Under the Canopy
On Outdoor Journal Radio's Under the Canopy podcast, former Minister of Natural Resources, Jerry Ouellette takes you along on the journey to see the places and meet the people that will help you find your outdoor passion and help you live a life close to nature and Under The Canopy.
Under the Canopy
Episode 89: Exploring How Microorganisms Shape Human Health
Professor James A. Scott takes us on a mind-expanding journey through the invisible world of microorganisms that profoundly shape our health from birth through adulthood. As an expert from the University of Toronto's Dalla Lana School of Public Health specializing in biological hazards, Scott reveals how the first 100 days of a baby's life represent a critical window when their gut microbiome—the complex community of bacteria living in our digestive systems—establishes itself and essentially "trains" their immune system.
The conversation challenges much of what we thought we knew about cleanliness and health. Scott explains how our modern obsession with sterilizing environments may actually contribute to rising rates of allergies and asthma. Surprisingly, exposures to certain microbes early in life appear protective rather than harmful.
This fascinating episode also delves into Scott's work preserving one of the world's most important fungal biobanks—a collection of approximately 15,000 living fungal strains, some dating back to the 1880s, including historically significant specimens like Alexander Fleming's original penicillin-producing mold. Despite its irreplaceable scientific value, this biological treasure trove faces an uncertain future due to funding challenges, highlighting the precarious nature of preserving biodiversity for future medical discoveries.
Whether you're a parent curious about giving your child the healthiest start in life, someone struggling with allergies or immune issues, or simply fascinated by how our microscopic companions influence our wellbeing, this episode will transform how you think about the relationship between humans and microorganisms. Subscribe now to explore more hidden wonders of the natural world with Under the Canopy.
Back in 2016,. Frank and I had a vision to amass the single largest database of muskie angling education material anywhere in the world.
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Speaker 3:As the world gets louder and louder, the lessons of our natural world become harder and harder to hear, but they are still available to those who know where to listen. I'm Jerry Ouellette and I was honoured to serve as Ontario's Minister of Natural Resources. However, my journey into the woods didn't come from politics. Rather, it came from my time in the bush and a mushroom. In 2015, I was introduced to the birch-hungry fungus known as chaga, a tree conch with centuries of medicinal applications used by Indigenous peoples all over the globe. After nearly a decade of harvest use, testimonials and research, my skepticism has faded to obsession and I now spend my life dedicated to improving the lives of others through natural means. But that's not what the show is about. My pursuit of the strange mushroom and my passion for the outdoors has brought me to the places and around the people that are shaped by our natural world.
Speaker 3:On Outdoor Journal Radio's Under the Canopy podcast, I'm going to take you along with me to see the places, meet the people. That will help you find your outdoor passion and help you live a life close to nature and under the canopy. So join me today for another great episode and hopefully we can inspire a few more people to live their lives under the canopy. First off, as always, we want to thank all our listeners all around Canada, all throughout the world, switzerland, down in Ghana, saudi Arabia, trinidad, tobago and, of course, the States. And, as usual, if you have any questions or any comments or you want to hear any specific shows, let us know, send us an email.
Speaker 3:Sometimes it takes a bit of time to try and get it all figured out and put together a show about it, but we do try to do that in many occasions and some of them I have. I remember the one where the individual from the Northwestern States wanted more about off-grid living. So we even brought in people with propane expertise to talk about off-grid living with propane and utilization of things like that, and individuals who actually are off are living in unorganized townships and all that. So we do try to accommodate as best we can. Now today's guest is James A Scott James, welcome to the program.
Speaker 4:Thanks, Jerry. Thanks very much for the invitation.
Speaker 3:Yeah, no problem, I really appreciate it and I'm looking at all the kind of stuff that you've been working on and some very interesting things. So I think it's going to be tough to limit it to the time. I mentioned it to you. But tell us about. You know basically where you're from, so our international listeners kind of get a sense of where you are.
Speaker 4:So I'm in Toronto right now, but I grew up in a little town on the north shore of Lake Erie, right across from Erie, pennsylvania called Simcoe, Ontario. So I'm kind of from the heartland of southern Ontario and I haven't really moved all that far. I moved, you know, maybe about 120 miles to the northeast to Toronto, and I've been here ever since.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I know Simcoe well. I did some town hall meetings down that way for the members when I was a minister. Down that way, Toby Barrett, Right, right, right, Yep, and as I recall, it used to be whether it still is or not the tobacco capital of Ontario in that area.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I think it still is. You know, tobacco is grown pretty commonly in crop rotation with soybeans and corn, and you still see tobacco being grown there, although over the years there's been a lot of buyback of tobacco quotas. So the industry there, the agricultural sector, has shrunk considerably and tobacco as a cash crop has been replaced by things like ginseng and a bunch of other things. So it's an area that's still quite agriculturally dependent, but it's undergone a lot of changes in the last 20 or 30 years.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and one thing that I found very interesting when I was dealing with that area was that actually the soil configuration with tobacco and peanuts coincide very well together. However, it seems that a president, Jimmy Carter, was a peanut farmer and protected that industry for the states immensely, as we're seeing with some of the things now happening in the states, so that peanuts and utilizing peanuts outside the States was not something that was cash advantageous for a lot of farmers. So peanut growing does not take place to the extent that it potentially could At least that's what I was told.
Speaker 4:It's true, it's something called a sandy fox loam soil. That's really characteristic of that region and it's great for tobacco. There are a few other crops as well, but certainly peanuts, and there are some longstanding peanut operations down there. But you know, a lot of their sales, I think, are domestic, they're direct-to-consumer sales. There may be some provision of ingredients for product manufacturing, that kind of thing, but it's a. It's a small but but stable industry. Those of us from the area you know, often we'll gift each other boxes of Ontario peanuts and peanut products for Christmas.
Speaker 3:So it's Well, I have to tell you one, and I've been trying to get peanut farmers to do something because thinking outside the box and what it was was when we go to camp, we have a large crew, We've had as many as 10, 15. But one of the things that everybody enjoys, believe it or not, is peanut butter and hot banana pepper rings, and actually the peanut butter stabilizes the excess heat and for jalapenos or hot banana peppers it goes together fantastic. And I always thought that thinking outside the box and providing something like hot peanut butter might be something that market, that might be able to be a niche market that Ontario could jump onto.
Speaker 4:Well, I think it's an unexplored market and, you know, peanuts are so nutritionally rich and we have a great climate not only for growing them but for storing them. One of the issues globally with peanut cultivation is that there are jurisdictions around the world that grow them but they have problems with storage, and there's a fungus that grows on peanuts in storage called Aspergillus flavus, that produces one of the most potent naturally occurring toxins. That's known, and it's a potent carcinogen as well, in addition to being very acutely toxic. So if you look at some of those jurisdictions where peanuts are grown as basically nutritional supplements but they're stored improperly, we see in those populations high rates of liver cancer and things like that that we just don't see in North America, where peanuts are also grown and widely consumed. But our storage is much better, according to our climate and as well, we've got lots of mechanisms to provide food safety and monitoring of the quality of those crops as well post-harvest. So we have a couple of advantages in that regard.
Speaker 3:Interesting Now. Are you familiar with peanut storage? I mean, we're not going to talk about it, we want to get on to other things, but I'm sure a lot of listeners are going. Well, how do you store peanuts that make a difference in North?
Speaker 4:America. Well, they need to be dry, right, and this is the thing. We're blessed in many ways that we have a climate that's not. It's not a tropical climate, it's not a subtropical climate, you know, it's a Northern temperate climate and we can keep these products. You know, peanuts, grains like rye grain and wheat and barley and things like that corn as well. We can keep those things post-harvest in conditions that prevent them from becoming subject to mold growth. And in other regions of the world, particularly in the tropical world, in Indonesia, in North Africa, areas where there's a lot of peanut cultivation, it's much, much more difficult. You know, the crop is very happy to grow in those climates, but it's much harder to store those crops in a way that prevents them from being subject to post-harvest spoilage. So that's really the kicker.
Speaker 3:So is it something that people need to worry about when they're buying peanuts? So is it something that people need to worry about when they're buying peanuts? When they're buying them and a lot of people feed squirrels and things like that with peanuts and things like that Is it something that can dismold or is it a fungus that is developing on it?
Speaker 4:Yeah, moldy peanuts are fundamentally bad. You don't want to eat moldy peanuts under any circumstances. And peanuts that are grown in Canada, peanuts that are grown in the United States, they're all grown under conditions like. This is something that's very, very well known, and where peanuts are used as product ingredients, say in peanut butter, all of the major manufacturers will subject their products to very rigorous testing for the presence of this toxin. And as the analytical methods to detect the toxin aflatoxin become more sophisticated, so the limit that's allowable in the products diminishes to that level. So you know none of that material is permitted in food for human consumption in North America, but you know other jurisdictions don't necessarily have access to those kinds of quality assurance mechanisms.
Speaker 3:Very interesting. So, james, tell us a bit about your position at the university, here at the UNT.
Speaker 4:Sure, yeah, I'm a professor in the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto and so I'm kind of an interesting crossover guy.
Speaker 4:So I'm in a group of researchers who teach and research in a subject called occupational hygiene, which is really the study of workplace exposures to gases, vapors, chemicals, particles, radioactive materials, industrial noise, all those kinds of things.
Speaker 4:And my teachable area is around biological hazards generally, because we know that there are a number of work processes where people are deliberately working with microbes. People are deliberately working with microbes, say, in the pharmaceutical sector, where microbes are used to produce certain biochemicals, but also in the agricultural sector where microbes, incidentally, are involved in composting or all these kinds of potential exposures and inhalation exposures, dermal exposures to these materials can have some associated health effects and depending on the sector, depending on the microorganisms these are, you know they're fairly rigorously controlled just to prevent those kinds of occupational illnesses in workers. So I bring to this program my knowledge of fungi but also other microorganisms, and I've long been interested in that sort of overlap between how humans and microorganisms interact. So this was a good fit for me I've been here since 2002, and it's a really good fit because I bring that dimension of biological hazards that my colleagues who work on asbestos and noise-related hearing loss in industry lack.
Speaker 3:Right. So some of the research that you've done have been a lot with infants, I believe, and with gut microbiome. Microbiome yes, gut microbiomes for a lot of infants and the impacts of, for example, the length of stay in a hospital or whether mothers are smoking. I'm seeing some of the research that you've done.
Speaker 4:Yeah, a bunch of things when I was doing my doctoral work.
Speaker 4:My doctoral work looked at house dust, so floor dust in houses, and I was interested in the fungal ecology of floor dust in houses because we know, and have long known, that you can vacuum up a vacuum cleaner bag full of dust from your carpet or from your floor and if you look at the fungal content of that there are lots and lots of fungi in it.
Speaker 4:Some of them are just passively deposited. We bring them in on footwear when we come in from outside. Others, you know, notionally blow in through the window and then over time will settle out in the dust. But then there are some that probably are in the dust because they live there and so all of those dust is sort of a reservoir of those fungal particles, is important in contributing to indoor human exposures to allergens or irritants things like that. So my doctoral work was looking at the ecology of certain fungi as they live in indoor dust, and so it was kind of a logical step for me to kind of continue as a researcher to be interested in indoor exposures like exposures in the built environment and how those can impact health, exposures in the built environment and how those can impact health. So my work on the gut microbiome even though it sounds very different, I think of it as still kind of an extension of my interest in how exposures in the built environment shape our health.
Speaker 3:Well, a lot of that when you're dealing with Dussel would come in through the lungs as opposed to the stomach, though, would it not?
Speaker 4:If you're breathing it in, oh sure. But you know, particularly for the younger amongst us who are closer to the ground, who often are not walking on the ground with two feet but, you know, crawling on the ground, their exposures can be dermal, they can be ingestion, they can be inhalation. They're usually some complex combination. So from the standpoint of children's health, particularly young children's health, those exposures can be really formative. And also they sort of represent baby's first exposure to things that are not them, you know, to sort of the foreign biological environment. And in that way they're sort of they provide the training ground for the immune system as it develops, to learn how to appropriately respond to things that are foreign. And that seems to be the sequence of how that maturation occurs, seems to be very important in terms of either putting babies at risk of developing allergic-type diseases or immune-type diseases or protecting them against later life development of those diseases.
Speaker 3:Well, I guess SIDS would be something substantially different then, because those are pre-crawling stages that infants pass on.
Speaker 4:Yeah, generally, and I'm not aware of what's been done in the realm of environmental exposures to SIDS the first 100 days of life, how those go go on to shape our disease risk later in life, you know, as children, as teenagers, even as adults.
Speaker 3:Two things. Maybe you can just let our audience know the difference between acute and chronic so that people can gain an understanding. When you say acute, the impacts.
Speaker 4:Well, I'll use the workplace example because that's the easiest to understand. So the acute kind of health effect in a workplace is a worker climbing up a ladder and then falling off a ladder and breaking their leg. So that's an effect that is immediately attributable to the fall off the ladder and usually the time interval between the fall and the individual suffering in this case the broken leg, is usually very, very short seconds. Chronic exposures are the kinds of things that day over day a worker may be exposed to a little bit of it, but they don't necessarily suffer an effect and it may be that even after retirement they may be subject to a kind of chronic, late-emerging disease that's a consequence of the exposures that they incur during their working lives.
Speaker 4:And you know, one of the best examples of that might be firefighters and lung cancer. And you know firefighters, of course, are exposed to all kinds of chemicals that are present in smoke and other kinds of materials that they may breathe over their careers. And those incremental kind of exposures, unfortunately, can often have longer-term negative effects, particularly around the development of lung cancer. So that's an example of one that's been known. So that's the difference between acute disease and chronic disease. So it's the difference between what I'd say injury, which is an acute disease, or occupational disease, which is a sort of longer-term thing. Sometimes it can be very difficult to put all the pieces together and understand how something like that arose.
Speaker 3:And most hospitals, realistically, are acute hospitals where emergency room is something that's immediately dealing with something. There I know there was a push for chronic hospitals as well, for individuals who develop exactly what you're speaking about, but that's a whole different subject that we could get into. Yeah, I'm going to give you one here so I can tell I've got a chocolate lab. Listeners know, anson Gunner and I got the look this morning. Come on, dad, are we going? And it's still maple syrup time, so we're out checking our pails and stuff like that in the morning.
Speaker 3:But anyways, one of the things that I find is that because he has to sleep beside the bed all the time Anyways, he's got a blanket that I put down for him.
Speaker 3:That's on a little foam pad sort of thing, and I can tell when he doesn't sleep well at night he gets moving around and he's up all the time and he's shaking his ears, his head, because he's got something in his ears that I need to put the blanket inside, either wash it or put it in the dryer, and after I put it in the dryer for a minimum of 20 minutes, I can put it back out and he has no reaction the next night at all Interesting. So I don't know if it's mites that are potentially causing the problems or is it something that you're dealing with with all the dust and everything else that's potentially there, but it's. I can tell, and I did it last night, because the night before he was up and down and he's shaking his head and on and on and on. But last night I put it in for 20 minutes before he called it a night and didn't move the whole night.
Speaker 4:Oh, wow, that's interesting. Well, you know, there are a bunch of things that can sort uh crop up in situations like that. There are uh mites that can get in dog's ears and and, um, they can cause a problem. Usually when you look in the ear you'll see a little bit of of wax accumulation. You can see uh, you won't necessarily see the mites crawling because they're microscopic, but you, you can see sort of their effect and you'll see a little bit of blood staining, things like that and uh. But but that's a situation where you, you pretty much need to to treat the ear, and it's not always treated with something to kill the mites, it's. It's often just treated with something to sort of flush out the ear so that it's less hospitable to the mites, and then it heals on its own, um, so that's one example.
Speaker 4:There there are fungi that can also get in dogs' ears, like the sort of famous example. It' ears are a delight to this fungus. It has a predilection for them. So the fungus can overgrow in dogs' ears and it can cause a lot of irritation, inflammation, that kind of thing. It doesn't really invade the tissue of the ear, it just grows on the waxes and when it does that, it will produce chemicals, enzymes that can cause, provoke a little bit of allergic reaction in the dog's ear canal and that kind of thing. So that's another thing. But that's not likely to go away just with heating up the pad. The more likely cause for the example that you described is maybe some kind of other allergen that's getting tracked in, because of course the dog is tracking in material on its feet as it's wandering around.
Speaker 4:Maybe it's got something that's a little bit of an allergen or irritant that you know the chemistry of that is destroyed by the heat. That's very possible too. Dogs can be sensitive to all kinds of things.
Speaker 3:Oh, I know that, for I had a beagle once Tessa was her name and I gotta tell you I had her probably to eight different vets that nobody could figure out what her problem was because she was chewing her paws raw, until finally the owner of one vet clinic, brad Baker, he says look go up and see this vet in Fenland Falls. And so we went to Fenland Falls and he happened to be the president of the Canadian Veterinary Association. But he did testing and he did actually allergy testing for the dog and we found out that it was allergic to grass pollen.
Speaker 3:Wow, and that's why it was chewing its paws raw and he said look when it comes in from a run, just wash them off in a pail of water. And guess what? We never had a problem again.
Speaker 4:Wow.
Speaker 3:So some of these things are interesting, but tell us about some of this research on the gut microbiome. Microbiome. I think that's a microbiota.
Speaker 4:Yeah, so it's largely bacterial and the gut microbiome really refers to that population of bacteria that live in our gut and they do a lot of useful things there. They're involved in helping our body to process the materials that we eat. Depending on the configuration of our gut microbiome, it's thought that certain kinds of gut microbiome composition may actually increase the potential for certain types of conditions. It could increase the potential for obesity, for example. It could increase the potential for inflammatory diseases like asthma. But essentially when we're born, there are bacteria in our gut.
Speaker 4:When we're born which you know, it's taken a lot of scientists, a lot of very careful study to understand that to be the case, because it was long thought that babies were born essentially sterile. You know 100% baby. But there's a little bit there, and how it gets there, no one really knows. But it does start out. But when the baby is born, fundamentally most of its cells are human cells and very few are bacterial cells inside the gut. And then within the first couple of months, say the first hundred days of life, the infant gut becomes colonized by this basically bacterial biofilm that we call the gut microbiome, this basically bacterial biofilm that we call the gut microbiome, and it does so through exposures to parents sharing their microbiome. If there's a dog in the house, probably it contributes a little bit. Maybe the baby crawling around on the floor eating dust or touching its mouth, that probably contributes. All of these things collectively contribute to the establishment of that biofilm inside the gut. And so the sequence of which organisms come in when turns out that it's actually very important.
Speaker 4:And if you were to raise the baby in just in a perfectly sterile environment where you delay its ability to have its gut become colonized in that manner, it actually causes the adaptive immune system, which is sort of the main flank of our immune system that responds to invaders, invaders. It causes that flank of the immune system to mature in a way that improperly responds to things that are foreign. So it can cause us to become allergic. It can cause us to develop diseases related to this immune dysfunction throughout the rest of our lives. So how and when baby is exposed to the things that it is in its environment turns out to be extremely important, and it's something that I think people had long suspected. But no one really understood properly the mechanism. And now in the last 20 years we're starting to understand that much more clearly and we realize that it's of tremendous importance.
