KAREN SHANDRO: Yes, two months

AMT: How did you cope with that? How did your family cope with that because it's contagious as well, isn't it?

KAREN SHANDRO: I've always heard about bacteria that happens in the hospital in long-term care centres when they have this bad bacteria break out. I never really knew the term but I know that they have to close down the ward and have scrupulously bleaching efforts. Well that's the same C. diff.

AMT: Right. I think the word I should have used was infectious. Yes.

KAREN SHANDRO: Yes. We can be carriers of C. diff. It never causes us problems until — in my case — through the use of antibiotics that destroyed my complete gut flora. Or for [unintelligible], people going through cancer treatments, the elderly. So this is the same C. difficile that invaded my body. Who knows when and where.

AMT: So when you were told that you might be a good candidate for this clinical trial, how did your doctor sell it to you?

KAREN SHANDRO: It really wasn't a sales pitch for lack of better words. Plan A for me was to be on of vancomycin in when the ER physician consulted infectious diseases and Dr. Dina Kao, what she'd mentioned to me vancomycin would be in my next drug that I'd be on. It's a very expensive drug. If you don't have a drug plan, it's very costly and the long-term side effects were not good to hear. So when I heard that and then I heard Plan B which was this whole fecal microbiota transplant which I never heard of before happening within my own province, basically in close proximity to where I live at the U of A hospital, for me it was a no-brainier.

AMT: You essentially were going to take pills that contained — how do I put it — biological matter that had been in the feces donated by a stranger.

KAREN SHANDRO: Correct.

AMT: And so tell us the day that you had to do that, what was that day like? What did they give you? What happened?

KAREN SHANDRO: The nurse Brandy came to me with this Styrofoam case, frozen fecal matter from a donor — all in pill form. I was early on in the trial — I personally took 59 pills. They just look like a large vitamin. And I had to take 59 pills — took me about an hour and a half. Ideally I think they wanted me to have it — memory serves me correct in about 45 minutes. But I got a bit water logged. So they were easy to take. They had no smell. They had no odour. They had no aftertaste. It just took a little bit of time

AMT: Ok. So you took those pills and then what happened?

KAREN SHANDRO: So I took those pills. I think I crashed for about four to five hours. And upon waking up I could literally say that I was starving. I had hunger pains that I hadn't experienced in a while and I remember the diet that I had. I had tea. I had multigrain toast with peanut butter. I had some yogurt and strawberries. And I am a triumph success. It did work. In 48 hours I was at a conference; actually the very next day — so I had this on a Thursday, March 19th 2015. On Friday I was at a conference with my husband's work mingling with people and eating whatever I wanted. It was surreal to me because all I could think of back my mind was I need a bathroom. But that was not happening.

AMT: Because really from the situation you described earlier you were basically having to camp in your bathroom for two months, right?

KAREN SHANDRO: I did.

AMT: And so how are you today?

KAREN SHANDRO: I'm fine. I'm healthy just like I was before. Maybe I am even healthier [laughs].

AMT: Well that's a good news story. Karen Shandro, thanks for sharing.

KAREN SHANDRO: You're welcome.

AMT: Karen Shandro spoke to us from Ardrossan, Alberta. Dr. Tom Louie is known as pioneer in fecal transplants. He was a co-author of the clinical trial Karen took part in. And he's with us from Calgary. Hello.

DR. TOM LOUIE: Hello.

AMT: So can you give us the layman's version of how our fecal transplant works?

DR. TOM LOUIE: Basically what we don't realize is that our antibiotics, depending on their spectrum, basically wipe-out the normal gut bacteria. So in many ways C. diff is a model where it's basically a wipe-out experiment to see what the role of normal good bacteria might be in health. And so in this case here the antibiotics would reduce the number of good bacteria by 100 to 1,000 to a million fold and it just leaves the patient susceptible to C .diff.

AMT: And so the good bacteria is even fecal matter. It's expelled daily. And so you need to put it back in?

