292: The Gut Disease Epidemic Affecting 1 in 100 people

[gentle music] Let's start with just how big this problem actually is.

Back in the 1950s, inflammatory bowel diseases, that's IBD for short, were so rare that most physicians barely even saw a case ever in their entire career.

Now, the best baseline data from that era actually puts prevalence, that's frequency of bowel disease, somewhere between two to four per one hundred thousand people.

It's very, very small, pretty rare.

Today, there was a 2025 paper that shows the current prevalence has crossed one in every one hundred people.

That means it went from two in one hundred thousand to one in one hundred in about seventy years, which, if you're doing the math, that is a fifty thousand percent increase in bowel diseases happening to people in North America.

Now, in the United States, which is less than five percent of the globe, they're estimated to have three million people now living with Crohn's and colitis, which is fifty percent.

That means five percent of the population has fifty percent of the global bowel disease.

In fact, the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States makes up about six percent of the globe, and they have sixty percent of the bowel disease together between them.

And it's not just inflammatory bowel disease like Crohn's, colitis.

Irritable bowel syndrome now hits between ten and fifteen percent of adults globally.

GERD, chronic constipation, chronic bloating, like the entire human GI tract is absolutely under siege.

And so something massive changed in the last three generations.