Speaker 3:Right. Well, one of your studies was the impact of postpartum hospital length of stay on infant gut microbiota, a comprehensive analysis of the vaginal and cesarean birth.
Speaker 4:So the type of birth, whether it's cesarean or vaginal, is having actually impacts on kids as well it does, and you can see it Like if you have a population of babies and you look at their poop.
Speaker 4:It was difficult for me to convince my lab technician to really want to do this job. But once you start doing it, the science and the interest in the science kind of outweighs the ick factor. But if you were just to take a population of babies and look at their poop, say at three months of age, without asking any questions, just looking at what types and numbers of bacteria are in the poop, you can easily differentiate those babies that are delivered by cesarean section versus those that are delivered by vaginal birth, really, and the ones that are delivered by vaginal birth have a head start. And you know you can sort of understand why. Because there's potential, a potential during birth, for example, for cross-contamination with fecal contamination. We talk about that as contamination, but really what that does is it helps to instill in the baby some of the early elements of that healthy microbiome that the baby inherits from mom, and that turns out to be a very important thing.
Speaker 3:Interesting. Now my family has a genetic disorder where both parents have something called Stargardt's, which is kind of a macular degeneration sort of impact on the eyes that they haven't been able to deal with. But my understanding through my father, who had it, and so did a number of his siblings and uncles etc, etc. That it was passed on from the mother to the child during a vaginal birth and I'm not sure you would have far more expertise Is that something that's legitimate or is it just a hearsay? Because I often wonder then, if that's the case, if both parents do have this potential gene problem, is a cesarean a way to ensure that it's not passed on to the children, or would you know anything about?
Speaker 4:that? No, I don't know anything about that. There's certainly, you know, there are some things that can in a way get passed on environmentally. After we started doing this work, I got really curious about well, we now understand a little bit more about what the role is, say, of vaginal delivery, or the role of breastfeeding versus formula feeding, and breastfeeding is also very protective of the baby, developing a sort of normally calibrated adaptive immune system. But then I got thinking well, you know what about house dust? Because many of the same organisms that we see in the gut microbiome you can find genetic signatures of those in house dust. So I got the idea well, maybe we can do some DNA sequencing of the dust from the houses where the babies came from and we can sequence the stool of the babies and we can figure out. Just based on looking at the bacteria alone in those two places, we can figure out which baby goes with which house and we can shockingly Maybe not shockingly and you can think, okay, well, there's two possibilities there, right?
Speaker 4:One is that when mom or dad are changing diapers, there's potential for the baby to influence the dust, right, right. The other is a little bit more, I'll say, sinister, and that is the idea that the baby may be ingesting material from the environment in the home. That, then, is colonizing the baby and influencing its gut microbiome. So if that's the case, then if you're new parents and you move to a new home right around the time your baby is born, there could be potential for your baby to inherit the gut microbiome of the people who lived there before. So I think, understanding some of these factors, it has, I think, important bearing on how these things can influence disease in early life, but also later in life, and these are questions that people have only started to be able to ask because of the technology that's become available the technology that's become available.
Speaker 3:So are we looking down the line here that the introduction of baby probiotics is something that would be beneficial to youth to ensure that some of these things that aren't happening out there, whether it's certain diseases or development of things, could be limited by having the right probiotic?
Speaker 4:Well for sure, there are cultures globally that have known this anecdotally and traditionally for centuries, for millennia. And while we haven't really fully understood the mechanism for why these things work, there's really not any doubt that they do work. And maybe, to the Swiss listeners, the idea of using yogurt as a nutritional amendment early in life, from a very early time point, is long known. And you know it's done for a reason. And it's done because it's health protective. And while we haven't really known what the mechanism is, we know the effect. But we're starting now to understand much better what that mechanism is.
Speaker 4:And the reason that it's important is because we know that asthma, allergy and asthma are important diseases in childhood, much more so today than they used to be when I was a kid, probably when you were a kid too, especially in westernized countries. And what we know from the genetics because these are issues that have been looked at very closely and they're pretty well understood that genes contribute to who gets these diseases. But genes alone only explain about half of asthma in childhood, explain about half of asthma in childhood, and what that means is that the other half is probably explained by an environment. So if we can understand what those factors are in the environment that contribute to that additional 50% of risk, then potentially those could be modifiable characteristics of lifestyle that we could make a huge dent in this asthma epidemic in childhood. So that's really the value in asking these kinds of questions and looking at these various exposures in the environment and trying to understand them potentially even if there's aspects of looking at autism as well as being one of the other components.
Speaker 4:Yeah, 100%. A lot of people have been interested in the question of autism. You know, there are many mysteries with autism and we know increasingly that there is this interaction between the gut and the brain that scientists have only started to realize, I'd say, in the past 20 years. And the more people have studied it, the more it's become clear that there is a lot of very important crosstalk between what happens in our gut and what happens in our brain. And, you know, I see in the future that people, as this interaction is better understood, I think we'll probably we're on the precipice of a number of important discoveries in regard to neurological disorders, probably clarifying some not all, but at least some of the ideology of diseases like autism and others.
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, actually I believe it was Dr Greg Thorne are you familiar with? Yes, Okay, and Greg was the one that suggested I contacted you in regards to getting on the podcast, and thankfully so. Thank you very much, Greg, but one of the things that we discussed there was his research on lion's mane mushroom mycelium. That, actually and I've seen studies that indicate that it has the potential to develop and grow neural pathways in the brain and spinal column to assist with individuals dealing with things like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, dementia and things along those lines. So there are a lot of different potential fungi that are out there that may have benefits, but there's also ones, from what I'm hearing here, that could have negative cumulative effect or chronic effect on individuals.
Speaker 4:Yeah, it's a mix. You know, fungi are these marvelous biochemical factories. They can do things in a single cell or in a small cluster of cells that it would take teams of scientists vast amounts of money to do in a laboratory setting, if they could do it at all. Like, fungi are able to produce these truly miraculous chemical structures, and a number of those have really interesting interactions with the cells of other organisms, humans being one. So we're really, you know, even though we've known about the miracle of penicillin, for example, since 1928 or 29 in Alexander Fleming's work, right chemicals that would be of interest for pharmaceuticals or other purposes, we're really only starting to see the tip of the iceberg of the potential for that. And so I think, as we understand that more and understand the relationship between human and fungi more, some of these chemicals that they make, they're analogs of human neurotransmitters.
Speaker 4:And why a fungus in nature that's living in a habitat where it can't access very much nitrogen? You know, it's these very carbon-rich, nitrogen-limited habitats why it would take the nitrogen that it can get, the little bit of nitrogen it can get, and turn it into this compound that's like a human neurotransmitter, why it would do that. It makes no sense at all. It seems like a huge waste of metabolism of a very expensive resource, yet it does it. So there must be some evolutionary reasons for fungri being able to do these kinds of things. And I think the more we start to understand that by being able to do these kinds of things, and I think the more we start to understand that, the more we'll see a lot of value in many of these interesting chemistries that fungicide produce.
Speaker 5:Hi everybody. I'm Angelo Viola and I'm Pete Bowman. Now you might know us as the hosts of Canada's favorite fishing show, but now we're hosting a podcast. That's right. Every Thursday, ang and I will be right here in your ears bringing you a brand new episode of Outdoor Journal Radio. Hmm, now, what are we going to talk about for two hours every week? Well, you know there's going to be a lot of fishing.
Speaker 1:I knew exactly where those fish were going to be and how to catch them, and they were easy to catch.
Speaker 5:Yeah, but it's not just a fishing show.
Speaker 6:We're going to be talking to people from all facets of the outdoors, from athletes, All the other guys would go golfing Me, and Garth and Turk and all the Russians would go fishing To scientists. But now that we're reforesting and all that, it's the perfect transmission environment for life To chefs, if any game isn't cooked properly, marinated, you will taste it.
Speaker 5:And whoever else will pick up the phone Wherever you are. Outdoor Journal Radio seeks to answer the questions and tell the stories of all those who enjoy being outside. Find us on Spotify, apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 3:And now it's time for another testimonial for Chaga Health Wellness. Hi, it's Jerry from Chaga Health Wellness. We're here in Lindsay with Tula, who's actually from Finland and uses Chaga. Tula, you've had some good experiences with Chaga. Can you just tell us what that experience is?
Speaker 7:Yes, I got sick with fibro and one weekend my husband came here alone. I was home and he brought your leaflet and I read it and I said next weekend when we go to a market we're going to buy some. And so we started putting it in our morning smoothie.
Speaker 3:Right.
Speaker 7:And among a few other things that I was doing. Because of that, the chaga has been the steady one Right. I would not want to live without it.
Speaker 3:Oh good, yeah, so it's been working for me Very good, lots of ways, and you had some good luck with blood pressure as well.
Speaker 7:Oh right, yeah, Thanks for remembering that. Yeah, I had a little bit of high elevated blood pressure and within two weeks of starting that every day every morning it went to normal.
Speaker 3:And you think the chaga was the reason why.
Speaker 7:Well, I didn't do anything else in that time frame Very good.
Speaker 3:And so how much chaga did you have and how did you have it?
Speaker 7:Well, we just put that powder in a smoothie, right? And it's about a tablespoon? No, it's less than a tablespoon for two of us, so you don't need that much.
Speaker 3:Right About a teaspoon. Yeah, yeah, very good. Well, thanks very much for sharing that. We really appreciate that and wish you all the best with the Chaga. Oh, you're from Finland as well, and Chaga is pretty popular in Finland, is it not?
Speaker 7:I think it probably is, because there's some professors in a university that that's teaching it and talking about it, and of course, it's big in Russia right because that's where you know the northern woods that came comes from. Yeah, yeah, and of course Finland has lots of perch trees.
Speaker 5:Right, yeah, and it's the only mushroom that you can't forage in Finland you have to forage everything else, but not Chaga.
Speaker 3:Oh, very good. Well, thanks very much for sharing that.
Speaker 3:Okay, have a great day you too, we interrupt this program to bring you a special offer from Chaga Health and Wellness. If you've listened this far and you're still wondering about this strange mushroom that I keep talking about and whether you would benefit from it or not, I may have something of interest to you. To thank you for listening to the show, I'm going to make trying Chaga that much easier by giving you a dollar off all our Chaga products at checkout. All you have to do is head over to our website, chagahealthandwellnesscom, place a few items in the cart and check out with the code CANOPY C-A-N-O-P-Y. If you're new to Chaga, I'd highly recommend the regular Chaga tea. This comes with 15 tea bags per package and each bag gives you around five or six cups of tea. Hey, thanks for listening.
Speaker 3:Back to the episode. Now I need to mention one thing. You mentioned about the Swiss and yogurt and utilizing that, the probiotics found in there. But there was Ned who was a staunch Cape Breton-er, and Ned used to tell me all the time he says you know, jerry, once in a while you just got to eat a little dirt. And I said what he said. Yep, he said it's good for you because it helps all his systems and everything else, and whether that's a thing from Crepe Breton or a family thing or not, but certainly the amount of bacterial components found in a little bit of dirt out there would have certain effects on individuals as well that we don't know or do or are starting to know starting to know it's true, and for 20 years we've known that kids who are raised in rural situations and on farms have somewhat lower incidence of these kinds of diseases allergy and asthma and so it's been thought that there is some farm protective effect and that it may be that it's exposure to to dirt effectively um and uh.
Speaker 4:So it's, it's important. The more that we understand about this, the better we've. We've come through a period of 50 or 60 or 70 years where we've done almost everything in our power to sterilize our environment, to spray our environments with sprays that kill things and make them as absolutely clean as possible, and we're now starting to see that that approach has had negative effects and we're starting to understand the mechanism of those effects.
Speaker 3:Well, I believe that there were some studies that showed that Mennonites and the Amish, there were some studies that showed that Mennonites and the Amish the number of, well, the amount of time that they get sick is substantially reduced.
Speaker 3:And it was predetermined or believed that the reason was exactly like we were just talking about. And I used to say that in the legislature, all the time that we herbicide, pasteurize, purify, in the legislature, all the time that we herbicide, pasteurize, purify, we do everything out there in order and then try to grow that singular culture out there for a pristine lawn and then wonder why we have all these problems out there and people can't bring the two together to realize that there are negative effects of a lot of those aspects and everything that we do. There are negative effects of a lot of those aspects in everything that we do. I think it was I can't remember, was it 36 or 50? Every breath we take, we take in various problematic materials with every breath that we take, but we also take in the ones that can resolve a lot of it for us when we breathe in a lot of these things as well.
Speaker 4:Yeah, it's true, there's lots of stuff that comes in a breath. I was 20 years ago. The Toronto Star approached me and wanted to do a little piece on air pollution in a way that helped people to really understand it. So I got an air sampler and I took it out. I actually think I took it in front of the legislature here in Toronto and I stood on the front lawn. I've done this before. Sometimes when you do that, the security guard comes out and wonders what you're doing.
