Signs of an Unhealthy Gut | Dr Will Bulsiewicz

[Music] hello and welcome to Zoe shorts the bite size podcast where we discuss one topic around science and nutrition I'm Jonathan wolf and I'm joined this week by Dr will bolsowicz and today we're talking about unhealthy guts Jonathan our guts help fight disease process energy and boost our mood so a healthy gut is hugely important but there's still a lot we don't know our understanding of the gut microbiomes in its early stages so is it actually possible for us to spot the signs of an unhealthy gut yes it is but it's not as straightforward as you think and interestingly it involves blue poo well blue is my favorite color in fact my wife often says that if I would buy something that wasn't blue she'd be really happy about it and I'm I'm actually wearing a green top just because I thought we might be talking about blue today so let's get into it so will when we say a healthy gut we could mean a lot of different things so what do you mean here first of all a healthy gut means we have a good balance of microbes otherwise known as bacteria and yeasts in our gastrointestinal tract these microbes help our body to take energy from our food to clear toxins fight viruses and they help produce the feel-good hormone serotonin I mean this is like literally just a minor glimpse into what they do they do a lot of great things for us and secondly it means that we are not suffering from digestive problems that make eating normal food difficult for us and so do you feel that the digestive problems themselves are somehow linked to this sort of poor situation with the microbes absolutely now to be clear everyone has occasional digestive symptoms I mean particularly if you have one too many pints and you load up on the spicy greasy food food but really what I'm talking about are chronic symptoms that are occurring weekly or even more than that there are many ways that they could manifest as a clinician my first question to the patient is very simple how do you feel that's actually the same question my therapist asked me so I like that it's yeah straight to the point so if you're looking for for centers in this case and I think you said look these are sentences where you're having this at least once a week that's where you're starting to uh say this is not just because you ate something that you're not used to but this is sort of really starting to be something you might talk to a doctor about so what are the sorts of symptoms that you know I or any of the listeners might say hey that's a manifestation of an unhealthy gut sure I mean of course it could be digestive symptoms so some of the classic digestive symptoms would be gas bloating cramping or abdominal discomfort diarrhea constipation but you know it's important to understand that it also goes beyond the gut so it could be issues with sleep or like skin changes such as rashes sugar Cravings unexplained tiredness or even unexplained mood disorders I always think about the whole person you have to think about everything not just the gut and the gut symptoms so it's very important to me to think about these things like mood and brain health where it could potentially manifest with neurologic issues and I think a lot of people listening to that would be quite surprised that you didn't just limit yourself to a set of obviously sort of gut related symptoms but you've sort of said hey I mean you sort of mentioned every part of the body right from your moods to your skin um you know to to fatigue that actually you can see this in all of these um these different places is really an interesting and sort of shows what a what a big picture you have in mind here well I think you know to that point Jonathan what we're really getting at are the connections of these gut micro microbes to the rest of our body and so yes they are very involved with our digestion but they're involved with all these other aspects of human health and this is why they can manifest Beyond just gut symptoms and I guess there could be food intolerances too that these can crop up when the gut is not functioning properly I mean basically what's happening when a person experiences of food intolerance which is where you consume a food in a normal quantity and then you suffer digestive symptoms afterwards basically what's happening there is that the gut the gut microbes are not up to the task of processing and digesting that particular food in most cases got it so you've asked this first question what's the next thing that you're going to ask are sort of hypothetical gut patient who's coming to see you the second thing it may be a bit taboo for a lot of people but as a gastroenterologist I found this to be incredibly important and that's bowel movements so well we've talked about this before you know normal people when you first meet them you don't ask them how often they go to the toilet in fact it's something that lots of people don't even want to talk about with their family or their partner so why do you have to ask them this cardiologists look at blood pressure and heart rate as a gastroenterologist I look at bowel movements this is my Vital sign and I see it as a window into Digestive Health when things aren't working the way they're supposed to within our gut it's typically going to manifest in the toilet bowl and so what kind of things you talk about with patients will so the first thing that I look at is rhythm I feel that the gut is designed to be in Rhythm you know very similar to the heart if you not get offer of them then things just get disrupted and they don't work the way they're supposed to so we're supposed to have a Cadence and that means that we should be pooping on a regular basis that's that's a real thing uh as as a doctor it's not just something that you know maybe we're just all like to have a certain Rhythm to to our life like we know we'd like to know what we're having for breakfast and that we're going to watch this particular show at 8pm oh I mean the Rhythm you know there's a part that's an innate part of the way that our biology was designed to function you we think about