The Baby and the Biome: How the Tiny World Inside Your Child Holds the Secret to Their Health - Hardcover

Lele, Meenal

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593421027 ISBN 13: 9780593421024

Verlag: Avery, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

A revolutionary parenting book that draws on cutting-edge research to reveal that the key to raising happy and healthy babies lies in carefully protecting and caring for their microbiomes.

A baby’s immune system develops rapidly in the first 1,000 days of life, with the first six months and year being most important. In The Baby and the Biome, Meenal Lele, medical researcher and founder of Lil Mixins, the #1 pediatrician-recommended  allergy-prevention product , explains how diet, environmental toxins, antibiotics, and even common parenting practices can damage the delicate balance of our children’s microbiomes, thereby increasing the risk for a host of immune diseases, including eczema, asthma, food allergies, IBS, and more.
 
Lele discovered firsthand how critical our microbiomes are to our overall health when she sought to understand the root causes for her son’s food allergies. Drawing on her medical background and through extensive research and interviews with scientists and doctors, Lele discovered the simple, practical steps that all parents and pregnant moms can take to help foster a healthy and protective microbiome in their baby. The Baby and the Biome will empower parents to protect and safeguard their children’s health for years to come.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Meenal Lele is the founder and CEO of Lil Mixins, a food allergy−prevention solution that is the #1 pediatrician-recommended early-introduction product available. She is the creator of the hit podcast Fixing Sick, which explores the science behind immune disease. Her work has been featured in Forbes, Entrepreneur, and Real Woman magazine, and radio shows across New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. She has appeared on Good Day Philadelphia, Great Day Washington, “Health Watch” on Fox 5 DC, “Chasing News” on Fox,and My9 in New York, New Jersey, and Philadelphia. She is a frequent guest on national food allergy and mommy podcasts, including Idea Mix, Blossoming Mom and Baby, and Today We Tried.

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Chapter One

The Rise of Immune Diseases

Common Misconception: Food allergies are genetic.

Many people assume that food allergies are entirely hereditary, and that if there's no incidence of a food allergy anywhere in the family tree, a child will be fine. I used to believe this, too, and that's why I was floored when my son developed allergies that no one else on either side of the family had. The fact is that while some of the risk for food allergies does lie in a child's genetics, it's not like some babies have an allergy gene. The real risk of developing food allergies rests in the food children eat, the medicines they take, the pathogens and environmental factors they face, and more. By protecting against these things, a parent can protect their child's immune system from breaking down and triggering a massive allergic response.

When Scott and I took Leo home from the hospital after his asthma attack, we unpacked our bags with even more prescriptions than we'd had before. There were so many medicines that we couldn't find a drawer big enough to hold them, and we spread them out on his old changing table like a bootleg pharmacy.

Leo now had a daily antihistamine to prevent itching and skin flares and three different topical steroids to treat the flares that happened no matter what preventative measures we took. He had a daily inhaler to prevent asthma attacks and a rescue inhaler in case he had an attack anyway. These medications were on top of the special soaps, detergents, and emollients we already used. He was on a strict avoidance diet to prevent him from having an allergic reaction, but we also had three sets of EpiPens in case he accidentally ate one of those foods and had an allergic reaction anyway.

Have you noticed a pattern of futility yet?

I am not one to suffer-or parent-in silence, so as we settled into our new "normal," I began opening up to friends and family about the pain of watching my child hurt and my fears about his future. When I started talking with others, I thought I was the only one dealing with a sick kid, but I quickly discovered I was wrong. As Dr. Julia Getzelman, a pediatrician and functional medicine practitioner in San Francisco, said to me, "Today, doctors and parents spend a lot of time dealing with chronic noninfectious illnesses such as food allergy, eczema, asthma, autoimmunity, inflammatory bowel disease, celiac, and more. All of these conditions-many of which used to only plague adults-are now being considered normal in the pediatric population."

Every teacher I talked to saw multiple cases of one or the other in each class, and every pediatrician I encountered said each week they treated at least ten or twenty patients with these conditions. The more I looked, the more widespread immune diseases seemed to be, even among people I thought of as healthy.

