Ep.13 - Unlocking the Secrets of Gut Health
In this Biome Bite, Dr James McIlroy goes back to basics and covers some of the key facts about gut health and addresses popular misconceptions.
Tune in to episode 13 of Biome Bites
Timecodes:
00:00:00 Intro
00:00:44 Importance of gut microbiome
00:02:22 Misinformation addressed
00:04:21 Gut health is more than the stomach
00:08:12 Different bacteria in the gut
00:10:31 Functions of the gut
00:13:08 Microbial metabolism
00:14:04 Traditional wisdom
Transcript:
[00:00:00] Hello, everybody. It's me back on my own this time for a solo episode and wanted to kind of go back to basics with this one and talk a little bit about the gut because we're a gut health podcast and we have experts on talking about gut health, the gut microbiome, the future of modern medicine. And I think it's important that we.
[00:00:23] Take a step back and elevate things a little bit and make sure we're all on the same page. So we're going to start with some fundamentals in today's episode. Now, before I jump in and talk all about the gut and what gut health is, wanted to thank you all for supporting the podcast and for making all of this worthwhile.
[00:00:44] We're doing this because we believe that the gut is important. We believe that the microbiome in particular has massive and still largely untapped therapeutic potential. What I mean by that is there are, I think hundreds of millions of people, maybe even billions of people all around the planet who can benefit from taking control of their gut health and making some adjustments and optimizing their microbiome to live a longer, healthier, happier life.
[00:01:19] And we started EnteroBiotics in 2017 with this big vision in mind. We wanted to transform the standard of care for lots of chronic, hard to treat, and also hospital related acute sudden conditions by changing the microbiome through next generation fecal transplant approaches. And in subsequent solo episodes, I'll tell you about our progress.
[00:01:42] The reason we're doing this podcast is because there's an education piece that has to happen alongside the drug development piece. The education piece is arguably just as important, maybe even more important. We have to get the message out there to people about what this is and why it's important. Now, I can say that even since we started the podcast, there's been a big change in the society's perception of drug development.
[00:02:04] of the gut microbiome, what the gut is, and the importance of gut health for everything, for digestion, for well being, and of course for treating disease and making medicines more effective. And it's hard now to pick up a newspaper or a magazine, listen to other podcasts without people talking about gut health and the gut microbiome.
[00:02:22] That's awesome. It does mean, though, that there's a lot of information out there that's not that good. And it's getting worse. I'm seeing things popping up left, right and centre now. The most recent one was all about Azempic and how Azempic, which is the GLP 1 agonist associated with great, amazing results in weight loss, was improving your gut microbiome in a big way.
[00:02:44] I was like, what? How does that even work? So basically the gut microbiome is now going through a hype cycle again. Gut health is going through a hype cycle again, which means that it's going to be the solution to absolutely everything. And people are going to capitalize that, try to make money off of it.
[00:02:58] These influencers, poor publications, poor information, clickbait, so on and so forth. Hopefully this is not your first episode. If it is your first episode, welcome. But what we do here is give you the truth. We give you evidence based, practical guides, up to date summaries of the latest information. So you know that you're getting the truth and the best possible evidence and research on this podcast.
[00:03:23] We do bring on the world experts and we try and distill the information in a way that makes it easy to understand. Now, without further ado, I'm going to take some time to talk about gut health, the gut, what it is, and bring this back to basics. So this is focused on the gut. Most people, when they think about the gut, think about, uh, the stomach, but actually the gut refers to what we call the gastrointestinal tract.
[00:03:49] So it encompasses everything from basically the mouth, right the way through to the back passage. And it's responsible for a number of critical processes within the body, digesting foods, Absorbing nutrients, retaining water, eliminating waste. And not only does it start in the mouth and finish at the back passage, it also encompasses and passes through a number of other important organs and it contains different organs depending on where you go within the tract.
[00:04:21] So the first key learning here is that when we talk about gut health. We're not just talking about the stomach. We're not just talking about the intestine. We're talking about the entirety of the gastrointestinal tract. The start from the mouth and ends in the anus. So what does that anatomy look like then?
[00:04:42] Well if we just break it down We start with the mouth. This is where food is chewed and it's broken down to more easily digestible parts. We've got saliva in there as well. There's some enzymes that start the breakdown of food. Then passes into the esophagus and that's that tube that connects your mouth through the throat and into the stomach.
[00:05:04] It's basically a muscular tube that moves things down in a controlled manner. The stomach then secretes acids and enzymes. It's there to break down food It's there to kill bacteria that maybe not are supposed to be coming into your intestinal tract. So it's a line of defense. And it creates essentially a breakdown product of food called chyme, which then moves into the rest of the body.
[00:05:30] And it's about breaking things down so that the rest of the digestive tract can get the benefit from the food. That's what it's all about really. And this is all linked, right? This is all linked. And just for interest, there's a microbiome in the mouth. which is distinct to the microbiome in the esophagus, which is distinct to the microbiome in the stomach.
[00:05:51] And we're going to move now into the rest of the body. Then you get to the small intestine, which is broken down into three separate parts. There's the duodenum, jejunum and ileum. So the duodenum continues to break down of food. And the special thing about the duodenum is it connects other organs, most notably the pancreas.
[00:06:13] and bile, which comes from the liver and the gallbladder. Then you've got the jejunum and the ileum, the second and the third part of the small intestine, which are there to absorb nutrients and minerals from food. So basically the small intestine is actually extremely important. It's there to suck up all the goodness from food and make sure that your body's benefiting from all the great things that are inside food.
[00:06:41] And in reality, It's not unreasonable to say that food is medicine in some respects, because all the goodness within food finds its way into the rest of the body, and can benefit the intestinal tract locally, and can also affect different aspects, different parts of the body, depending on what it's broken down into.
[00:07:02] So when you're eating something, you can think, well, actually, what is this going to become when it's in my body? And the longer the ingredients list and the more industrial gloop, if I can call it that, that exists within the ingredients list, there's probably more likelihood of stuff there that you don't want, to be honest with you.
[00:07:23] Now, moving into the large intestine, there's a connection between the small bowel and the colon, called the cecum. Then you've got the colon, also known as the large intestine, and its job primarily is to absorb water. That's certainly. what they tell you in the, uh, medical textbooks. It's there to absorb water and to create feces, also known as stool.
[00:07:48] It's also there to absorb electrolytes, salts, and so on. But of course, we also know now, because you listened to this podcast, that the large intestine contains the densest number of microorganisms within the whole body. It is when people talk about the gut microbiome, they're probably talking about the large intestine microbiome, sometimes also talking about the small bowel microbiome.
[00:08:12] The differences between the microbiome within the stomach, small intestine and the large intestine are there's many more bacteria in the large intestine. Then there's different types of bacteria between the small intestine and the large intestine. So in the large intestine what's happening is the products of your food, which your body can't digest, with the digestive apparatus that we spoke about, the enzymes from the pancreas, the bile acids and the bile that comes from the liver and the gallbladder, the enzymes that are contained within the intestinal tract that kind of are there to break down the food into their constituent parts, so proteins into amino acids, carbohydrates moving into sugars.
[00:08:56] There are cellulotics and fibers that your body can't break down and they find their way into the large bowel. And that's when this fermentation process happens. These microorganisms contain the digestive apparatus that we can't. That we don't, rather, sorry, we don't contain. We can't break it down because we don't contain the digestive apparatus, which is what I wanted to say.
[00:09:19] And that means that if you're having a plate of food that has salad, vegetables, fruit, things that have come from the earth, rather than that have been created by man, you can be quite sure that there's going to be components of that. which could stimulate the growth of bacteria in your large intestine, because this relationship that we have with the microbiome in the large intestine essentially goes along the lines of we feed them, they break down the constituents of our diet that we can't break down, and in return they produce beneficial metabolites that help us.
[00:09:52] And the most classically described ones are the short chain fatty acids. But there are also products of microbial metabolism further up the intestinal tract, so there's bile acids that are converted from primary bile acids, i. e. ones produced by the body, to secondary bile acids, they're ones that are produced by the microbes.
[00:10:09] These bile acids have a lot of signaling properties. They potentially interact with the immune system. They modulate the microbiota. They maybe even have signaling molecules in distant parts of the body. So we've talked about, um, the mouth, the esophagus, the stomach, the small intestine, the large intestine, and we've also talked about the microbiomes in different parts of the body.
[00:10:31] So just to kind of take a step back even further then, what, what are the functions more generally then of the gut and that digestive system more generally? So it's about digestion, the mechanical digestion and chemical breakdown of food into absorbable. components. It's about the absorption. So the nutrients, the water, the electrolytes that come from the food that move into the bloodstream through the walls of the intestines.
[00:10:53] That's fundamental. That's what nourishes our body and gives us the energy to perform the chemical reactions that allow us to move, breathe, think, see, hear, so on and so forth. There's also the elimination. Parts that are indigestible do pass through your body and make up the bulk of stone. There's immune system function as well, so that's a key component of the gut and the wider body.
[00:11:17] And the reason that the gut is densely innervated with immune cells is because there's a one cell layer thick aspect of the intestinal tract that protects the kind of toxins and stuff you ingest from going immediately out into the bloodstream. That's called the gut barrier, the epithelial barrier, and a significant proportion of the body's immune cells are located within and around that barrier because it's the first line of defense for if there's a pathogen, for example, or some sort of toxin within the body.
[00:11:47] The gut also, in its totality, produces hormones mainly relating to digestion, appetite, and mood. One of the examples is the GOP. So, glucagon like peptide 1, and that relates to the skinny pills and pens, skinny pens, sorry they're not in pill form yet, I don't think, that are now going crazy, like um, Ozempic. What about the importance of gut health then? We've talked about what the gut is, what its constituents are, and also the microbiomes in certain areas. So, proper gut health allows you to digest your foods properly, efficient digestion, nutrient absorption. There's the immune system aspect as well. So if the relationship between your microbiome and your intestinal tract is in check, then the immune system potentially benefits too.
[00:12:34] So a healthy gut helps protect against infections and diseases. There's a connection between the gut and the brain, the gut brain axis. There's this direct link between the vagus nerve, one of the cranial nerves, that connects the gut right the way to the central nervous system. And it's bi directional.
[00:12:51] It goes up and it goes down. Which is why stress can impact on your gut health. You mean you can run to the toilet, you can get bloating, and vice versa. What you eat can also affect how you feel. There's also an indirect connection. through the metabolites. So we talked about how you feed the microbes and they feed you.
[00:13:08] Well, there's this other connection, which is the products of microbial metabolism. These metabolites can find their way into the bloodstream and then can move into the central nervous system and influence our brain and our nervous system. And more generally, overall health. If your gut's in check, then other bodily systems are potentially in check too.
[00:13:26] And if your metabolites are the wrong ones, then they may be influenced as these processes. So if you feed the microbiome garbage and rubbish, you're going to get rubbish out. It's quite simple. So you should think carefully about everything that you put into your body every single day. Every time you put something into your mouth, you have an opportunity to improve your microbiome and improve your health.
[00:13:46] Now, in the next episode, we're going to talk about what I do for my gut health. But in the meantime, I'm going to leave you with a couple of quotes. Death sits in the bowels. A bad digestion is the root of all evil. Hippocrates, the legendary ancient Greek philosopher. All disease begins in the gut. You've probably heard that one before.
[00:14:04] That's comes from Hippocrates as well. And some traditional wisdom attributed to various sources over the centuries. If your bowels are not regular, then your whole body is sick. And it's so true. If things are not working well in the gut, then things are not going to be very good for you outside of that in your general overall life.
[00:14:23] So on the next episode, we're going to talk about what gut health is and how we can improve it. So what are the signs and symptoms associated with the gut not working properly? And then also some routines for how you can improve your gut health through some easy, actionable things you can do within your own day on a day to day basis.
[00:14:42] So hope you enjoyed that biome bites episode. We're going to be doing more of these over the summer. If you've got any suggestions, please dial in. This is Inside Matters. My name is Dr. James McElroy. Thank you for taking an interest in gut health and mastering your microbiome.