Speaker 4:So I took an air sample around Queen's Park and I took the air sample back to the lab and it was basically putting all of the particles in the air down on a microscope slide. I put the microscope slide under the microscope and I calibrated the view field so that what I had in a single field and I could take a photograph of it was the particles that would be in one breath of air. Right was the particles that would be in one breath of air Right. And then I went through the photograph and I labeled what all the particles were and talked a little bit about where the air sample had come from and sort of where these particles had originated, and then talked about what some of the health issues are from them.
Speaker 4:Of course there's lots of different plant pollen grains. There's rubber that shed off tires as they go through, there's the particulate condensates from diesel combustion. There's a whole variety of things that you find in the air, and individually these things they don't really matter. They may have minor influences over the period of your life if you're exposed to certain amounts of these things, but I think it's very helpful to just understand that they're all there and where they come from, and you know, to the extent that we know, what they're capable of doing. So I thought it was sort of a fun way for people to be able to look at that and say, hey, this is what the air that we breathe looks like, because it allows you to sort of take these abstract ideas and see them in a much more concrete way.
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely I would be. I'm quite surprised. I'm fascinated to hear that rubber was actually in the air, and I do know that back in the 80s one of the highest contaminants in the air was actually lead from lead gasoline. That can have cumulative effects and I often wonder if some of the things that we're dealing with now is not a result of the lead that was in the air at that time, and now it's been substantially reduced so that there's virtually no lead in the air because we've taken the lead out of gasoline. So there are a lot of things that can be done to make our environment that much better.
Speaker 4:Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so some of the other things that you dealt with was maternal smoking during pregnancy increases the risk of gut myelobome. Microbiome yes, the microbiome I keep going back to microbiota Microbiome associated with childhood overweight and obesity. How did you find her, what came up and how did this idea start to come forward?
Speaker 4:So all of these papers and this theme were part of a much larger study called. We now call it the CHILD Study, but originally that was an acronym for the Canadian Healthy Infant Longitudinal Development Study, child acronym that my friend and colleague PJ Sbarro, who's a pediatric respirologist at SickKids in Toronto, came up with a really clever, clever acronym. Anyway, we recruited moms in their third trimester of pregnancy from multiple sites in Canada and I think we got a total of about 3,600 moms and then we followed their babies basically from delivery up until we're still following them. I think they're probably maybe eight to 10 years of age now, maybe 12 years the oldest, and we did a lot of work trying to um, and we did a lot of work trying to characterize, uh, mom and dad, uh, looking at genetics and genetic risk factors, looking at um diet and behavior, um, smoking, of course, things like that, uh, and, and we also spent a lot of effort looking at the environment where the baby was raised and to the extent that we would send out these trained inspectors to basically look at the environment, to sort of capture all of the various cleaning chemicals that were used, to look at the furnishings and things like that, to look at the type of housing and also to collect samples from the home in the form of settled dust on floors, which sort of represents the main reservoir, as I was saying, for the particles that we're exposed to as we live.
Speaker 4:We're all sort of like the I don't know if you remember the Charles Schultz Peanuts cartoon. We're all a little bit like the character Pigpen, oh yeah, where as we go about our day-to-day activities, you know, and move across our floor, we sort of stir up these particles. So we're always kind of surrounded by this shell of particles that we breathe in, many of which are stirred up by our mechanical activity of walking across flooring and just being animated and that kind of thing. And in a home, the floor and the carpet in particular if there is carpet, is the main reservoir that contributes to that, what we call the personal cloud. So we wanted to take a close look at the personal cloud and see what impact it had.
Speaker 4:But anyway, so we collected on these 3,500 or so babies like a lot of very detailed information about their time activity, about where they lived, about their proximity to parks, about the type of home that they lived in, whether there was a dog or a cat, et cetera, and one of the things that we did additionally was to collect stool samples at birth so the meconium that comes out of the baby right when the baby is born, a stool sample at 100 days of life and then a stool sample at one year of life life and then a stool sample at one year of life and tried to kind of integrate all of these various things that we measured to figure out how those data tell a story about the development of the baby and the development of the shaping of risk.
Speaker 4:So yeah, so back to your original question. It's just, you know, we started to tease out what the effects were from the various things that we measured on. You know how they may impact, in our case the microbiome. Other scientists who are working on this birth cohort would look at other elements of it. This has been a very, very big project for a lot of scientists over many years now and you know those of us who are doing this piece on the gut microbiome are only like a tiny sliver of a much, much larger study that has really found an incredible amount to date of interesting findings and actionable findings from a population health protective standpoint about early life.
Speaker 3:So even, but you mentioned about the smoking and the impact on obesity, potentially for a lot of youth as well.
Speaker 4:Yes. So smoking as an example, we see that, maybe not surprisingly, that there are effects that occur as a consequence of either being exposed to secondhand smoke in the home or potentially from baby being exposed through mom smoking during pregnancy that can alter again the trajectory of the gut microbiome development. That in turn can have impacts on health risk for certain things, and obesity in this case is one. So you know, you don't necessarily start out thinking, hey, these things are related. But then when you start to line up the data and you see the story that it tells, it becomes very interesting. And you see the story that it tells, it becomes very interesting. And you know, the gut microbiome turns out to be the mechanism by which a lot of these elements in our environment are perceived and thereby imparting some kind of health outcome.
Speaker 3:So one thing that I'll mention is that I strongly believe in a lot of your thesis on a lot of impacts on breathing in and the impacts on that. One of the things that I did when our sons were born was I bought very high quality air purifiers and had them in their rooms where they spent most of their time whether it was sleeping or playing on the floor and things like that was sleeping or playing on the floor and things like that just to ensure that the air quality they were breathing in weren't taking in any potential negative impacts just like you're talking about. Every time you walk on a carpet or a step or anything else, it goes into the air and you potentially breathe it in. And that was one of the ways that I tried to ensure that give them the best start in life by limiting the negative potential impacts and things like that. Is that something that would be beneficial or not? What do you think?
Speaker 4:So it used to be that pediatricians would tell their patients you know, if you don't want your baby to be allergic to cats, then don't get a cat. And that was sort of the conventional advice. Of course, none of it was based on any kind of evidence, it was just intuition on the part of pediatricians. And it turns out that on that fact, all pediatricians were wrong, excluding people who potentially would have a genetic predisposition to cat allergy, which explains some amount of people Absent that risk factor. Living in a home with a cat is probably protective against the child developing cat allergy. So it's exactly the opposite of the advice that generations of pediatricians gave their patients. And it's only through a study like this child study that we can start to understand from an evidentiary standpoint what these risks are.