What was going on?

What Are Allergic and Autoimmune Diseases?

The first thing you should know is that all allergic diseases (like the food allergies and eczema Leo suffers from) are actually immune diseases. Not all immune diseases are allergic diseases, though. For example, Type 1 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, and lupus do not develop because of allergic reactions. Some immune diseases are classified as autoimmune diseases and are distinct from allergic diseases for reasons I will describe below. Finally, all immune diseases-both allergic and autoimmune-are sometimes called self-diseases because they involve a normal body system going haywire.

Each immune disease affects a different part of the body: eczema happens in the skin, asthma in the lungs, celiac in the colon, food allergies in the gut, type 1 diabetes in the pancreas, and rheumatoid arthritis in the joints. While it is possible to have many immune diseases at once (like seemingly everyone I talked to), each condition is triggered by a different combination of genetics, environmental factors, or even viruses. But at its core, every manifestation of an immune disease is the same: the immune system malfunctions, goes rogue, and attacks something it shouldn't.

I've used the term flare casually in my descriptions of Leo's illnesses, but the term deserves more explanation. A flare is a sudden intense onset of the symptoms of any immune disease brought on by a trigger. In the case of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), a flare can mean intense cramping or diarrhea from eating spicy foods, drinking alcohol, or having too much sugar (all of which can be triggers). For Hashimoto's thyroiditis or lupus, it can mean fatigue or aches and pains caused by everything from gluten to stress to certain kinds of drugs. For asthma, it means significant difficulty breathing after a person is exposed to environmental allergens or, in Leo's case, a cold virus. These immune responses may come in waves, with days or weeks of flare-ups, and a person may have long periods of remission with no symptoms.

If the immune system attacks internal proteins or cells of the body that it should really leave alone, it's classified as an autoimmune disease. In the case of type 1 diabetes, the immune system goes after the beta cells that produce insulin. As the beta cells are killed off, the pancreas is destroyed, and the body is no longer able to produce insulin. Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis, and IBD are all caused by a perpetual attack on the cells that make up the intestinal lining. This chronic inflammation of the digestive tract eventually destroys the intestines or colon.

Allergic diseases happen when the immune system attacks an external protein like pollen, food, or mold (antigens) that it should also ignore. The damage to the body is a side effect of an attack on the antigen, rather than from a direct attack on a healthy tissue. However, the immune response that occurs in an allergic response sometimes causes symptoms very similar to those we see in autoimmune diseases. Over time, if people experience a persistent allergic response like uncontrolled eczema, it can eventually destroy their tissue. All in all, the self-diseases we call immune disease are dangerous and, far too often, deadly.

Immune diseases can be hard for some people to wrap their brains around, so I find it helpful to think of them in terms of other, more tangible or familiar diseases. Think of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. A person does not go to the hospital, get strapped to a ventilator, or die specifically because they contract this particular type of coronavirus or one of its many mutants. A person suffers through the immune response to the coronavirus, which may include shortness of breath, loss of taste and smell, fatigue, and unfortunately, sometimes organ failure leading to death. This cluster of immune responses is the disease called COVID-19.

Similarly, you are already familiar with another group of self-diseases: cancer. Consider three common cancers: breast, cervical, and lung. Breast cancer is triggered by genetics, cervical cancer by a virus (HPV), and lung cancer by pollutants that you breathe. In cancers, both internal (genes) and external (viruses or pollutants) root causes can make the normal body process of cell replication go haywire. In each cancer, cells replicate in a tissue incorrectly, and this malignant growth eventually harms an organ, causes sickness, or leads to death.

Cancer can sometimes be stopped by removing the root cause of the particular case (for example, think of quitting smoking), but often the disease is relentless and won't end without treatment. Luckily, allergic diseases can usually be stopped by removing the triggers. For example, if you're allergic to peanuts, you can avoid eating peanut butter. In autoimmune diseases, however, it can be impossible to remove the cell or...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Avery
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2022
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593421027
• ISBN 13: 9780593421024
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 272
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland