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	Podcast:		UC Science Today
	Episode:		New insight into the origins of asthma and allergies
	Category:		Science & Medicine
	Duration:		00:01:01
	Publish Date:		2017-01-03 18:00:00
	Description:		Asthma and allergies begin in our guts. Susan Lynch, a gastroenterologist at the University of California, San Francisco, has made this discovery while studying stool samples from newborn babies. Lynch found that certain types of bacteria that healthy infants usually have, were missing in the group she tested. "Perhaps, microbial metabolism in the gut is reprogrammed in this high risk group that lacks these bacteria." Lynch explains that microbes in the guts of unhealthy children were digesting amino acids, carbohydrates and lipids - the building blocks of our bodies - in an abnormal way. And that’s something scientists were not able to prove before. "This was the first time we could show definitely that the products associated with the microbiota in the gut drive immune dysfunction." This bacterial disruption put children at higher risk of developing allergies at age 2 and asthma at age 4.
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