Speaker 4:So the kinds of things that make intuitive sense don't necessarily always work out the way that we expect them to. So I think that something like an air filter. I can see a lot of positive benefits for using air filtration, right, but you know, that's sort of based on intuition and the question is well, where is the evidence on it? And the evidence in certain cases it may be that it's beneficial to have inhalation exposures to those naturally occurring things. Maybe if you're living next to a highway where there's lots of pollution particulate, then that's something that you would want to reduce. So I think it depends on the situation the extent to which those kinds of technologies are going to be valuable. But fundamentally it's an area where we don't have a lot of evidence. What we have is our intuition, and sometimes it's wrong.
Speaker 3:Right. So you mentioned about the cat's negative aspect, that if you want to make sure they're not allergic to cats, one of the things is expose them to them. What about peanuts and what we're hearing now? The same sort of thing. Is it not that we're hearing the exact same?
Speaker 4:now. Yeah, so the longer you delay exposure to peanut, the more likely it becomes that a child can develop allergy, and severe allergy to peanut. So what it seems like now is that there's a kind of timing and I don't remember offhand exactly what the timing is. The pediatricians who are interested in childhood allergy now know this very well. But there's a kind of time in that very, very early life trajectory when if you introduce some minor amounts of peanut at that point, it actually has a protective effect. So that's something where we now have some mounting evidence that the very carefully orchestrated and timed early life introduction of that allergen can have a protective effect. It's not delay the exposure as long as you can, which sort of made intuitive sense, but it actually increased the risk. So we now know that you know, adding peanut into that sequence of foods that you expose baby to in very early life, in a particular defined sequence, it can actually help tremendously to avoid the you know the bad outcome of having a serious allergy.
Speaker 3:Right Now. Is it just through consumption that it hits the exposure, or is it breathing in the fumes from cooking with peanuts, things like that as well?
Speaker 4:So peanut allergen is not really a volatile material at all. It's a big protein, right, it's an enzyme, and so you really can't volatilize it. It's something that needs to be exposed, basically through ingestion. Maybe there's potential to do contact exposure as well, but I think that primarily it's going to be an ingestion exposure.
Speaker 3:Interesting. Well, james, now tell us about the data bank that you're maintaining, or having difficulty maintaining, there at U of T.
Speaker 4:Sure. Well, this gets back to sort of my main interest. You know, the reason that I got into science in the first place was because, um of a professor who taught me a course on fungi, um, in my first year of university and uh, and from that point on I was sold about fungi because, uh, they're so interesting, so few people study them and uh, you know, there's a lot of opportunity to really make a dent in something and not have a lot of competition while you're doing it. So I got really interested in fungi very early on and, of course, I went and did graduate work in fungi and publish studies on them. We want to be able to take the strains that we work on and make those available to other researchers who could potentially come along and build on our research or find things that we did wrong and refute it. That's the nature of science, and so part of how fungal science works is that we have these biobanks and there are multiple of these biobanks internationally, where a scientist who's done work on a particular fungus will deposit some living representatives of the things that they worked on so that other scientists could come along and request those same strains and do more work on them and request those same strains and do more work on them.
Speaker 4:So this particular biobank is a biobank that was started in the 1930s in Alberta, and it was started under the auspices of the Alberta Public Health Network, and it collected and retained fungi that were causes of disease or illness in patients from across Alberta, but then it expanded to across Canada and internationally, and not just fungi that cause disease, but fungi that are associated with plants, maybe cause plant disease, fungi that cause animal disease, fungi that cause wood rot, fungi that do a whole bunch of different things. So this biobank grew and grew and grew and it became one of the most important global biobanks of fungi that researchers would come to from all over the world to request strains. And in 2015, the University of Alberta, which had been maintaining the biobank up to that point, decided that they were no longer interested and able to keep it after its curator retired. They were looking for a place for it and I thought, well, I'll take the thing on, I'll scrape together a little bit of money if I can and donate some on my own and hopefully, over some years, I'll be able to find some sustainable way to fund this. And it's been 10 years since it's been here, I've applied for multiple different grants provincial grants, federal grants, research grants and there is no way to get traction on funding this.
Speaker 4:And the difficulty is that it doesn't really do research on its own. It provides research materials. So it's kind of like, if you can imagine a chemist who needs a chemical for their research, they need magnesium sulfate. So they open up a chemical catalog and they order a bottle of magnesium sulfate and a couple days later the magnesium sulfate shows up. Well, if you're a mycologist or a microbiologist, there aren't catalogs where you can order this microorganism or that microorganism. You have to go to one of these biobanks and if the biobank doesn't have it, then you have to go to another biobank and ultimately, if no biobanks have it, then you need to change something about your research because you can't get the organism. So safeguarding this resource is really important, but it's not something that specifically does research. It supports other research programs.
Speaker 4:We don't currently in Canada have funding mechanisms to support these kinds of research supports. You know, like the people and it's not just fungi or microorganisms there's people who use medical isotopes and they're increasingly very difficult to acquire in a timely way. There's increasingly people who need helium for quantum computing, for other problems in physics, and it's very, very difficult to get that. So there are these kinds of essential research platforms that in Canada we used to have some mechanisms to fund these, but since about 2012, there have been no federal mechanisms available to fund these kinds of important research platforms. So it means that we need to.
Speaker 4:You know, if we can get them in country, we do that, but if we can't get them in country, then we need to go out of country to be able to secure access to these things and increasingly it's difficult to do that, like the parallel biobanks in the United States.
Speaker 4:For example, very recently the main one, that's an agricultural fungal biobank it put up a big notice on its website that said we no longer provide materials to scientists outside of the United States. So if you're a Canadian scientist and you need strains, that they have we mirror some of their strains in our biobank, but you can't go directly to them anymore and acquire those. So you know some of these, I guess, logistics mechanisms. They're increasingly fragile and they're dependent on the politics of the day. They're dependent on supply chains and we learned through COVID that you know some of these things that are essential for, you know, national security or other national interests, and certainly research is one of those. We need to find ways to secure those and access to those resources in-country, because we just we cannot any longer rely on other countries to provide us with those kinds of materials, right? So?
Speaker 3:James, how do you maintain a biobank like?
Speaker 4:this Well, the organisms, and there's about I don't know, maybe about 14,000 or 15,000 strains of them. So they're preserved in living form, but in a variety of methods. So a number of them are cryogenically maintained. There's some that can be freeze-dried and we can maintain them in glass vials in a freeze-dried format. There's others that need to be preserved under limited oxygen conditions on growth media. So we use an overlay with mineral oil.
