Greatest Hits: Gut Aging Connection Dr. Vincent Pedre

I want to talk about the gut aging connection since this is more of a longevity podcast.

But...

You opened, when you were telling us your story, a little bit of how you developed leaky gut.

And we've talked a little bit about that on the podcast.

But can you differentiate, this is a more difficult question, but can you differentiate leaky gut symptoms versus kind of SIBO and even yeast overgrowth? So that's kind of a triad I see a lot.

And sometimes patients have all of those.

But can you kind of differentiate quickly to the audience what those are? As you kind of mentioned, those were problems you were finding in your patients as you kind of became this gut specialty doctor.

Yeah, absolutely.

So SIBO is small intestinal bacterial overgrowth.

And what that means is that there is a higher concentration of bacteria present in the small intestine where they're not supposed to be present.

And it could be an overgrowth of bacteria that normally live in the small intestine, like lactobacillus, or it could be bacteria that have migrated from the bigger reservoir of the gut microbiome, the large intestine, into the small intestine through the ileocecal valve.

And it doesn't matter which type it is, it's going to cause the same types of symptoms.

Candida or fungal overgrowth is just basically an excess of yeast in the gut.

The confusing thing is that you can have SIBO, you can have SIFO, so small intestinal fungal overgrowth or candida, as people know it, that you can have both of them at the same time.

And both of these can lead to leaky gut.

So now you can have a triple whammy.

You've got SIBO, SIFO, and you've got leaky gut.

So small intestinal fungal overgrowth for SIFO.

So I almost, you know, one time I wrote a post about this and I said, you know, maybe we need to stop talking about SIBO and SIFO and just start talking about SEMO, which is small intestine microbial overgrowth.

And microbial could be bacterial.

It could be yeast.

Or it could be both.

And I think if we think about it that way, then it becomes easier to not miss something with a patient.

Because I think oftentimes if you think, oh, you just have SIBO and you're not thinking about SIFO or candida, but you haven't really ruled it out, you haven't ruled it in, you haven't ruled it out.

but you're overlooking it and then your patient is getting better from SIBO and then suddenly they start having symptoms again.