Gastrointestinal tract

So I always ask my client, tell me exactly like how your day unfolds.

So what are meal times like? So if I have a client who works in like a corporate firm or they're just super busy, okay, and they've gone from a very intense meeting and then they're going to grab the lunchbox from the fridge at work and then they're putting it on their desk, they're answering emails and they're eating, their brain hasn't had time to communicate to the God that now it's time to eat.

So you sit thinking about the intense meeting, you're looking at your emails, and your brain hasn't communicated to the God that now it's time to eat.

So what happens? So if you're stuck in sympathetic drive, which is the fight or flight response, where your body's releasing stress hormones and you're eating in that state, it's going to be a bit harder for your body to break down the food.

So what we want is we want to be in a calm state when we're eating.

We discussed hypermobility and Ehlers-Danlos syndrome as 13 subtypes.

with the hypermobility one being closely connected to inflammation, MCAS, and immune system dysregulation, some of the commonly missed GI complications in hypermobile patients, how POTS, MCAS frequently overlap with GI dysmotility, the role of MALs.

how stress influences symptoms as well as nutrition, how he views constipation, and last but not least, his emphasis on staying curious.

This is a fascinating conversation about complex medical conditions and how they intersect with the gut.

Congestive heart failure, getting some like, like give us some like COPD, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, open the lungs up.

IBS is like, well, and you know, there's also this disorder of the brain gut interaction, which is a step closer, but it's still doesn't really tell us what we need to do.

And so, um, And I guess through listening to people and looking at studies that looked at biopsy tissue of those with IBS, they had these kind of immune dysfunction seemingly present in the mucosa, in the lining of the GI tract.

And in this space, we don't have a lot of great data points.

So that came from a personal passion, but also professional.

So professionally, as a general surgeon, the bulk of my work was operating and removing colon cancers, working on digestive diseases, inflammatory bowel disease, seeing chronic GI issues in clinic.

So I was seeing a lot of this day to day.

And it was interesting to me, how can we reduce the burden of this? How can we improve people's lives? And, you know, diving into microbiome science that we didn't really talk about to patients as doctors.

So when we talk about gut health, I think most people, the lay person, probably means microbiome, fiber problem, constipation is probably what they mean, but it's far more diverse than that.

And it basically encompasses all of it.

The entire GI tract, which is dozens of organs.

I feel like when people online talk about gut health, it's often boiled down to things like bloating and gas, which are very diverse problems for a lot of people.