Speaker 4:Depending on the organism, some can be preserved in one or two ways, but not in others. So we would typically, for each one of the strains in the collection, we would preserve it under maybe four or five different means and then hopefully it will be successful in at least one of those. But some of the oldest materials that we have in the collection were originally obtained in the 1880s. So these are some of the very, very first fungi that were obtained in pure culture, living in pure culture, that were collected, and some really important ones, like the one that was originally from Alexander Fleming's Petri dish and then the one from the cantaloupe and peoria that later went on to provide all of the penicillin for the war effort during the Second World War. Other fungi that are used to produce drugs, like the first statin, lovastatin was produced by a fungus. So all kinds of things that have been of critical importance to a variety of human enterprise. We preserve all of those.
Speaker 3:So obviously, if you freeze-dried them, they still must be able to survive taking a freeze drying.
Speaker 4:Yeah, they can, but it's only a small fraction of the strains that can be freeze dried. Unfortunately, a number of them need to be preserved in a way that requires them to be tended very frequently. So if we run out of money for the person who's tending them and they no longer get tended, then you know much like a zoo. They die and you can't replace them.
Speaker 3:Right. So when there's requests to get these materials, do you sell them to people who may make requests in order to generate revenue to maintain them?
Speaker 4:Yeah a bit. You know, for a few hundred dollars we would provide a license to use the strain and then send a copy of the strain. But we have never been able to generate enough revenue from strain distribution to be able to maintain the collection costs Typically maybe $20,000 or $30,000 a year we would get in revenue from strain sales and that's barely enough to put liquid nitrogen in our nitrogen tanks to preserve the cryogenically preserved strains.
Speaker 3:Right. So what kind of funding would an annual cost to maintain these 14,000 to 15,000 strains you have?
Speaker 4:The annual cost is actually low. It's basically the salary of the person who's doing the curatorial work, which all in is maybe about $100,000 a year with benefits and then space costs. So it's like it's an ongoing salary cost really, but it's the kind of salary that you can't justify in a research grant Right, and there's no other way to do it. Amount of money that would cover the costs of the technical person maintaining the materials and offset a little bit of the cost of, you know, the person doing the director work on the collection and making sure that all of the records are up to date and that kind of thing.
Speaker 3:Right, so if somebody donates, can they get a tax receipt for a donation?
Speaker 4:Yeah, it would be through the university, and the university provides tax receipts for it. But it's a matter of you know. We've been working with a couple of potential foundation funders who have expressed some interest, so we've had a couple of bites. But it's you know. The devil is always in the details and I think this is an unusual situation. Most countries that have these kinds of assets, it's government that funds them and we just we've never been government funded except through a couple of grant funding programs that have long been mothballed Right. So we're in a unique position in comparison to similar biobanks in other countries.
Speaker 3:Interesting and I imagine this biobank is growing all the time. Are you finding new strains that are coming forward as we're getting the melting of the ice caps or the glaciers and things like that, the exposure to prehistoric?
Speaker 4:materials. We've got huge collections of interesting things. We've probably got the world's largest collection of pathogens of reptiles. We've got a lot of pathogens of bats Of course those have been in the news lately the agent that causes white nose of bat, which is killing off globally populations of multiple bat species. We've got a lot of emerging human pathogens.
Speaker 4:Yeah, we've got many, many interesting things, and not just from Canada, from about 130 global jurisdictions, including islands in the middle of the Pacific that don't necessarily have any national affiliation, like some from Antarctica, some from the high Arctic, like from literally all over the globe.
Speaker 4:We have representatives from some countries that no longer exist since the agents were collected, some jurisdictions that we would no longer be able to access, for example. So there's a tremendous amount of irreplaceable access to biodiversity that this collection offers, and that's why I've been so keen on finding a way to maintain it in Canada, because once it's lost to Canada, once it has to go overseas, it becomes subject to the whim of whatever government then is willing to fund it, and they may decide not to, or they may not decide to send strains back to Canada. In the case of the European Union, there are international agreements that would prevent certain of these materials, based on their country of origin, from coming back to Canada, as insane as that sounds. So once it moves away from Canada, it won't be able to come back, and that's why I've felt so strongly that we need to find a way to keep it here.
Speaker 3:All right. Well, james, thanks very much for taking the time to be on the program. How do people get in touch with you, or how can they make a donation, or how they can contribute or find out more details about your research, and where can they get all this information from?
Speaker 4:Sure research. And where can they get all this information from Sure? Well, the biobank website is wwwuamhca and that's got a lot of information on it and at some point shortly I'm going to put a donation link that carries back to the university donation portal to support the biobank through there. But that contains a lot of information on what the biobank is, some of its activities, some of the interesting strains that the biobank contains. It's also got a fully public-facing, searchable portal about the public holdings of the biobank and photographs and DNA sequences and all kinds of things that scientists would be interested in and maybe even some non-scientists as well.
Speaker 3:Right. Well, like you said, it was a course that you took that inspired you to get interested and to maintain that, and sometimes listening to the podcast will inspire other individuals to get more involved and potentially help out as best they can.
Speaker 4:Certainly More people need to be interested and know about fungi. They need more proponents because they're such interesting creatures.
Speaker 3:Yep, absolutely Well, James. I really appreciate you taking the time to be on our podcast today, and it's just more information about all those things that are out there under the canopy that we can learn about and hopefully, as science and individuals like yourself, James, get more research done and be able to find better things for us in society as a whole. Thanks again for being on the program.
Speaker 4:It's been my pleasure, Jerry. Thanks so much for the invitation.
Speaker 6:How did a small-town sheet metal mechanic come to build one of Canada's most iconic fishing lodges? I'm your host, Steve Nitzwicky, and you'll find out about that and a whole lot more on the Outdoor Journal Radio Network's newest podcast, Diaries of a Lodge Owner. But this podcast will be more than that. Every week on Diaries of a Lodge Owner, I'm going to introduce you to a ton of great people, share their stories of our trials, tribulations and inspirations, Learn and have plenty of laughs along the way.
Speaker 5:Meanwhile we're sitting there bobbing along trying to figure out how to catch a bass and we both decided one day we were going to be on television doing a fishing show.
Speaker 6:My hands get sore a little bit when I'm reeling in all those bass in the summertime, but that might be for more fishing than it was punching you so confidently you said hey, pat, have you ever eaten a drum? Find Diaries of a Lodge Owner now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast.