I had such a fangirl moment on today’s episode of Period Story! I speak with Alanna Collen, a science writer, biologist and author of 10% Human: How Your Body’s Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness. Her book inspired much of my interest in gut health, so it was a thrill to speak to her for the podcast.
In this episode, Alanna shares:
- The vasovagal events that made her periods extremely painful and unpleasant
- How the Depo Provera injection changed the trajectory of her career
- Her background in evolutionary biology and how she ended up doing a PhD on bats
- How an encounter with ticks in a rainforest led to her research on the gut microbiome
- Why she thinks going to basics with nutrition is better than any gut health tricks or hacks to feed your gut bacteria
- Her views on fibremaxxing and why we would all benefit from eating more fibre
- How the trillions of microbes in our bodies support our immune system
- The connection between our gut microbiome and obesity
- A sneak peek into her next book, which has been 10 years in the making
- Why the weight set point matters and how we can influence it
- And of course, the story of her first period
Alanna says that we can look after our microbes by eating as many plant foods as we can and building up the amount of fibre our body is used to tolerating.
Thank you, Alanna!
Get in touch with Alanna:
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SHOW TRANSCRIPT
Le’Nise Brothers: Hi Alanna. Thank you so much for coming onto the show today. I’m so excited to speak to you, to talk about your rich experience in microbiome research and what you have coming up next. But let’s start with the question that I ask all of my guests, which is tell us the story of your first period.
Alanna Collen: Hi Le’Nise. It’s so nice to be here. I’m really excited to talk to you. Well, I think the story of my first period is maybe slightly disappointing. I don’t remember a huge amount except I started my period and thought, oh, well there we go. It was probably just a few weeks before I turned 15, so I was quite late.
And I guess I’d been kind of hoping for it sooner ’cause I felt like a late bloomer and all my friends had already started their periods and stuff. But in terms of my period itself, it wasn’t, there was nothing, it was. Light and not anything significant really. And I dealt with it just as expected.
I was at home at the time my mum was in, you know, everything was easy. I knew what to expect. I knew, I knew what was happening. So it wasn’t a big deal. The periods in the following months were a big deal. ‘Cause I think that one was maybe so light that it didn’t really affect me. But once things settled down and I got into a normal rhythm. Then, uh, I started to have extremely awful periods.
Le’Nise Brothers: Okay, so can you say more about the awful periods?
Alanna Collen: Yeah. So, I don’t know whether you’ve had any other guests who have this, but I have a very strong vasovagal response to well, periods and I think generally my cervix being touched. So, basically the beginning of my period would result in me feeling extremely sick, in huge amounts of pain and very, very faint. And it’s the faintness that was so unpleasant. And if I had actually fainted, that would’ve been much nicer. But what I do is I stay right on the edge of consciousness.
My heart rate drops into the thirties. My blood pressure obviously drops very low. I’m in excruciating pain. I vomit. I need the toilet. I can’t stand up everything at the same time. And it’s quite horrendously awful, and it lasts for about 40 minutes. And so having periods was almost immediately extremely traumatic.
And I mean, it was predictable. The same thing happened to my mum. And, um, it would basically, that went on. For whenever I was having periods during my life, four, every third period would be like that. Every third or fourth period would be a massive drama and extremely unpleasant. That meant that after just, I don’t know, maybe, certainly maybe around a year of having periods, I then went onto the depo injection where I, which meant that I had no periods at all, and I stayed on that until I was 28.
Le’Nise Brothers: Wow. And just going back to what you were saying about your periods and the reactions that you were having, the vasovagal response, was there any investigation about what was going on?
Alanna Collen: I remember going to the doctor once with my mum and basically the doctor saying, oh, it’s normal. Just, you know.
I think the doctor thought maybe I wasn’t, that I needed sugar that I was feeling faint ’cause I hadn’t eaten or something. And in hindsight, that was utterly wrong, not the case, not what was causing it. And I think perhaps because my mum suffered in the same way that we just didn’t, it was just like, this is how it is.
This is how periods are for you. I didn’t, I know that not everyone felt the same. And actually I didn’t, I guess I didn’t have too many of those periods before I went onto the injection. So it wasn’t something that, um, was significantly impacting my life for very long, and therefore I could ignore it.
Um, so yeah, we didn’t really, we didn’t really get into what was happening.
Le’Nise Brothers: Okay. And then you were on the injection until 28, and then what was your experience like coming off of the injection or after getting your periods back after not having the injection for a while?
Alanna Collen: Not having, having the injection for sort of 12 years was amazing.
Amazing. I absolutely loved. I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to have periods when they could just have an injection every three months and be done with it. And my career I think was extremely different because I had this injection. I did things that I just don’t know how I, I literally don’t know how people who, women who, who are having periods do those things in their careers. Because I spent a lot of time running around in jungles and I had no access to facilities whatsoever. You know, I lived in jungles for weeks and months at a time with no toilet, no running water, nothing, no electricity. So I had no capacity to you know, store waste period waste.
So I think my entire life and career was, was completely different as a result of having those injections, and I’m super grateful for that. When I, when I restarted, it just went straight back to how it was before and was, you know, quickly quite horrendous. I was determined at that point, I’d become a bit more aware of what putting stuff into your body does to you and altering your hormones for such a long period. And I was also aware of the consequences of being on progesterone without much estrogen over time, you know, the impacts on your bone density and so on. I was keen not to be on anything, but it, it didn’t go very well.
And also at that point I was, um, by then married and wanting to have a child, so I wanted to get my cycles back to a natural state. I was aware that it might take some time for that to happen having been on the injection for such a long time. Yeah, I just felt like I had to put up with it, basically.
But it was, it was horrendous. There were points where I considered calling an ambulance, although I knew that they’d never be there in time and I knew that there was not a whole lot they could do. There were definitely points where I called my husband to come home or to look after me. Or my mum, I called my mum in the middle of the night to just have someone next to me, you know, just even on the phone. Just have her there while I go through that process. So, yeah. Horrendous.
Le’Nise Brothers: I noticed you were using the, you used the past tense. When you talk about this, are your periods still like this or can you talk a little bit about what’s going on with your period now?
Alanna Collen: Well, currently I’m on HRT and I have a Mirena coil, so I’m not having periods. And again, it’s bliss. Um, but. The, a very strange thing happened both to, to my mum and myself, which was that when we had our first child, these events stopped. So I no longer, even if I were, you know, even before the Mirena coil, I wasn’t having these major vasovagal events and I did have them in response to other things. So I actually had one when I had the Mirena coil fitted earlier this year. And again, it was horrendous. It was in a medical setting. So it’s quite interesting because all the nurses were absolutely panicking, and I was like, can I do this every three months?
It’s, you know, this isn’t, it’s a big deal, but it’s not a big deal to me. It’s fairly normal to me. So I was hooked up to a drip and I had to monitor on, and they had to transfer me to a flatbed. And it was all just, there was so much drama and adrenaline around it, and I was like, this is, you know, you, you guys don’t realise but I’ve dealt with this for large periods of my life without any help at all. Yeah, now thankfully I’m, I’m back to not having to deal with that kind of stuff.
Le’Nise Brothers: Just thinking to the future, so if you had this experience, your mum had this experience, is there anything that you’re doing to prepare yourself if your daughter has a similar experience?
Alanna Collen: And that’s a very good question and not something I have really considered. But I would very likely suggest that she took the same approach as me. Although I’m not entirely comfortable with synthetic hormones from an early age or, you know, at all it’s so disruptive to your life to go through that.
And, you know, my periods, even when they, when I didn’t have a vasovagal attack, were very unpleasant and very painful. And so I could easily have two or three days a month where I was not able to do what I wanted to do because of pain. So yeah, I think I’d probably be talking about that with her doctor.
Le’Nise Brothers: Just going to what you, back to what you said about being in the jungle. Your experience of not having a period there, or not having to deal with waste, period waste and all of that. Can you talk a little bit. About why you were in the jungle, because I find this really fascinating because your background is an evolutionary biologist.
You did a lot of study in a particular area, which I’ll let you talk about, and then you made this big shift to microbes and the microbiome. So can you say a little bit more about that?
Alanna Collen: Uh, yeah, so I was, um, I’ve always been a biologist. I was very interested in biology at school, and then I did a biology degree.
And during the first year of my degree, I was particularly interested in wildlife. I’d grown up watching, you know, David Attenborough documentaries and loved animals. And, uh, there was an opportunity to go to Indonesia to work alongside scientists. And with wildlife and I, I took it in the first summer of my university holidays and spent two months there.
Uh, the first month was in a very remote village in a rainforest and I loved it. And I became particularly interested at that time in bats. Um, I did a, a week with a bat scientist and we caught dozens of species, hundreds of individuals during that week, and I just found all the different so fascinating. The fact that they fly, they echolocate. So I got super into bats and continued to study them during my degree and then did a master’s with a focus when I had the opportunity to make choices about what I was doing, I always chose to work on bats, and then I did a PhD on bats as well.
So I spent a lot of time over the years. My PhD was very travel heavy. Um, I’m not quite sure, but I, I guess I went to maybe eight or 10 countries during that time. Lots of long periods of time in rainforest, particularly in Southeast Asia and other habitats as well, like, the desert in Egypt and so on.
And yeah, just a lot of catching bats and recording their eco echolocation calls and working on how, understanding how those calls evolved over time.
Le’Nise Brothers: That’s so fascinating because you, when you think biology, bats don’t necessarily come to mind for me, I think more about human biology, right?
Alanna Collen: Yeah.
Le’Nise Brothers: What is it about bats that you find so interesting or you found so interesting?