DR. TOM LOUIE: Indeed. If I was a spokesperson for fecal bugs I would say we're there to help you every day. You don't know that we're there. We fill the gut up so that any bad bugs that come in we'll out-compete them and we also stimulate the immune system to keep you healthy. We may even help your memory. We also provide vitamins to you; Vitamin K to stop you from bleeding. So we’re there. And we're not liked because we smell a bit and yet the cells that line our gut — our human cells — love us because we make products that stimulate the cells. So if I was a spokesperson for the gut bugs that's what we do. So we're here to protect you from noxious pathogenic bacteria — bacteria that cause disease. And so we basically out-compete. And so we're natural partners. We're a part of you.

AMT: OK, well that's a good sales pitch for the gut bug. So how did you get into the business of treating patients with the gut bugs and donated human feces?

DR. TOM LOUIE: I was dragged in kicking and screaming in 1996 by referral from gastroenterology in Calgary. And so I had trained in the U.S. with the infectious disease physicians who had been famous for working on diagnosing C. diff in the early days and knew about gut bugs. But basically after this patient had over a year and a half — two years of C. diff, I said "Well we have no means of escape but I'll give you an article from Sweden on a case of C. diff." So it was just one case and I had the patient read the story and her daughters read the story as well. So basically I said well let's do it. But when I asked the hospital — the Calgary general — whether we could do it in the hospital the nurses were quite revolted by the idea.

AMT: What did a fecal transplant require initially?

DR. TOM LOUIE: I was doing enemas.

AMT: And then you moved to pills.

DR. TOM LOUIE: Yes indeed. So between 1996 when I did the first transplant I had never done an enema before and so it was all self-learned as it were. I asked the nurses for a little bit of advice. But overall it was a self-taught and so the errors of how to do it I learned from that. And radiology helped me as well.

AMT: So when did you move from enema to pills?

DR. TOM LOUIE: In 2010 I ran into a several patients that were not curable by high volume enemas. They couldn't retain it. So I just parked the patient for about eight or nine months and just kept them on vancomycin and then thought about it and eventually came to the conclusion that maybe I should try the oral route from above and so that's when the pill business started.

AMT: I've got a couple of questions about that. First of all, who were the donors? How did you find donors?

DR. TOM LOUIE: Basically even at that time it was still family members. So I always chose somebody in the family because they're related. So that is often times a mother-daughter combination or a sibling. I occasionally used a husband, but if it was a wife recipient. But I consider them as being less optimal because they may be more distantly related genetically. Based on some early data to say that the bacterial flora in your siblings and offspring would be more similar.

AMT: Ok, so you started doing this with pills. What are these pills like? How do you make them?

DR. TOM LOUIE: Basically it's a fecal donation. And what we do is we suspend the whole stool in about a litre buffered saline that's made anaerobic — meaning we take the oxygen out of it. And then we filter it to discard any of the large particulate matter otherwise known as undigested food, etc. So they're thrown away and then it's spun down several times so that we only capture the bacteria that are free floating in the water so that they don't sediment. So it's that fraction. So out of a 100 grams or 150 grams a donation, we would come up with about two teaspoons of bugs. Two teaspoons.

AMT: And it's those bugs that you put in the capsules?

DR. TOM LOUIE: Indeed.

AMT: And these are gel caps?

DR. TOM LOUIE: Yes we fill them with about half a cubic centimetre of suspended bacteria.

AMT: And do they have more gel lining around them than usual?

DR. TOM LOUIE: Well yes indeed. So in this trial we over encapsulated the smallest capsule twice. So that meant that there was a gelatin capsule twice around the original smallest capsule.

AMT: And why would you freeze them?

DR. TOM LOUIE: For convenience — thinking that most bacteria survive freezing.

AMT: Ok. So that gets around the "ick factor" then — it's frozen and it's encapsulated a number of times — if there is an "ick factor" for somebody who desperately needs this.

DR. TOM LOUIE: Yes indeed. We also colour code it as well. So we also found that if it is transparent I think it probably causes a bit of alarm I guess.

AMT: Does Health Canada get involved at some point in all of this?

DR. TOM LOUIE: I think of late after about 2011 or 2012 — I think Health Canada became interested in this what we're looking at. Some regulatory filings for that. And so that's the basis of this trial that Karen participated in to validate the notion of giving pills as against the standard treatment which would be by a colonoscopy

AMT: So tell me more of the results of your clinical trial.

