Episode 62: Meenal Lele
In episode 62, we cover:
🔹How your baby’s risk of developing allergies, asthma, eczema and even IBS can be linked to the gut microbiome
🔹Major players in microbiome dysfunction: antibiotics, pregnancy and baby care, diet, and environment
🔹The age most food allergies develop in children (it’s younger than you think!)
🔹The only proven method to cut the risk of your baby developing food allergies
🔹How Meenal’s son’s number of food allergies jumped from 8 to 10 following oral immunotherapy
🔹Why feeding nuts, peanut, egg, and other allergenic foods in infant-safe powder forms should not interfere with breastmilk or formula
🔹The clinical studies that support the feeding of allergy-causing foods from the age of four months
🔹What we’re doing wrong when it comes to diaper changing and washing our babies that can harm their immune systems
🔹The biggest mistake we’re making with antibiotics
🔹Why eczema can trigger a chain reaction leading to food allergy and asthma
🔹Probiotics - the key strains with evidence for eczema prevention, but when you take them matters
Protecting your baby’s microbiome to prevent eczema, allergies & asthma
Meenal Lele’s son Leo has 10 food allergies, eczema and asthma. In the thick of new-mom anxiety, combined with figuring out how to manage her son’s newly onset medical issues, she began looking for the ‘why?’.
In her book, ‘The Baby and The Biome - How The Tiny World Inside Your Child Holds The Secret To Their Health’, Meenal says: “Since late 2016, I have committed myself to trying to understand what happened to my son.”
Leo is one of millions of children across the US with similar diagnoses. “10 percent of children have IgE food allergies [that’s the potentially life-threatening anaphylactic kind] to peanuts, wheat, tree nuts, eggs, dairy, and soy,” she cites in the book.
While genetics is a factor in developing allergic disease, Meenal makes clear that it can’t be the whole story.
“You cannot have a disease go from zero to 100 in one generation and call that genetic,” she told me.
As a medical researcher, Meenal honed in on the importance of the microbiome; the trillions of bacteria, fungi and viruses that live inside us and how we can try to safeguard our babies’ microbiomes to minimize the risks of developing allergic diseases like eczema, asthma, food allergies, and even irritable bowel syndrome (“IBS is now thought to be really an allergy too,” she told me in episode 62 of healthHackers®).
Overuse of antibiotics is one of the major players in microbiome dysfunction, says Meenal
“The microbiome covers every bit of us. The big piece that you need to understand that it covers is what's called your ‘barriers’,” she told me. For example, the skin and gut. Microbes line every part of these barriers and are vital for keeping us healthy.
“When a kid develops eczema by stripping their skin barrier, they scratch it, and that actually causes a food allergy. When you increase the odds of a food allergy, you can increase the odds of asthma,” she told me.
“By damaging and messing with our microbiome, we've actually made our own immune system - our barriers - weaker, and our barriers are really the first and biggest part of our immune system. So that's really how this kind of whole cascade happens,” she said.
How have we been damaging our babies’ microbiomes? In her book, Meenal identifies several major players in microbiome dysfunction: antibiotics, pregnancy and baby care, diet, and environment. She pulled together her findings, methods and suggestions for attempting to stop, reduce and in some cases reverse allergic diseases.
Check out episode 62 to hear the biggest mistakes we’ve been making when it comes to diaper changing and washing our babies. Meenal also tells us which probiotic strains have evidence for eczema prevention, and what steps she’d take if she was pregnant right now to minimize the risk of her baby developing eczema, asthma and allergies.
Nurturing your baby’s microbiome is key to their health
Around the time of Leo’s diagnoses, new studies emerged showing that feeding allergenic foods to babies as young as four months could significantly reduce the rate of developing allergies to those foods.
Referring to one of the studies, which focused on peanut, she told me: “If the parents were really good about making sure the baby ate enough peanut every single week, there was a 97% reduction in the risk of peanut allergy”.
Meenal used the findings to integrate the most common allergenic foods into her second son, Kaden’s, diet. She describes the process of early allergen introduction as “training wheels for your baby’s stomach,” essentially helping your child’s immune system to tolerate the foods and not develop an allergy to them.
“I bought every major allergen and spent dozens of hours figuring out how to get each food into a baby-safe form without adding any salt, sugar, or junk. I also placed Kaden’s food on one side of the counter and Leo’s on another so I could be positive that there wouldn’t be any cross contamination,” she says.
Kaden did not develop any allergies, but the food preparation was a struggle that motivated her to set up Lil Mixins - a company that produces food allergens in infant-safe powders to mix into a baby’s meals when they start eating solids.
Meenal’s company produces infant-safe allergen powders
My review of the Lil Mixins early allergen feeding kit is coming soon on healthHackers®
While Meenal can’t know exactly what caused Kaden to avoid developing any allergic diseases like his older brother’s, she does say in her book: “The habits parents put in place and the choices they make during their child’s first six months can either foster strong barriers and a healthy immune system or set off a chain reaction of allergic responses that takes years to control.”
In episode 62, when I suggested a parent might feel accused or blamed for inadvertently damaging their child’s microbiome through lifestyle choices which may have contributed to the development of their allergies, Meenal told me:
“How could it be your fault if you didn't even know? If you're at a place where you can make choices before - great. Knowledge is power. And even if you're at a place where it's already happened, what we found in our household is that by still making the same choices, we were able to pull back from the brink, we were able to reduce the number of flares, reduce a lot of the symptoms he's having, and actually, to a large extent heal a lot of stuff.”
Meenal’s book, released in September 2022.
Find her online here.
Check out my video review of the Lil Mixins early allergen introduction kit here.
Meenal is offering healthHackers® viewers and listeners 10% discount on Lil Mixins purchases using the coupon code healthhackers10 when you click here. When you use the discount code, healthHackers® receives an amount at no extra cost to you. Your support helps make more product reviews on healthHackers® possible.