Alanna Collen: I mean, I still love them. I know what you mean about biology. It does, it does, often you go straight to health, right. And how the human body works. But for me, at that time, wildlife was human biology and was biology.
And, um, I was working, my PhD was at a conservation organization, so it was all about you know, the natural world was very much the focus. And I was very concerned and continue to be very concerned about the state of the planet and biodiversity. And I married a conservation biologist from that place where I was doing my PhD.
And I, I think bats in particular, I think partly it was that when you do field work on bats, you very often catch them. And so with, with a lot of field work in biology, you are maybe not in contact with the animal. You might be doing camera trapping or collecting scats, the poos or to find out bits of information about them.
With bats, you often catch them, hold them, measure them, in my case, record their calls, and I just found each, the character of each different species is so different, so interesting. Their little faces. I mean, a lot of people think they’re ugly. I think they’re completely fascinatingly beautiful and so diverse and interesting. And the fact that they fly, and there’s a lot about aerodynamics that I find quite interesting about how they work. The echolocation calls are all different. I find that really interesting because they’re using physics to find their way around the world and they all do it in a different way.
So, yeah, so much. Yeah.
Le’Nise Brothers: I love that. I, I, I love it when, you know, people have, they’re passionate about things and I can really hear that.
Alanna Collen: Yeah.
Le’Nise Brothers: When you talk about it. And now talk about how you made the shift from studying about bats to then looking into the microbiome and you then went on to write your first book, which is called 10% Human, How Your Body’s Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness.
So talk about that shift.
Alanna Collen: Yeah. So, the downside of, uh, working in rainforests is that, um, they’re quite dangerous actually. And perhaps I didn’t fully appreciate that at the time. One of the, one of the dangers is infectious disease. So I had an encounter with a lot of ticks. At one point, I think I probably walked through a tick nest because, uh, I found myself, um, my ankles and feet covered in, um, dozens of ticks and, by the time I had the chance to deal with them, lots of them were buried into my skin. And, you know, I didn’t know where they’d all got to. And ultimately I then fell ill with an unknown disease that was possibly some Asian version of Lyme disease. Who knows? I still don’t know. But I became quite unwell.
I started to have periods of, uh, extreme fatigue and muscle pain and, it would come and go, which made it even more difficult to diagnose. And eventually, uh, a doctor said, look. Let’s just try treating this as if it’s Lyme disease, as if it’s like now a long chronic version of Lyme disease. So we’re going to give you a load of antibiotics and I also had developed a bone infection in my toe, which possibly was related to being bitten on all over my feet.
And that was, that was pretty bad. Very, very painful. I had three surgeries to clean that out. I had antibiotics placed in beads inside the bone of my toe, and I had a lot of intravenous antibiotics at that time. And then a follow up of actually nearly a year and a half of various different other kinds of antibiotics to try to clear this infection out of my system.
And in some ways I felt a lot better. I, I stopped having such dramatic symptoms, but in other ways things started to go wrong. So my gut wasn’t very happy. I kept getting infections and I had quite bad acne. And if I tried to come off the antibiotics, the acne would get worse. So, at some point during this process, I started to think maybe I’ve messed up my good bacteria.
And that’s literally all I knew at that point. Good bacteria, they, you know, they live in your gut, right? And they do something maybe, uh, so I went to, I went to a GP and said that my theory now was that although I was feeling better from my original problem, I had messed up my good bacteria. And he just went, that is not a thing.
And I felt so indignant because I just thought if we’re full of microbes, then how can they not be doing anything? How can it, that’s not how evolution works. If something’s, if something’s there, it’s there for some kind of reason in all likelihood. So I went home and I started properly looking into it, reading scientific papers and that, then I just became, you know, I found that I was actually looking into it exactly the right time. There were, um, this was about 2012, 2013, and there were several special issues of Science and Nature that had all about the microbiome. And scientists were really catching on to how significant the microbiome was in running our immune systems and, uh, the metabolism and so on.
And so I was fascinated. I was completely hooked on piecing together this puzzle of what our microbes do, how they do it, and how that might relate to my experience and how that might mean I could fix myself. So yeah, I, I got obsessed. I’d finished my PhD, I’d already decided that I wanted to try and write a popular science book, and so suddenly this seemed like the right thing to do.
I couldn’t stop reading, so why not also write about it?
Le’Nise Brothers: So now, this was about 10, 10 years ago.
Alanna Collen: Yeah.
Le’Nise Brothers: That you wrote your book.
Alanna Collen: Yeah.
Le’Nise Brothers: And the, we’ve now seen a big shift in the way that gut health is discussed in the media, the way that you can go to Sainsbury’s and buy different gut health products, there’s a better understanding of gut health.
What do you think of this shift and what do you think the public still needs to learn about gut health?
Alanna Collen: I am absolutely delighted with, I mean, it couldn’t be more gratifying to go from a point when I started writing the book where no one had heard the word microbiome and people literally could not believe what I was telling them when I was first talking about it.
