For a while, I've been fascinated by how our gut microbiome can have such a visible impact on our lives, affecting everything from energy to immunity to inflammation and even our mood. But for all the buzz around gut health, it is still a black box for most of us, and I wanted to go deeper.

So today I'm talking with Dr. Robin Chutkin, a board-certified gastroenterologist, founder of the Digestive Center for Wellness, and author of several books on the microbiome. She's treated thousands of patients over three decades and brings a perspective that's both clinically grounded and refreshingly practical. As she puts it, There is no brain health, no immune health, no lung health without gut health.

In this episode, we're going to explore what your gut might be trying to tell you, from reflux or bloating to what your stool says about your health. We'll also cover how probiotics, fermented vegetables, hydration, fiber, and more actually impact your digestion, and whether washing your hands or sanitizing too much might be doing more harm than good.

I'm Chris Hutchins. If you enjoy this episode, please share it with a friend or leave a comment or review. And if you want to keep upgrading your life, money, and travel, click follow or subscribe. Robin, why is gut health such a critical part of our health? Chris, I want you to look down at your belly and see where your gut is located.

It is right in the center of your body. It is literally the engine for your entire body, for your brain to function, your kidneys, your lungs, your liver, your immune system. So if your gut health is off, it means your body is not functioning properly. Now, I know you went to Yale for pre-med, Columbia for med school.

How much of your medical training and education even touched on the gut? Less than 1%. Less than 1%. And less than 0.01% of my training and education touched on what we should be eating and how we should be feeding this incredible engine that's fueling our entire body. And so what are some of the common myths or misconceptions that people might not be thinking correctly about their gut?

The gut for most people is this black box. Like they don't understand it. They think, I'm just going to throw some stuff in there and hope that it works. So they don't understand this basic idea of input and output that you put in something at the top through your mouth and something comes out at the bottom through your anus.

And everything that happens in between your mouth and your anus is dependent on the input. So the input really informs the output. And I think people are just guessing and they're just kind of throwing stuff against the wall of their gut and hoping for the best. And what's actually going on inside the gut?

How do we think about all the bacteria? And I guess like maybe a one-on-one, a one-on-one on gut health for people. The first thing I want people to know is that the gut actually starts right at the top with the mouth. And that's where digestion happens. And in fact, even before the food hits your mouth, you start digesting.

The sight of food, the smell of food, sometimes even the thought of food can start to release enzymes from our salivary glands. So as soon as a food hits the mouth, it starts to get digested. And of course, we chew it up in our mouth and then it travels down the esophagus.

Food hits the stomach. It gets churned up into something called chyme. And again, more enzymes, gastrin, lots of different enzymes, hydrochloric acid. After the stomach, it goes into the small intestine. And then we get to the large intestine, sometimes called the colon. And one of the interesting things is that even though it's one continuous tube from your mouth to your anus, all the different parts work completely differently.

They have different lining, different epithelium. So for example, in the esophagus, you have a squamous lining, which is very sensitive to acid because there's not supposed to be acid in your esophagus. In the stomach, you have a columnar lining, which is resistant to acid. Different parts release different enzymes.

Different parts can churn up food differently. So it's very specialized, even though it's all connected. So what are some of the kind of main roles this entire gut system plays in maintaining our health? I'm sort of embarrassed to say that I had been a gastroenterologist about 15 years before I figured out this one simple, incredible thing.

And that is that when something is in your GI tract, it's not actually in your body. It's in this hollow tube that goes from your mouth to your anus and bisects your body. And so one of the main functions of the GI tract beyond digesting and absorbing the food, it's to keep things that get into our body through our mouth.

So that could be pollen, it could be poison, it's bacteria, it's viruses, to keep those things in this hollow tube running the whole length of our body and to prevent them from getting absorbed through the gut lining into our body where they can get through our bloodstream to different organs.

The lining is not just this passive thing. It's only one cell thick, but it's very active. And so it kind of knows what it should let through, what it shouldn't. The gut bacteria help with that. So that's one of the first things. It's a defense to prevent things from getting into the rest of our body.

And then, of course, digestion, right? So the food gets churned up, enzymes get released, different macro and micronutrients get passed through the gut lining into the bloodstream where they feed all your other organs, your brain and your lungs and your immune system, et cetera. We also have stomach acid, which isn't just essential for digestion.

Stomach acid literally kills pathogens. So there was a study that was done in 2021 and it showed that people who are blocking stomach acid with these potent drugs called proton pump inhibitors, those people had a two to four fold increased risk of getting sick with COVID when they were exposed to the virus.

Because normally when you have intact stomach acid, you swallow SARS-CoV-2, you can breathe it in, but you can also swallow it. And then that stomach acid unravels a viral protein and inactivates it. And it does it for all kinds of different viruses. It can protect you from poliovirus and from different bacteria.

And when I say protect, I mean lower incidence compared to not like I'm bulletproof. I have stomach acid. Viruses can't make me sick. So that's just a huge difference right there. But that wasn't really news, Chris, because we knew from decades ago from cruise ship outbreaks of norovirus and things like that, we could always predict who would get sick.

And sure, older people, babies, but people who don't have stomach acid, people who are taking that Nexium and, you know, their Prevacid and thinking, this is fantastic. I can eat a cheeseburger at 10 o'clock and I don't have reflux. And yeah, that's true. But unfortunately, the flip side is that it makes you more vulnerable to pathogens, to bacteria, to viruses, to foodborne illnesses.

And so that's a little bit of the negative of an unhealthy gut. What are some of the positives of a really healthy gut that can impact your life or your health? I think the gut immune connection is one of the most important. And because we are seeing such an epidemic of autoimmune disease, we are seeing that one in four Americans have an autoimmune disease.

So things that affect our skin, like psoriasis and eczema, things that affect our gut, like Crohn's and ulcerative colitis and celiac disease, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, which can affect the joints and the kidneys and the skin, MS. And it turns out that our gut health is really at the heart of that, of that explosion of autoimmune disease.

And the story of how we figured that out really comes from something called the hygiene hypothesis. And if we go back a little bit to the 1950s in the United Kingdom, they were starting to see this explosion of autoimmune disease. So they had this epidemiologist from the London School of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, Dr.

David Straughan, and they asked him to do a study to figure out why they were seeing so much, they call it hay fever, but essentially asthma and eczema. And he did a 21-year study. He looked at 18,000 kids from birth to age 21. The first discovery was that kids who lived in large households with extended family, cousins, lots of other kids who were getting sick all the time, like your cousin sneezed on you and now you're sick or, you know, somebody gave you a virus.

Those kids, they had much lower rates of autoimmune disease when they grew up. The immune system was being trained by these frequent illnesses. So that was the first surprising thing. The second surprising thing was that kids who were more affluent, who lived in houses with better access to showers and things like that, who were cleaner essentially, who were bathing all the time, those kids had much higher rates of autoimmune diseases as adults.

So what the hygiene hypothesis told us, and it took us till the 1980s to figure this out from his study, is that exposure to childhood germs is important for creating a balanced immune response later on. That's not going to freak out and develop an autoimmune disease. And number two, that being super cleaned, being super sanitized is not good.

It can also create a problem with the immune system. And the really interesting thing is that if we look at a map of the world today, we see high rates of autoimmune disease in the more developed countries like the U.S. and Canada and Western Europe and Australia. And we see really low rates in sub-Saharan Africa and India and Southeast Asia.

But as countries become more industrialized, as they get super clean and also eat more processed food, more medicines, etc., you start to see the rates of autoimmune disease rising. So we're seeing, for example, increasing rates of autoimmune diseases in India, in parts of the Middle East. And that it's due to a lot of things, but part of it, a huge part of it is this sort of super sanitation and people getting very clean and also sort of cleansing their bodies with all these personal care products and cleansing their homes with things that are removing a lot of the healthy microbes.

