first 1000 days

I'm also a mother of two.

And I like to say that I help families understand how lifelong health is shaped by the gut microbiomes during their first thousand days of life.

And I'm also an author of a new book where I try to bring together my career as a gastroenterologist and my experiences as a mom and help parents understand how their baby's lifelong health is being shaped by gut health.

So I just spent the first half of my career working at pretty amazing places like Yale University and Duke and University of Virginia Health, where I got to work with fellows and teach them.

I deliver a lot of digestive wellness and care to my patients in the adult space.

But of course, you do a lot of research and you suddenly start putting pieces together and saying, wait a minute.

A lot of the gut microbiome is actually developing in the first three years of life or what I call the first thousand days of life.

And so I think that's a missing piece that we don't talk enough about.

And I had a large NIH grant, it's called a K Award, to study food insecurity in East Africa.

It's called The First Thousand Days, so what it means to be having trouble with food.

And for those who don't know, The First Thousand Days refers to the year before a child is born and the two years after.

So you get a non-pregnant woman, you get a pregnant woman, and then you get the dyad of the mama and the baby or babies as the case may be.

So we were studying how problems with food in that time period affected both mom and baby, the physical development, the mental development, nutritional development, growth, all that stuff.