You know, with my friends and in the pub and stuff saying what these microbes did for us and how important they were. People did not believe me, and now it’s just everyday information that, like you say, it’s in every supermarket, it’s in magazines all the time. It’s just gut health. It is a standard.
Unfortunately, possibly not in, in, uh, the NHS, but in terms of the public’s understanding, I think that’s just fantastic and I’m like super proud to have been part of that revelation, uh, to the public about how important they are and to have been able to communicate the science of, of so many amazing scientists over the years.
So what would I like? I actually think that the public have a really good understanding of it. What disappoints me about the way we treat health and gut health at the moment is that we we’re focused on tricks and hacks, and I don’t think that’s how it works. I think if you are looking for tricks and hacks to make your microbiome healthy, that’s possibly not going work so well as.
Just taking it back to basics and saying, what am I feeding them? One thing that I often get asked on podcasts is, what’s your super food? What’s your go-to food? What’s the one thing that you think that everyone should eat? And that’s exactly the kind of attitude that I think is so, uh. Disappointing and wrong when it comes to health.
It’s not about doing one thing. It’s not about going to the supermarket and buying beetroot or pomegranate or whatever the hot new nutrient or food stuff is at the time. It’s about having a balanced diet. It’s about eating lots of fibre, lots of colors in incorporating all sorts of plant foods into your diet and it’s, it’s not a sound, soundbitey is it, but that’s how it actually works.
So yeah, that’s the change I’d like to see next.
Le’Nise Brothers: Have you heard about this trend that it first started on TikTok? It’s called fibremaxxing.
Alanna Collen: Oh yeah. I, ha, yeah, I have, go on. Tell me more.
Le’Nise Brothers: So basically it was this woman in New York. She decided that she wanted to really see how she could improve her gut health.
And she kept hearing people talk about fibre and how fibre was so important, and she was trying to find a way to make it sexy for herself so she would continue to do it. And so we know that the recommendation is about to eat about 30 grams of fibre every day, which most people struggle to do.
Alanna Collen: Mm-hmm.
Le’Nise Brothers: She says that for herself, she wanted to try to eat between a hundred and 120 grams of fibre a day. And so it was about, you know, with the Gen Z and gen alpha, it’s everything is maxing, looks maxing, fibre maxing. And so that’s then became this trend of eating as much fibre as possible, but trying to make it really sexy.
So it’s not just about like, Raisin Bran or, you know, lots of bran, lots of that kind of what traditionally we would’ve thought of as of as fibre. And so yeah, that was this big thing over the summer.
Alanna Collen: I mean, I think, I think that the idea is right. I think also it’s interesting, the, the amounts of fibre, the recommended amount, like you say, is around 30 grams in different countries.
But, um, we know, know that historically it seems that populations used to eat something more like a hundred grams a day. And pre-industrial populations around the world still eat more like a hundred grams. So that’s not an unreasonable amount of fibre to, to eat. I think you have to be careful about how you get there.
Starting to eat a hundred grams of fibre a day would completely overwhelm your gut. You have to, there it is a living population and if you want to make changes, you need to do it slowly so that it can keep up and so that your gut biology can keep up and your gut barrier can manage it and so on.
So it’s not a. No one should suddenly just start eating loads of fibre. They will have horrible symptoms that will make them feel uncomfortable, and then they’ll make assumptions about being intolerant or something. And the reality is, your microbes digest stuff for you. So if you want to make a change, you’ve got to let them come along for the ride and increase populations of the particular species and strains that digest those particular kinds of fibre or kinds of food.
Um, so that would be the first thing that I’d say about fibre maxing. If, if that’s something you want to try, then it’s a process. Yeah. Um, in terms of the trend, like it, I, I get the need to make it sexy because it’s not something that, I think for some reason the protein trend appeals to people as being sexy automatically.
There’s something about protein and muscle and being lean and strong that’s just is automatically sexy. Fibre is not so sexy, really. And you know, people associate it with bowel movements and other unpleasant things that it just doesn’t make it seem the same way as protein. So yeah, if there’s a, if there’s a way to make it sexy, then great.
I like, I think there are elements of eating, lots of fibre that can be seen as sexy, like eating the rainbow. I think that’s got a very appealing nature and, varying the kinds of fibre that you eat, the kinds of plant foods that you eat, and recognising that it’s not just about fruit and vegetables.
There’s also seeds and nuts and grains and so many other kinds of fibre that you can incorporate into your diet that your microbes will love. That’s all good. So yeah, overall the trend itself is maybe a beneficial one for people. I would also say sorry to add to that, there’s, I think in diet and nutrition. Over the decades, there’s been a tendency towards leaving stuff out, being the solution. So eat less fat, eat less saturated fat, eat less, fewer carbs, eat less sugar. And I don’t think that’s been the most helpful approach because it makes people feel like they’re getting less.