Okay, so I have a thousand questions, but I want to take a quick pause because we have two young kids at home. And I would say, you know, culturally in the States with young kids, it's like sanitize their hands all the time. They're always touching gross stuff. Just the other day, my daughter, you know, was in the bathroom dancing and fell on the floor and then just started rolling around in a public bathroom on the floor.

You know, very rarely does it seem like kids are using public, even public water fountains. They're all bringing water bottles. You know, where's the balance, right? I assume that if someone's rolling around on the floor of the bathroom, they should probably wash their hands, but maybe you don't need to sanitize their hands 15 times a day.

And maybe they don't need to shower, you know, once or twice every single day. How do you strike that balance? Yeah, it's such an important balance. Generally now, I see these kids with a hand sanitizer hanging off their backpack and I'm like, oh no. First of all, there are things in some of these hand sanitizers, triclosan and other things that are endocrine disrupting chemicals.

So I'd much rather take my chances with dirt than with triclosan for my kid, number one. And if you look at how young babies are, they put everything in their mouth. That is an instinct. That's not, oh, they're misbehaving or they didn't get the memo. They do that because that is how they're interacting with their environment.

They are putting things in their mouth to get microbes into their body. And that's an important part of childhood. But what do we do? We take it away and we sanitize it and we put chemicals all over it. And we're like, now you can touch it. So getting dirty is not only good, it's essential.

And there's a great book out there called Last Child in the Woods, Nature Deficit Disorder. I think it's by Richard Louvy. And, you know, we're all sort of focused on the screens and the kids are on computers too much of the time. And that's all true. But the bigger issue is they're not outside getting dirty, interacting with nature.

Because after our initial journey through the birth canal, those of us who are lucky enough to be born vaginally, that's when we get colonized with a mother's good bacteria. And that forms the beginnings of our foundational microbiome. So after that, we then need to get those microbes from nature, from food, ideally that's grown in dirt, and from getting dirty ourselves, from, you know, being out there with grass and trees and all of it.

And we see that kids who are born in the hospital via C-section, who don't get the benefit of coming through the birth canal, they are colonized with hospital-acquired staff instead of the mother's healthy bifidobacterium lactobacillus. And interestingly, Chris, for years after birth, they have higher rates of allergies, of asthma, of autoimmune disease, and of obesity.

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So on one hand, you're touching dog poop. You're in the bathroom. Got to wash your hands. On the other hand, like you're playing in the dirt. Don't wash your hands. How do you feel about the middle ground? You know, riding public buses, you know, wiping down the seats and the tray tables on an airplane.

Like where are the kind of public places like the, you know, the railing on the subway? How do you feel about those? Are those good germs? Those are fine. They're fine. I mean, I don't know that I can make a strong case that the germs on the railing on the subway are good for your child.

But here's the thing. Your kids have a healthy immune system. I'm assuming that they don't have an immune deficiency syndrome or anything like that. And it's training the same way that we want our kids to learn grit and resilience socially. It's important for them physically also. So when I see the parents hand sanitizer on the tray and all of that, that, I mean, I don't know what's going on with that kid.

That kid could have a very serious immune deficiency syndrome or some other reason, but most of the time it's a terrible idea. It's a terrible idea because the kid is not catching Ebola from the tray. And what we have, what we clearly know now is that being too clean is worse than being dirty by far, by far.

So the bathing too, like your kids, um, you know, let them get dirty. It's great. Like a dog is a lot of work. So I'm not advocating for a dog if you don't have one, but there's studies that show that households with children who have dogs, the kids end up on fewer antibiotics.

They have fewer autoimmune diseases because a dog is bringing some dirt and some outdoors into your house. So to circle back to the gut, we talked about a lot of the benefits of a healthy gut. How does someone even know if they have a healthy gut? There are some really important feedback loops in the body and the gut has a lot of them.