things we've talked about on the show time restricted eating or intermittent fasting and that's just a manifestation of our circadian rhythm and what I'm saying here what I'm here to say today is that you know our gut has a rhythm too and it's important that that Rhythm actually be manifest with routine regular bowel movements I guess as well as Rhythm there's something about the whole experience being easy you know you should feel good you know like you're sort of strutting out of the bathroom with a smile on your face not like you've just done you know five rounds in in the boxing ring nah certainly not five rounds and I do think that there's you know I maybe we're not supposed to say this but you're allowed to feel good you're allowed to feel well after a good healthy um evacuation you know as a medical doctor that's where I want you to be and the bathroom experience really should be something that's positive and relaxed I do think it's really interesting you know so I have we both have relatively young uh kids as well as older kids and um you know we're all too young to remember being toilet trained uh but you sort of see it with your children and you realize that there's a huge amount of Shame wrapped up in this experience right because it's so important and I think you do build into that therefore the sense that if you don't do it right it's really bad and so you know it's not something I've I've studied or I'd read any papers about but you could sort of see how you can end up feeling a lot of Shame it's not something you talk about if things aren't going quite right then actually you're sort of failing and I I can't see how how you know maybe I'm traumatizing my children you know my little girl already um by by the very fact of going through toilet training over the last few years um you know look I I I do think that that's part of this I think that also we need to be talking more openly about these things and also I think that the process of toilet training brings up an interesting point Jonathan because there is a conditioned aspect to this so the conditions the circumstances within our life do ultimately affect our ability to go in and have that effortless satisfying bowel movement that I'm trying to guide people towards so we've talked a lot about you know is it easy and effortless tell me what else you you ask at this point yeah so rhythm is one thing I'm going to also look at things like the form of the stool form meaning the shape or the way that it visibly appears and the way that I typically will approach this is using something called the Bristol stool chart which classifies the poop into specific types based upon its shapes there's seven different categories within the Bristol stool chart I will put a link in the in the podcast notes so you can look up your own store based upon this now Bristol is a city in the UK for those listeners from around the world who who don't know that and I don't know how good they feel that now across the world they're actually most famous for classifying poop uh however they are in luck if they would like that to move on because the latest science suggests that there may be a a new way to measure a healthy gust that isn't named after Bristol and that is gut Transit time and gut Transit time is how long it takes for food to travel from your mouth to the other end well can you tell us a bit more about that Zoe actually did some exciting Research into this Jonathan and by simply eating food that contains this blue this blue dye coloring and then tracking how long it takes from when you first eat that food to When It ultimately comes out the other end with a blue bowel movement the blue poo as we like to say what's really interesting about this is like you know it's It's Curious it's cheeky but also it's science based um the blue poo we have discovered is actually correlated with characteristics within your microbiome we found that Transit time can actually be a better measure Believe It or Not of your gut health than looking at things like your stool consistency or the frequency or even the Bristol stool skill and I think that's that there's something quite fun about something that that seems really fun and light on on one side and on the other hand went into one of the top peer-reviewed journals uh and it and basically saying that actually this time it takes uh as you said well really gives us some additional information which I love so um what's next so we've talked about symptoms how do you feel we've talked about looking at your bowel movements and now the third thing that I really would want to focus on as a medical doctor is potential conditions that might be associated with an unhealthy gut when the bacteria in your digestive tract become unbalanced Jonathan it can lead to something called dysbiosis so well dysbiosis is not a word most of us use regularly you know hey honey I've got some dysbiosis has never been said by anyone ever could you turn that sort of medical jargon into something more understandable well first of all speak for yourself my wife and I do speak like that yeah um you know the spouse is what it means is that your microbiome is out of balance so when you measure it it would look different than a person who has a healthy gut microbiome and typically what you would see when there is dysbiosis present or this loss of balance is that there's a lower diversity of the different species you have less of the beneficial gut microbes and unfortunately you have more of the inflammatory or non-beneficial gut microbes some of the effects of dysbiosis could be things like your stomach gets upset after you have food poisoning in in this particular setting it's temporary and Mild really what I'm trying to get at here is that there are these serious chronic conditions that may be associated with dysbiosis and so what what are you looking for in um in this case well so you know much like we when we were talking about the symptoms how it can affect the whole body I'm looking at this through five particular types of conditions that can be manifest as the result of dysbiosis so you know first