Whereas now we seem to have having with those not having worked very well and not really having had a massive impact on public health. I think that’s why we’ve seen this switch to more protein as a trend. And I’m not on board with that one, but more fibre, I certainly am on board and I think that’s a nice way to think fibre first and then what else do I need?
And so yeah, that’s got value.
Le’Nise Brothers: Yeah, I completely agree. And that’s one of the principles that I, when I work as a nutritionist, that I lead with, what can we add in rather than this restrictive approach where it then starts to play on your mind and all you’re thinking of is, I can’t have this.
Alanna Collen: Yes.
Le’Nise Brothers: I can’t have that.
Alanna Collen: Absolutely.
Le’Nise Brothers: Yeah. Talking about microbes, the way that you talk about them is so interesting. So it’s, they do this, they do that. Talk a little bit more about our microbes because the title of your first book, 10% Human, is really interesting.
Say more about microbes.
Alanna Collen: Yes.
Le’Nise Brothers: And the trillions of microbes that we have and what they do for us.
Alanna Collen: Yeah. So, we, we are absolutely stuffed full of microbes, but they’re in almost all parts of us. They’re covering our skin. They’re, and the gut is the hub. So we have something like 50 to a hundred trillion microbes living primarily in the gut.
10% Human that comes from the idea that we, that the number of microbial cells in the body outnumbers the number of human cells by 10 to one. Unfortunately for the title of the book that has since been altered. So they actually did a recount of the number of human cells and, um, so the microbes haven’t really changed, but um, that puts it now more at 50 50 or something thereabouts.
So if I were writing the book now, it’d be called 50% Human. It is very frustrating that the one thing that’s changed is the title anyway. Um, the kind of principle very much stands that microbes are very significant to us. They’re not there as hitchhikers. They’re, they actually have a very crucial and intimate role in running our bodies.
And most of that role takes place when we’re babies and they’re very, very significant in how they set the human body up, the immune system and the metabolism in particular and how they instruct it. They calibrate it basically. And, but then even as adults, they’re super important. They tell your immune system what to do.
They tell your immune system how much to worry about different things. So if you eat something like gluten or um, nuts or encounter some pollen. The immune system should, the microbes should be saying, oh, we’ve seen some pollen, but don’t worry guys, it’s fine. That’s its instruction to the immune system.
These, this can’t hurt us. And it’s when that microbial relationship with the immune system goes wrong because the messages aren’t there because the microbes aren’t there that we then develop things like allergies. Autoimmunity is another level of that. So that’s when, um, the immune system attacks our own cells, our body’s cells and produces illnesses like type one diabetes or lupus or rheumatoid arthritis. And that’s when it’s this, it comes from the same roots where the microbes haven’t taught the immune system to tolerate what it finds. Um, and then we have the flip side, which is things like cancer, where the microbiome should be playing a role in teaching the immune system what to attack, as well as what to leave alone. And when we, we actually develop cancer multiple times a day, and in terms of the very simple basics of cells that start to proliferate uncontrolled. And if, um, the microbiome, if the body is working well, then the immune system goes, hang on a sec.
These guys are bad. Let’s kill ’em off. Get rid of them. And that’s part of normal biology. And you know, part of the problem with cancer is that the immune system isn’t managing to attack and kill off those cells. So cancer can proliferate more easily. So yeah, the microbiome. It tells the immune system what to do.
And the immune system is also fundamental in telling other body systems how to work. So once we have inflammation, if the immune system is active and out of control, active in the wrong ways, managing the wrong things, that then affects a lot of other things about how our biology works, including how the metabolism runs.
So our weights have some, the amount of fat that our bodies carry and how well we, we metabolise food is also dependent on what the microbiome is telling the immune system, what the immune system is telling the rest of the body, including the brain.
Le’Nise Brothers: And talking about different body systems.
So another area that the microbiome is so important for is hormone health. So we have a whole family of microbes called the estrobolome that are so helpful for managing estrogen. Can you say a little bit more about that?
Alanna Collen: Uh, this is definitely not my area of expertise, um, and something that’s actually developed since I wrote 10% Human.
But, um, the general principle is that there are, our microbes kind of metabolise many products that our bodies produce. Including hormones. And so they’re part of this cycling process of, of what we have, what chemicals we have floating around in our bodies that do jobs for us. And so if our, if our microbes are out of balance, then that can affect how our hormones are balanced as well.
Le’Nise Brothers: So you wrote the book and it kickstarted a lot of conversations. What about in your own life? What changed for you in your diet and or your nutrition and your lifestyle in the midst of writing the book? Because you mentioned the health struggles that you had been having. Did anything? I, I’m not going to say did what changed for you, because I’m assuming that a lot changed for you.
Alanna Collen: Yes, a lot changed.
Yeah. I mean, I think I was fortunate to have started from a point of reasonably good understanding of nutrition and a decent diet in the first place. Now obviously ultraprocessed foods have become a very big deal, and I was already very conscious of ingredients that didn’t belong in food.