So for example, I talked about reflux earlier on, if you are having heartburn, it is not because you're overproducing acid. That doesn't happen. Overproduction of acid is a very rare disorder called Zollinger-Ellison syndrome that occurs in about one in a million people, which means that maybe 380 people in the US have overproduction of acid for the other, you know, many millions who have heartburn.

It's because they're having inappropriate opening of that lower esophageal sphincter. Why is it opening inappropriately? Eating too late at night, eating too much food, too much caffeine, too much alcohol. So overfilling the stomach causes a valve to pop open and things like caffeine and alcohol, nicotine also can make that valve open.

But what do we do? We go out and we take these acid blockers instead of paying attention to that. When you have reflux, it's not because your body is not working. Your body is giving you really important feedback and saying, hey, that eight o'clock meal that you're having every night and then you're lying on the couch, not a great idea.

Or that extra cup of coffee or the second glass of wine or whatever it is. So that's an important part of feedback higher up. Constipation is also really important feedback. Constipation on its own isn't a disease, it's a symptom. And it's a symptom that either you're not putting in the right output to get the desired output, you're not hydrating enough.

So things are kind of getting stuck along the way. Maybe you're taking a medication that's slowing down your gut motility. Maybe your gut microbiome is off. Maybe you need more core ab strength to really help push things along. Often it is a medicine cabinet. And so when somebody comes to see me with something like bloating and constipation, which are really common GI symptoms, irregularity, the first place I go is a medicine cabinet.

Because, for example, a lot of vitamins can cause gut distress. They can slow down gut motility. Anything containing iron in it is going to slow down. Your gut motility can make you constipated. Calcium-containing supplements, et cetera, can also do that. Prescription medications, pain medications, of course, can slow down the gut.

But even medications you might not think about, like antidepressants, anti-anxiety medications, those often cause bloating and constipation. There are medications that people are on for high blood pressure that do it. So the list is really long. And we're just talking about causing constipation. If we look at now messing up the gut microbiome, there was a study that was published in the journal Nature, and they looked at 41 different medications, and they found that half of them were causing problems in the gut microbiome, including things like laxatives that, you know, you think, okay, I have a slow gut.

I'm going to take a laxative. You don't think the laxative is actually messing up your microbiome. Artificial sweeteners, anti-anxiety drugs like Prozac. So the list is really long. So the medicine cabinet is one of the first places I go. And then you have to think about, okay, hormonally, is there something going on?

Is my thyroid underactive? And that's why my gut motility is slow. So it's always a good idea. Check your thyroid function. If you are suddenly finding you're more constipated, things are slowed down. So could it be something hormonal like that? Could you be in perimenopause? Probably not you, Chris, but I certainly could.

So, you know, is there a change in your internal hormonal milieu that's causing your gut to behave differently? So is it something hormonal? Is it something physiological? Do you have a mass, a tumor or something that's pressing on your gut? Or it could be something more benign, like a uterine fibroid.

So really important to play medical detective. I'm not saying don't go to the doctor and don't take a drug, but figure out what's causing it rather than I'm just going to take this, this thing. And my second book, no, my third book is called, uh, the bloat cure 101 things.

And each one is a page and it's a disease. So a is like air aphasia, air swallowing that could be causing it, you know, and it goes through all these different causes from food intolerances to hormonal things, to anatomical things, voluptuous venous colon being one of mine. Women have a twistier colon, but it's so important for people to literally like roll up their sleeves and be medical detective because unfortunately, Chris, the reality is that the medical community just does not have the time for that.

That is not the way we are oriented to practice medicine in 2025. It's like, okay, this is wrong here. Take this. It's not like, okay, let's talk about how much water you're drinking, how much fiber you're having in your diet. Are you moving your body? Are you taking an iron supplement that's slowing you down?