obviously would be digestive issues this is what I do as a gastroenterologist and includes things like irritable bowel syndrome Crohn's disease disease all sort of colitis they're just just to name a few but you know particularly with our work at Zoe we're looking at metabolic issues this is through the lens of the gut and things like obesity and diabetes where high blood pressure and high cholesterol they have all been connected back to loss of balance within the gut microbiome there's also the immune mediated conditions involving the immune system so really I'm talking about overgic diseases or autoimmune diseases the fourth category Jonathan would be hormonal issues so like in women this would be things like your regular period infertility endometriosis polycystic ovary syndrome or in man it could be the the most dreaded condition that a man could have erectile dysfunction and finally the sort of fifth place that we think about medical conditions being the manifestation of dysbiosis is in the brain believe it or not this is part of the brain gut connection and it can include things like mood disorders but it could also include things like chronic migraines or even Parkinson's disease and I think you know time back to what you said earlier this is an enormous list of things right touching every part of your um your body and lots of things I think people again might be surprised by when you talk about things like hormonal changes um that I think we normally think of as being completely different to this situation about what's happening in in our bacteria yeah definitely and you know in my mind as I'm approaching this as a clinician what I'm doing is I'm sitting there and I'm looking at this person and they're telling me how they feel they're telling me about their bowel movements and I'm thinking about like is there a pattern within their chronic health history that would help for me to explain what's going on with them and you know so I'm not looking for one thing I'm looking for the emergence of multiple of these different diagnoses that I just mentioned and when you see that pattern then you know that you know that the gut is a part of the issue here so so far we've talked about three ways that you might investigate signs of an unhealthy God you've got symptoms you've got the bowel movements you've got the related medical conditions but one thing you haven't mentioned is gut microbiome testing how comes I feel that the testing needs to be validated so for us to have confidence and use these tests within a clinical setting where we are helping to guide patients to better results we actually need research that validates and proves that using this test and the information that we get back from it we can actually get to that place of improving a person's health so almost all of the the problem Jonathan is that almost all of the microbiome tests that are currently available they haven't done this they need to publish papers showing us that they work now a lot of listeners will be a bit surprised about that because Zoe is hosting this podcast and as part of Zoe's testing at the beginning of the personalized program we do our own unique microbiome tests so so what are you saying so obviously I believe in Zoe and um the issue is that Zoe is not just a microbiome test and I think it's very important for people to understand that Zoe is far more dynamic in terms of what is being offered and it goes far beyond just microbiome testing in isolation I mean you know we're looking at their blood sugar response their blood fat response we're looking at their complete dietary picture and I think it's most fair for us to say that microbiome testing is still in its early stages and we don't know enough as of today to be able to give strong advice based upon the microbiome alone well I think I'm glad to hear you you feel it has some place here and I as we've been looking at this you know as Zoe we've sort of come to the conclusion that we don't feel comfortable that just using a microbiome test on its own is enough to advise you on what to eat and so I think this is uh you know it's a key message to always recognize that you can hear about this incredibly exciting new things sort of on the edge of Science and then when you're trying to come down and say well you know I want to know what I should eat or I want to know what my mother should eat my wife should eat um then you actually need to say okay what's all the best evidence together now will you know that's us thinking about this as a sort of technology company as a doctor is it unusual to say hey there's just not like this one test that I would use in and give me all the answers that's I mean that's not unusual at all to be honest with you I think it's important for people to understand that as a doctor when we attack you know these problems and try to guide our patients to a better place it's about integrating all of the available information whether it's the microbiome or the blood sugar or food intolerances that really the point here Jonathan is that when you see this bigger picture and you integrate more information you are able to get more clarity in terms of what defines the individual person and so well what if I've listened to all of this and I think you know what I think I might have an unhealthy gut based upon you know I'm sort of ticking off the things as you describe them what should they do well to be honest with you even for the listeners who are sitting there saying look I feel like I'm pretty good my gut's healthy I I would say to you look this is so important no matter who you are we all should start where we are today and strive towards an even healthier gut because this is so essential to human health and for all of these people who are trying to take that step towards a healthier gut the most important thing is to make the right diet and lifestyle choices that can lead to Better Health this can include things like managing our stress levels improving the quality of our sleep leave not simple things like eating slower drinking more water and eating a very diet that's high in fiber and