So I, I didn’t tend to eat ultra processed foods at that stage as a habit at least. But I certainly increased the amount of fibre I ate. So the first thing I did, which is also my tip for anyone who wants to try to improve their microbiome, is I overhauled my breakfast. I had previously been eating a healthy in quotes, cereal from the supermarket that, you know, has health claims on the box and says things like high and fibre and stuff.
I recognised that actually, although it said those things, it was, obviously kind of ultra processed and also not that high in fibre compared to some other cereals that you might eat for breakfast, but not in reality. So the first thing I did was start eating a kind muesli type thing that I made up myself. It’s kind of a bircher, but actually I didn’t make it the night before, so it was at that point muesli with including seeds and nuts. Um, but no dried fruit ’cause I wasn’t a fan of dried fruit. And then I would mix into it some some natural yogurts and milk and usually raspberries and blueberries because I really liked them. So I got a bit of colour in there and I got a load of different kinds of plant foods. I got some probiotics from the yogurt, and it was yummy and still is yummy. And and it was quite high in fibre. So I was actually getting very nearly my daily recommended allowance of, or, uh, recommendation of fibre just from that one bowl of breakfast cereal.
Le’Nise Brothers: Wow.
Alanna Collen: So that was a big change. And then I just started to be more conscious of how to incorporate more plant foods into my lunches and dinners as well. And how I snacked and things like that. I’m very much now I, I think about what my microbes need. I’m quite conscious of my own body, so when I feel like I’m a bit inflamed, then I’ll be even more conscious of what I’m eating and making sure that I’m feeding the microbes that can calm that inflammation.
So that was definitely the biggest change. Antibiotics I’ve been very reluctant to take antibiotics if I can avoid them. I haven’t had nearly as many as I did before. Um, I should have said earlier actually that one of the reasons that I’d ruined my microbiome was because I was using an antibiotic called Doxycycline as an anti-malarial.
And because I travelled so frequently, I never came off it. You have to be on it before you travel. You have to be on it while you’re there, and you have to be on it for a period of time after you get back. And uh, so I just was on it for years and years and years and that was before I started all the other antibiotics to treat the tickborne infection.
So yeah, the, having avoiding antibiotics after that was a big part of it. And, um, being very careful with my daughter and, trying not to give her antibiotics unnecessarily. Not be casual about it. Let’s not say you shouldn’t give your child antibiotics if they need them, because obviously sometimes they are lifesaving or they can make a big impact on whether, uh, a child develops significant damage after some kind of infection, like ear damage, for example.
But I was, yeah, just very much more aware of, can I. Can I see how she gets on? So there were two occasions where I, she was prescribed antibiotics and I went to get them from the pharmacy and I brought them home. And then I basically watched her like a hawk and decided on, on both occasions that she was dealing with the infection on her own and that I didn’t need to give them to her.
And, um, she came, came through those infections, which were just, you know, respiratory infections on her own with, without any, um, complications. So I’m fortunate there, she’s now nine years old and she’s never had antibiotics and I’m, I’m very relieved and pleased that, that I’ve been able to, that she’s been able to do that.
I’ve been able to do it as well. Um, so yeah, that’s a big part of what I’ve changed.
Le’Nise Brothers: It’s quite interesting hearing you talk about antibiotics and your experience and whether or not you gave them to your daughter. I’m in the same position where my son has never had antibiotics and he has never been seriously ill, so he’s never really needed, needed to have them.
So I’m, I feel quite lucky in that respect. But the, I think that the conversation generally around antibiotics has also shifted where I think, you know, remember thinking about in the 90s and the 2000s where you would just, you go to the doctor, here’s some antibiotics.
Alanna Collen: Mm-hmm.
Le’Nise Brothers: And now I think there’s more of an understanding around not just the effect on the gut microbe microbiome, but also antibiotic resistance.
Alanna Collen: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Le’Nise Brothers: Can you just say a little bit about that?
Alanna Collen: Well, I, I think, yeah, so antibiotic resistance is obviously a really significant problem. And I think the interesting thing is that maybe 20 years ago, most people’s understanding of antibiotic resistance was that it was a problem that would affect humanity as broadly, but not that it was a problem that would affect them.
And I think possibly that shifted slightly where what we are understanding now is that if you take antibiotics, your level of antibiotic resistance goes up, which means those antibiotics will not work for you later. And that, that’s a little bit more like, oh, okay. I don’t want to take them if it means that I’ll have surgery and then I won’t be, then I’ll get a super bug and I won’t be able to fight it off.
And I certainly see that in many of the children in my life, my daughter’s friends and so on, that those who have had antibiotics from an early age have, have gone on to have multiple courses a year. And that they then have to move on to new varieties because they’ve stopped working. And so that, that’s, um, yeah, that antibiotic resistance element of it is super important.