DR. TOM LOUIE: Basically the 116 patients were recruited and followed over a period of a year. So the results showed that taking 40 pills was the same as undergoing a colonoscopy delivery of about two cup full of the fecal slurry.

AMT: And what were the results?

DR. TOM LOUIE: 95 percent of them got better on either treatment.

AMT: That's pretty impressive, isn't it?

DR. TOM LOUIE: I was pleased with that.

AMT: Well Dr. Louis thank you for taking us through what you worked on.

DR. TOM LOUIE: Thank you.

AMT: Dr. Tom Louie joined us from Calgary. He is a Professor of microbiology, immunology and infectious diseases in the Cumming School of Medicine at the University of Calgary. Emma Allen-Vercoe is also optimistic about the healing potential of human feces. And while the University of Guelph microbiologist also works with donated material, her work may someday eliminate the need for human donors. Emma Allen-Vercoe is a co-founder of Nubiyota, a company that specializes in microbial therapeutics. And she's with us from Guelph, Ontario. Hello.

EMMA ALLEN-VERCOE: Hi there.

AMT: So your practice builds on the work that Tom Louie is doing in Calgary. But I guess it's also different. Tell me what you are working on?

EMMA ALLEN-VERCOE: Yeah. Well I have to say Tom is a hero of mine. He was the one that introduced me to whole concept of fecal transplants when I was working in Calgary before I started my own lab. And what I've done is I've created a lab where we culturing those microbes from the human gut as sort of separate entities — so as pure culture — which is something that's a little difficult to do because traditionally microbiology doesn't lend itself very well to the culture of these microbes. A lot them are very difficult to grow. [Unintelligible] as Dr. Louie suggested that means that a lot of them even a slight whiff of oxygen means that that will kill them or compromise in some ways. So we have an entire lab set up to capture anaerobic bacteria which is unusual in microbiology sense.

AMT: What you call your lab?

EMMA ALLEN-VERCOE: We call it the Poopy Lab [laughs].

AMT: [Laughs] And you've got a Robogut in there. What is that?

EMMA ALLEN-VERCOE: Yeah. So the Robogut is really just a contraption that - we didn't invent it we just kind of [unintelligible] to culture entire microbial ecosystems. And what we've learned over the years is that a lot of these microbes, one of the reasons that they don't like to grow on their own is because they need their friends. And so the first thing that I did my lab is set up a system that allowed them to grow together as a community. And that in fact allows most of the microbes from the human gut to grow in the lab. And what it is it's just really a bio reactive system. So it's sort of glass and stainless steel vessels. So what we can do in those vessels is actually recapitulate the environments of the human colon. And by doing so we can see these bioreactors with stool or even with collections of microbes we have cultured and have them live quite happily for quite some time — a few weeks.

AMT: So you're seeding it with stool. That is donated stool, is it?

EMMA ALLEN-VERCOE: Yes. So University of Guelph doesn't have a hospital associated with it, so a lot of the time we're using stool from students because it's sort of easier to get. So we're looking at really healthy microbial communities. Although I do a lot of work with collaborators who are in hospital environments to work on clinical studies like colitis and the like?

AMT: I'm just wondering how you advertise for student donors?

EMMA ALLEN-VERCOE: Well it turns out students will do pretty much anything for beer money.

AMT: [Laughs]. So you have managed to culture these microbes. What's the intent? What do you do? When you get them does that mean you could actually use them in some kind of drug that would be a little more wide-ranging as opposed to the individual kind of capital treatments Dr. Louie is talking about?

EMMA ALLEN-VERCOE: From the company side we recognized early on that’s one of the big needs in a fecal transplant world. Clearly fecal transplants work and they work very well. And the problem with them is that our donors are very healthy and they're screened. But you can never be 100 percent sure what you're putting into patients if you're just using stools. And chances are it's not dangerous. But you really can't tell too much because you can screen for microbes and nasty things you don't want in there. But there are a lot of things that we don't know about stool and about microbes in there and we can't screen for the unknowns. So we recognized early on that because we make entire ecosystems that are not as complex as stool ecosystems. They contain anything up to 80 different bacterial species and the average stool sample comes back to about 200 different species. So we're getting there but not quite. But we recognize that we could probably use those ecosystems as drugs if you like if we choose to make more. So the first one that we did we call it "re-poop-ulate” and it was a mixture of 33 bacterial strains that we took from a healthy individual which we published a number of years ago. And that was really just using the skills that we sort of leverage from my lab to culture these microbes and so that pure culture and then add them together in a saline solution that was used just like fecal transplants are used in a colonoscopy.

AMT: So "re-poop-ulate” as you call; your company works on that?

EMMA ALLEN-VERCOE: Yes, so what we are trying to do now is to; so that paper came out in 2013 actually is based on work we did in 2011. And since then we've been working to try to do two things. First of all to really refine the types of microbes that are present within those ecosystems. And the second thing that we're trying to do is to put them together in two to stabilize them and to put them into an oral capsule just like Dr. Louie has been doing, but at this time not the stool. This would actually be pure microbes. So much more sort of a drug-like approach because we can make the same drug over and over again because we can use the same microbes.

AMT: Ok now you've partnered with a pharmaceutical company called Takeda. Am I right?

EMMA ALLEN-VERCOE: That's right, yes.

AMT: So what are you working on with them? Can you tell me a little bit about that?

EMMA ALLEN-VERCOE: Yes sure. So we are working on a trial [unintelligible] using an oral encapsulated product; first in class biologic drug which contains around 40 different bacterial species that are encapsulated and stabilized so that they can be given orally.

AMT: And ideally they'd be able to be available at a pharmacy as opposed to having to go and get the treatment the way it exists now. That's the end goal?

EMMA ALLEN-VERCOE: That may be the end goal. I think though that we have to treat this type of drug as a drug. And I would imagine it would always be a prescribed drug.

AMT: We started this competition because of C. difficile but what other illnesses could potentially be treated through this?

EMMA ALLEN-VERCOE: Well we have a lot of ideas for the future. In terms of the sorts of things that we can go after. Obviously there are all sorts of illnesses that are to do with gut ailments like colitis as I mentioned. But that is really not just one disease. That's actually an umbrella term for a number of different diseases. That's quite difficult to do and try to sort of understand the patient population is the hard part. We were very interested in a number of other indications of things that might not be so obvious or sound so obvious things like depression. And I'm very interested in autism as an aside. We are very far away from being able to treat autism with the fecal transplant right now or with gut microbes. But trying to understand how gut microbes may have a role in some of these gut brain diseases is a current academic interest mine.

AMT: And that's fascinating because it's only recently that those of us outside of scientific research heard about the microbiome and its importance in development. Is this dovetail with the kinds of things you're looking at then?

EMMA ALLEN-VERCOE: Absolutely. Right now we're thinking that some forms of autism — let me clear very few forms of autism I think have different etiology. But some forms of autism we actually may be a gut disease that affects the brain. And so we think it might be something to do gut microbes and products that are affecting brain development pathways and so we're trying to sort of disentangle that and then trying to understand that.

AMT: When you first began as a microbiologist did you even have this on your radar?

EMMA ALLEN-VERCOE: No. In fact I worked on salmonella like a lot of microbiologists starting out worked on human pathogens. But the pathogens are really the minority. They're ones we hear about because they're the notorious ones. But really the microbes in the gut are absolutely fascinating to me because they do far more for our health and they are actually part of us. They’re symbionts. We never really realized it until recently and so I think that's why I'm so interested in it.

AMT: It's a whole new area of scientific research that just keeps opening up.

EMMA ALLEN-VERCOE: Yes. I don't think I'll ever want another thing to do.

AMT: Well thank you for explaining all of the stars. Thanks so much.

EMMA ALLEN-VERCOE: You're very welcome. Thanks for having me.

AMT: Emma Allen-Vercoe is a microbiologist at The Poopy Lab, a professor of molecular and cellular biology at Guelph University, and co-founder of NuBiyota. That's our program for today. Stay tuned to Radio One for Q. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. Thanks for listening to The Current.

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