So my goal is I want to put the tools in people's hands. So, you know, read the bloat cure if you're bloated and in those 101 pages, hopefully you'll find what's bloating you or my first book gut bliss, which sort of explains all these different things going on in the GI tract.

And so again, very clear. I'm not saying don't go see a doctor, but I think it's so important for people to understand how their GI tract works. What are the things that are basically making it behave badly, go wrong, and how can they fix it? Let's say you don't have any of that.

Like you're not bloating right now. You're not constipated. Everything seems to be working. Is there still opportunity to improve your gut? And is there a way to diagnose whether you're like, you know, on the brink of things going wrong or you're really, you know, you're, you're an A plus.

I do also want to mention in addition to GI symptoms. So the reflux, the burping, the bloating, the constipation, loose stool, um, irregular bowels, it's also your immune system. Cause we talked about that close connection. And when I mentioned that, you know, the gut lining is only one cell thick, you have all the trillions of microbes on one side of the gut.

And then you have the immune system on the other, you have all those cells that are releasing the cytokines, et cetera, on the other, and they're in constant communication. So when we see that the gut microbiome, for example, is disrupted, because let's say you took a massive course of antibiotics and you've wiped out a lot of your gut bacteria, or you've been eating a crummy diet for years with not enough fiber and too much processed food, and your microbiome is a bit off.

That is potentially going to affect your immune system. Maybe it's an autoimmune disease. Maybe it is, you're getting sick frequently, you're having lots of coughs and colds. And so that's an important clue also, that something could be up with the gut. And it doesn't mean not everybody who has an autoimmune disease has an unhealthy gut, but autoimmune diseases are often born in the gut.

Frequently, there's a genetic predisposition, but there is some kind of trigger, and the trigger is often happening in the gut. So that's an important consideration too. If you, or if you have a kid who's sick all the time to think about what's going on in the gut, I really don't advocate for a lot of gut testing because it's kind of like whole genome testing.

So in the 35 years or 40 years since we've been able to sequence the entire human genome, an incredible project, the Human Genome Project, that took multiple institutions globally, billions of dollars, were able to sequence the entire human genome. And how many genetic diseases do you think we've been able to cure since we've been able to sequence the entire human genome?

I'm going to at least assume one, but I feel like your answer is going to be zero. It's a big donut because the genes are just a part of it. So it's the same thing. And just to sort of define the microbiome a little bit for people who may be a little less familiar, we're talking about all the organisms that live in and on our body, mostly in our gut, but they're also on our skin, on our scalp.

They're even in our lungs. They're in our bladder. They're everywhere. They're under our nails. And we're talking about bacteria, but also viruses, parasites, fungal organisms, archaea. So multiple different organisms. We can't see them, but if we scraped them all up, the ones in our gut, they'd weigh about three to four pounds.

It's over a hundred trillion. We have somewhere around two to three times as many microbial cells as we have human cells. So we're sort of more microbe than human when you think about it. We're like the beehive kind of inanimate. And then the microbes are all the bees. So we're talking, and then all the genetic materials, a big density of stuff.

And what do they do? Well, they digest food. They help to synthesize vitamins like vitamin K. They help to neutralize toxins. They train the immune system, the whole hygiene hypothesis we were talking about, and they turn genes on and off. So Chris, you could have a genetic predisposition for a disease, but because of the complement of your microbiome, you don't develop the disease because the microbiome can inactivate those genes.

So you could have an identical twin, identical genetic material, and you have a disease and they don't, or vice versa, because your gut microbiome is influencing disease expression. So you would think with all of that, like, all right, bring on the microbiome testing. Let's figure out what's going on.

No. And that's because we are, this is in its infancy. So we've identified maybe a thousand or more, a few thousand species in the gut, but they're probably hundreds of thousands. And then just identifying the species isn't enough. We have to understand the metabolites and what they do. And sometimes bacteria can go from making one thing to making something else as an adaptive response based on a change in the environment.

So it's really premature to go and get a microbiome, a stool microbiome test and think that, oh, it's going to tell you everything you need to know. What I do recommend to people is to be citizen scientists, to contribute to the research through organizations like the American Gut Project, which is a nonprofit.

For less than a hundred bucks, you can send your stool in. They'll do an analysis. They're not going to then try and sell you a bunch of supplements or tell you, you know, you can't eat blackberries. So a lot of the commercial testing, it gives recommendations that I think are really misleading and erroneous.

And then there's a whole upsell of like, take this product and it's going to fix your microbiome. So I think if people want to do it because it's interesting, contribute to the science. So the American Gut Project, their database is open to researchers all over the world. And so for example, somebody studying Parkinson's disease can look at stool samples and the microbiome of people with Parkinson's disease to figure out that actually Parkinson's begins in the gut, believe it or not.

They published data about six years ago, the American Gut Project study. And that was the largest microbiome study done ever. It was over 10,000 people, over 40 different countries asking the question, what makes a healthy microbiome? And the answer was, drum roll, people who ate 30 or more different plants per week had the healthiest gut microbiome.

You didn't have to be vegan or even vegetarian. They were vegans with really unhealthy microbiomes, vegans who were eating typically less than 10 different plants per week. And they were straight up omnivores, but who were eating a wide variety of plant matter. And so that's not just vegetables, it's fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts, beans, seeds, herbs, spices, all of it.

So basically having a varied diet. And it's the same kind of stuff that Dan Buettner found with Blue Zones, right? Is having a wide variety of different plants in your diet is really where it's at. Okay. And so I know there are these tests. I think Jonah, Tiny Health are a couple of them.

I'm looking at a couple of these websites because I want to understand. And I've had friends that have taken them and it's like, oh, like you're going to learn how healthy your gut is and what supplements you need. As someone who studied this a lot, are you kind of like, there's just not enough evidence to support what you would do?

So maybe it's more like 23andMe where you can learn about all the bacteria, but like, what do you do with that? Or is there a person for whom these tests are really interesting or are they really just, you know, wrapping away to sell more supplements? The latter. I try to direct people away from the commercial microbiome companies where the whole goal is kind of what you said, an upsell of supplements and things that are just sort of nonsensical.

And the problem too, is that it kind of takes people's focus away from what they actually can do, which is overuse of antibiotics and acid blockers is a huge threat to the microbiome. A diet without enough fiber, huge threat, too much alcohol, processed foods, all the things that you would imagine.

But when somebody gets this result and they're like, oh, you just have to take the supplement. It makes them think like, oh, I don't have to do these other things. You know, I just take this pill. And so that I think is really, that's problematic. Yeah. I have not done one.

I'm like curious as a curious person, but it just reminds me of 23andMe where it was like, you likely have blue eyes. And I was like, well, I knew that one. You know, here's your earwax type. It was like kind of fun things, but it was more fun than I didn't change anything about my life because of it.

Yeah. And we see what, what, what's, you know, that company's going through. Right. And so a lot of this, I mean, I think a lot of these folks, some of the microbiome testing companies were started by really good researchers and I think they start out well-intentioned, but that there's always that line, right?

Like, you know, oh, if we say this and we do this and because they're marketing something, you know, they're not there as healthcare providers. They're there to sell a product. And so there's almost always some over-promising and under-delivering on that end. But again, I do encourage, especially people, whether you're healthy, you look like you would have really good poo and a good microbiome or for somebody who has an autoimmune disease and wants to see, or wants to get it checked and then is planning on making some intervention, it can be helpful, but it's not predictive.

So you can make a ton of changes and you may not see any significant changes in your microbiome. And you could make no changes in your diet and your microbiome could still shift because there are other things that are informing it. Our environment, our exposures, the stress in our life, all of this stuff affects the microbiome.