I also think that people’s awareness of how important the microbiome is helps with the antibiotic resistance. They don’t see it as a, as I said, like a, a public health problem. They see it as a, what are they doing to their microbes problem. And that puts you off. So then you are less likely to be casual about just taking antibiotics ’cause it might help, it might shorten your, your cold by a few days, although it won’t ’cause it’s a virus. But you know, that, that puts people, makes people more mindful of what they’re doing to their own bodies rather than what they’re doing to humanity’s collective problems.
Le’Nise Brothers: Now just shifting a little bit to the future.
So your first book was about microbes and your next book, if you can say a little bit more about it, is around obesity.
Alanna Collen: Yes.
Le’Nise Brothers: This is such a fascinating topic because firstly, it links really nicely with the first book because we know the effect that the microbes have on metabolism.
Mm-hmm. And we’ve now seen this huge explosion in GLP-1 usage.
Alanna Collen: Mm-hmm.
Le’Nise Brothers: Can you just say a little bit more about that and maybe give us a sneak peek about what you’ll be covering?
Alanna Collen: Sure. So, like you say, I did talk about obesity and weight in my first book, um, because the microbiome is really important.
So it comes back to what I was saying before about inflammation. If your microbes are not protecting your gut lining, then various elements, microbial elements can get into the blood where they irritate the immune system and they make it inflamed. And that then affects how your body stores fat.
So inflammation creates fat storage because the, basically the body is worried that something bad is happening because the gut lining is damaged. And if something bad is happening, then they want to make sure that there’s a lot of stored energy. And so, it promotes fat storage if your microbiome is not in good shape.
So I found though that that work, that research when I was writing 10% Human completely fascinating, it absolutely transformed my understanding of how the body manages weight, um, and fat storage and my understanding of obesity the obesity epidemic. And so I kind of ran with that and started to do more research into actually what, you know, it’s, it’s not just, it’s, it doesn’t make sense to say eat less, move more you’ll lose weight because what’s making you eat more and what’s making you not want to exercise or to be active? Something’s driving that. You know, our appetites tell us what what to do, how much to eat, and uh, and actually even less consciously, our bodies decide what to do with that energy once it’s in, once, once it’s in us.
So I was fascinated to try to understand what, what is driving those processes and what can we really learn about why one person wants to eat more, why one person wants to eat more foods that are traditionally seen as unhealthy and how can we change it? So then I started working on this new book, which is currently untitled, unfortunately but might be called The Weight Setpoint, we’ll see. It is not just about the microbiome, but is about how the energy management system of our bodies has been altered by our modern way of living and that causes a raise in the weight set point. And the weight set point is how much fat your body wants you to store. And basically your brain will do whatever is necessary to make your body store that amount of fat.
So regardless of what you do, if you diet, yes, you, you can lower your weight by eating less than than you burn, but it doesn’t change the weight set point. The weight set point remains higher. So when after some time or when you slacken off or even it happens, even if you don’t slacken off, your weights will creep back up to the weight set point.
It will do that through altering your appetite, altering the kinds of foods that your brain wants you to eat, and also by changing how efficiently your body uses fuel. So it will burn less when you exercise and it will spill less energy as heat so that you can hold onto it and put it into storage.
So it’s a very clever system, very very different from our current understanding of how obesity works. And yeah, I can’t wait for this book to be out in the world. It’s been, I’ve been working on it for 10 years, so it’s a big deal. And, um, yeah, hopefully in the next year or so we’ll be out.
Le’Nise Brothers: You talking about weight set point reminded me of this study that I read. So basically, I don’t know if you’ve heard of this show, it’s an American show. I think they had some epi, some versions on over here called The Biggest Loser.
Alanna Collen: Yes. Yeah. So I’ve written about it in the book.
Le’Nise Brothers: Okay. Okay. And for people who aren’t familiar with the show, it’s basically a reality show where people go on and they try to lose the most amount of weight within a very short period of time, and there is some research that came out of the back of the many contestants that have been on the show that talk about the changes in their weight set point after being on that show and how there, this has actually, I don’t know if they use damaged, but they imply that it’s been damaged by what they did on the show.
Do you have any thoughts about that, given that you have written about it.
Alanna Collen: Yeah. So a fairly prominent scientist called Kevin Hall studied the contestants, was smart enough to get in there early and studied some of the contestants, uh, before they went through the process of The Biggest Loser, which involves extremely restricted diets and huge amounts of exercise, and, um, and then followed up with them during the process, after the process, and then some years down the line, um, I think it was six years down the line, so he could see what happens to the body, to the metabolism, and to weight over this time period. And as you say, most of the participants lose enormous amounts of weight, really significant amounts of weight.
Most of the participants regain almost all of that weight, some overshoot, and end up heavier than they were before it started. And uh, one of the interesting things that Kevin Hall found was that their metabolisms had shifted slightly. So to burn fewer calories as a result of this process so that let’s say for example, somebody needed 2000 calories a day in order to stay alive, to maintain a steady weight.