Grains and sweepy vegetables cutting back on all highly processed foods can be another step that people can take and if I do all of those things do you think I would expect to see a change in my gut health if I I was exhibiting some of the things that you've been talking about earlier absolutely I mean remember that you know it kind of comes back to this basic first question which is how do you feel you should feel better when your gut is becoming more healthy you should feel better you should see an improvement of food intolerances you should have better bowel movements and um over the long run you may be able to improve your health status in terms of reversing or improving or reducing your risk of these chronic medical conditions that we've been talking about and one of the things I always love whether it's you talking about this or Tim or anyone else is there's a huge amount of positivity because this is an area where you're always saying you know what there's a power for us to make changes that can really improve our health and I think most of the time we feel we're sort of stuck in a one-way uh deterioration so like it's all like ah you know my body was great when I was 21 and now it's just getting worse and worse or um you know there's nothing you can do all you're doing is just sort of holding back the the tide and so I think what's what's really great listening to this is you're saying to lots of people actually you can really improve your gut health so that it's a lot better in a year's time than it has been you know maybe be for decades maybe since forever good I mean Jonathan you're mentioning a 21 year old I'm twice the age of a 21 year old at this point in my life and I think I have twice as much health as I did when I was 21 years old and that's because of changes that I've made to my diet and lifestyle through the years that have allowed me to get to a better place and I think it's really a message of empowerment here which is that you are not a genetically pre-programmed list of medical conditions and health related problems that you actually have the power through your choices to make small changes that can actually yield massive results in terms of your health and that that to me is the important message and it's really exciting and that's a part of what we're doing with Zoe and maybe just to to finish up I'd love to to go back to the neon blue muffins that we talked about earlier when we're talking about measuring your gut Transit time because this is something that anyone listening to this podcast can do at home if you wanted to to find out more there's actually a link we'll put it in the show notes but it's at join zowie.com blue poop um and well is this something that you you tried with your family we did yeah so uh at the time we had two kids we now have three um I didn't give blue poop to my you know seven month old who's drinking bottles but we did it and it was you know it's quite fascinating it's quite fascinating just to kind of get the results but also when you dig into the paper that was published in the journal guide which by the way uh speaking as a gastrologist this is the top European gastroenterology Journal uh when you dig into the Zoe uh paper on this topic it's fascinating to discover the connections that exist between your gut Transit time using the blue poop method and your microbiome and even potentially your cardiovascular risk so it's um you get a lot of bang for your buck by just eating a couple muffins absolutely and um I did this I enjoyed doing it um but my my kids really enjoy doing it as well because we've got the whole kitchen blue and then interestingly we were all fascinated you know for the next 24 to 48 hours about you know when we were gonna find the blue coming out the other other side and and therefore what this was is going to say as always I think one of the interesting things is you don't really know your Transit time so you might go regularly every 24 hours but you don't actually know how long it takes from the point that you eat to when it comes out the other side it might be this actually taking you two or three days so I do think it's just it's you know incredibly cheap do-it-yourself experiment um and there's something that's always so interesting about understanding more about your own biology and I'm also realizing that there's this huge variation amongst people and so once again this idea that we're all just the same you know it's just a little micro example of how that isn't true yeah and I think just to riff off of that real quick Jonathan um first of all people who do the poop challenge which you can do at any time uh you can input your results and actually will provide you'll receive feedback from our website that allows you to understand even further Beyond just like how much time it was and I I think one of the other things that I would say real quick is that a common question question related to this is well why don't I just eat some corn or why don't I just you know drink some beet juice and see when that comes out and the answer to the question is that those particular tools they haven't been clinically validated for this purpose so coming back to the idea of validating our research and Publishing it in journals and showing that it actually works with the blue poo method we actually have done that we have actually shown that these correlations are real and they do exist and that's that's the reason why you opt for this technique as opposed to just you know drinking some beet juice amazing well I think we learned a little bit today about an unhealthy gut which was a lot of fun if you have listened to this and you'd like to try Zoe's personalized nutrition program to discover what's going on in your own microbiome and improve your health you can get 10 off by going to join zoe.com podcast I'm Jonathan wolf and I'm Dr willby join us next week for another Zoe podcast [Music] thank you

Channel: ZOE

Views: 82,446

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Id: 7R-6dmCECrU

Length: 22min 48sec (1368 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 30 2023