After the process of going through all of that weight loss, then their bodies would shift down so that they needed only 1800 calories. Per day. So they become more efficient to conserve because they have this, the, their brains have a weight set point within them that is telling them that they need that much fat storage.
That’s what the body thinks is right. So if they then drop their weight, the body thinks it’s starving. So it does what it needs to do, firstly to try to get ’em to eat more or to move less so they burn less, to release less energy as heat because it’s a waste. And to be more efficient in the way it runs itself so that the muscles don’t use as much energy.
The organs don’t use as much energy, and that then means that once they’ve gone through a weight loss process, their metabolism has, has dropped. They need fewer calories to survive, so they have to eat even less. So they’re in this horrendous position of, of being restricted even more than they ever were, but the weight is still coming back.
And that and that tallies with a lot of research into yo-yo dieting, um, that people actually tend to ultimately be heavier when they have yo-yo dieted a lot. If you take, for example, twins where one has done a lot of dieting and the other one hasn’t, the one who’s done a lot of dieting, even if they’re genetically identical, as the one who tends to weigh more.
So yeah there’s a lot to say that the weight set point doesn’t change. Even if we lose weight, but the metabolism shifts to try to preserve that weight set point.
Le’Nise Brothers: So someone’s listening to this and they have struggled with their weight for a long time and they’re looking, they’re at the point where they’re looking for a different solution.
Maybe they’re thinking about going on a GLP-1. What would you say to them?
Alanna Collen: Well, I’m not a medical doctor, so it’s not really my position to, to recommend or, or not GLP-1s. GLP-1s also do not alter your weight set point. They interfere at quite a high level with your body trying to fulfill that weight set point.
And they seem to have huge numbers of benefits aside from weight loss, you know, significant metabolic benefits in terms of making, um, you manage carbohydrate metabolism, sugar, metabolism better, and also some benefits, uh, around inflammatory processes. So they seem to be affecting how the immune system is running.
And obviously some people suffer side effects that make that not worthwhile. And there may be side effects that we see coming up over time. And now that very many millions of people are using it that couldn’t be seen when during the trials or when fewer people were using it, and we just don’t know how they’ll, those will pan out.
Um, but it’s incredibly effective. They’re incredibly effective medications that seem to be doing a lot of good. However, when people stop using them weight set point remains how it was before, and people tend to gain weight again, so it is a commitment. Um, in terms of what I’d say to people, I would if they’re aside from the GLP-1 question, I would say, don’t diet because as in, don’t go on a reduced calorie diet because yes, they work in the short term term, but no they don’t in the long term, and they may have the effect of reducing the amount of food that your body is happy to exist on. And they may, you may end up having this, the kind of yo-yo diet effect over time of actually ending up weighing more than you did before having bigger fat stores. I would say exercise, not because it reduces weight.
It’s not very effective at doing that. Maybe a kilo or so, but not. Not particularly more than that, but it is still good for your health and it does reduce inflammation. And it does help you manage sugar levels and so on. I would say still worry about your diet because even though cutting calories, doesn’t lead to weight loss, or doesn’t lead to permanent weight loss. It doesn’t lead to a change in the weight set point. Having a healthy diet, again, still has major impacts on your overall health. Having lots of fibre, lots of colour in your diet, eating loads of plant foods that still benefits your immune system and reduces inflammation, which over the long term will help you to manage weight and possibly prevent your weight from going higher.
So there’s still, like all the traditional things still stand. And then in the, in the book that I’m writing, I will also be talking about how to improve your microbiome, how to improve sleep, because sleep is a really significant part of weight, of the energy management systems. And also to, I’ll be talking a lot about environmental chemicals, the impact of chemical exposures, which can be anything from ultra processed foods to medications, to chemicals that we encounter in the home and so on. They are also all known to have an impact on the weight set point. So that’s, that’s the, a major component of my new book.
Le’Nise Brothers: Fantastic. I’m so looking forward to reading, reading your new book. When is it coming out?
Alanna Collen: Um, good question that my editors would also really like to know. I’m not sure is the answer. Towards the end of next year or the following year, I think is. Is likely.
Le’Nise Brothers: Yeah. I mean, as I know, writing a book is a journey and once you hand the book in, it’s like a, even though you have the whole editing process to go, it’s like a, a weight of your back.
So I am looking forward to reading it whenever it’s published. What’s the one thought that you’d like to leave listeners with today?
Alanna Collen: Oh, that’s a good question. Just one thought. I’d say fibre. My, my answer is, is plant foods, eat fibre. Look after your microbes by eating as many plant foods as you can, and building up the amount of fibre that your body is used to tolerating.
Le’Nise Brothers: Fantastic. Where can people find you?
Alanna Collen: I’m on Instagram.
Once I finish this book, my presence on Instagram will pick up a little. And obviously they can look for my book. 10% Human.
Le’Nise Brothers: Fantastic. Thank you so much for coming onto the show.
Alanna Collen: Thank you for having me. It’s been really fun.