I think there are some foods that everyone knows, like it's probably better to not eat all, you know, processed food and it's good to eat whole foods. Are there any things that are surprising, controversial, or more in the middle where people, it's not so definitive that are things people should be either thinking about or testing on themselves to see how their body reacts to certain foods?

I'm going to make a lot of people really unhappy right now by saying that kombucha does not improve the health of your gut microbiome. We have no convincing evidence. However, this is important. If you are swapping out soda or alcohol for kombucha, that's a win, right? Because we know that soda, any amount is terrible for the gut.

And we know that alcohol is bactericidal. It kills bacteria. It doesn't mean that it's terrible depending on how much you're drinking, but alcohol is a killer of gut bacteria. So if you're trying to drink less and you're like, hmm, I'm going to swap, you know, a couple beers I have at night or my usual cocktail for kombucha, great.

But the idea that you're going to drink the kombucha and it's sort of regenerating your gut microbiome, no. One of the most effective foods beyond the general, like you want to eat food that didn't come from a factory, right? Ideally, is fermented foods. Unbelievable. And the Sonnenbergs at Stanford, a husband and wife couple have done a lot of great work on this.

So a fermented food like sauerkraut is a triple threat in a good way. It's prebiotics, meaning it's a food that the bacteria eat because it contains fiber. If we look at something like sauerkraut, it's cabbage, right? So it has prebiotic foods in it, the actual cabbage. It has probiotics, live bacteria, because in the fermentation process, you're generating lactobacillus.

And it has postbiotics, which are things like short chain fatty acids that are all the compounds that are being made by the bacteria as they're fermented. So a jar of like really good quality sauerkraut, not like a pasteurized, you know, factory made one, but like, let's say you get something from the farmer's market or that is one of the most medicinal foods you can eat.

And I'm very skeptical, like the whole, you know, acai berry and like, yeah, the whole superfood thing is so overdone. But there is such great scientific evidence for something like sauerkraut or even fermented vegetables. I have in my second book, the microbiome solution, which is actually my favorite. I have some great recipes in there.

And we borrowed some recipes from Jeff Cox's great book, The Essential Book of Fermentation for the fermented food recipes. They're delicious. Like there's an apple and cabbage sauerkraut in there. That's fantastic. Fermenting stuff is pretty simple. You need a mason jar, you need water and salt. And you can ferment almost any vegetable, or you can do what I do and go to the farmer's market and buy some from somebody who's done it.

But it's incredible. And you only need like a tablespoon. So even if you don't like sauerkraut, if you can commit to like a tablespoon of sauerkraut or kimchi, incredible. Yeah, you were saying sauerkraut the whole time. And I was like, I don't love sauerkraut, but I love kimchi. And do the kids, will the kids eat it?

Because so good for them. TBD. Kids don't like spicy, but they don't mind fermented. And we went to Vietnamese restaurant yesterday and the kids usually eat whatever we order as long as it's not too spicy. Wonderful. So we have not crossed the spice hurdle, but everything else seems to work.

Yeah, the kids menu is ruinous to children's guts. So if you can, if you can do that, I encourage your kids to just have a little taste of what you're having rather than the, you know, the chicken tenders and the tater tots and the mac and cheese. That's fantastic.

Full credit to my wife who had the kind of like 100 foods in 100 days plan, where when our daughters first started eating solid foods, there was a goal that in the first 100 days, we wanted to expose them to 100 different foods. And these are like raw ingredients, not like a Twinkie, an Oreo, that kind of thing, like a vegetable, a fish or, you know, a legume or something.

And I was surprised by the time you get to 100, you're kind of going out there. We weren't necessarily counting every single fish in the sea. But even then, that's, you know, that's not going to get you to 100. So it was like every vegetable, every fruit, we'd go to some of the kind of markets from other countries to try to find fruits and vegetables that we don't normally get.

And I, it was awesome. And I think now there are things our kids don't like, but you know, they'll always try something. So we've, we've tried hard to expose our kids to a ton of food. And so far it's been successful, except spice. I love that your, your wife was actually basically following that American Gut Project data of 30 different plant foods per week, even the bonus version of that with a hundred without knowing that data, but just inherently was like, it's good for my kid to eat a wide variety of foods.

It's incredible. Yeah. We just wanted them to try everything. Now the downside is the more we expose them, sometimes they have really expensive palates. Like we went out to dinner with my parents once and my dad loves sashimi. We all do. And he orders this sashimi plate. My daughter's like just grabbing it by the piece, eating it like popcorn.

And we're like, man, you are an expensive, uh, dinner companion. This episode is brought to you by superhuman. Now I've used superhuman for years, and I think it's hands down the best way to do email, assuming you value your time, which I absolutely assume you do. That's because superhuman is the ultimate solution for inbox decluttering and enhanced productivity.

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That's V-U-O-R-I. Again, that's chrishutchins.com/viore to discover the versatility of Viore clothing. Exclusions apply. Visit the website for full terms and conditions find the link in the description. You did mention when you were talking about sauerkraut pre and probiotics. I feel like it is a topic I know absolutely nothing about, but I know there are, you know, friends and family members who are like, Oh, are you taking your prebiotics and probiotics every day?

Like, this is what I take. Where, how do you, clearly the gut is probably the target of why they're taking those things. Yeah. How does that fit in, in your kind of framework? Well, the first thing I want to tell people is that prebiotics are food. That's what you should think.

A prebiotic is not a pill or a supplement. The World Health Organization definition, a probiotic is a live organism that when ingested confers a benefit to the host. So that knocks out 99% of the things people are taking because they're conferring no benefit to them. They're, they're taking some pill from the supermarket or the pharmacy and it's supposed to have this amount of live bacteria.

Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. And they're just pooing it out, mostly dead bacteria, not present in sufficient quantities to colonize the gut and reproduce and make a difference and not clear that these species are necessary or doing anything. So the most important part for people to know is that you need to be trying to colonize in, in terms of encouraging reproduction of your existing bacteria because half the stuff you're taking in a pill is dead or not helpful.

There are some probiotics out there on the market, one in particular that I use in my patients because it's been studied in over a hundred human trials. And it's a combination of seven or eight different strains of bacteria that have been very well studied for serious conditions like ulcerative colitis, as well as irritable bowel syndrome and found to have efficacy.

But that is the kind that is refrigerated. It is sent to you with a little monitor to show that it maintained this temperature. If the temperature went above this amount, there's not enough viable organisms and they'll, they'll replace it. That's not the typical over the counter that people are just going to the health food store and buying.

And even for that one, as sort of fancy and spectacular as it is, I use that primarily in my patients with gut disorders. I don't recommend that the average person take that like vitamins. We don't have any evidence that the average person benefits from taking a multivitamin. Now, if you have Crohn's disease and you'll be 12 deficient, sure.

Or if you have vitamin D deficiency, or if you're iron deficient, but just then you take iron, but just taking a multivitamin, then we don't have evidence that it's doing anything. So a much more meaningful and impactful approach is to think about the gut bacteria in your gut already.

You've got trillions of them. And what can you do to feed them and to amplify them and to feed the right species? And this is where you get into, okay, we want to feed them more fiber. We want to cut down on the alcohol and the processed food. We want to make sure we're hydrating so that our gut is moving.

Our gut motility is normal, because when the gut is stagnant, that also creates problems with the gut bacteria. It is not as sexy, perhaps, as taking a pill, but is much more impactful for your gut. So that's a probiotic. Prebiotics refer to the food that bacteria eat. The food, not the pill or the powder or the potion, the food, the actual fiber.

So things like legumes and greens and, you know, berries and all those foods that contain fiber. But particularly when we think about things like, um, foods that are high in inulin. So it could be things like dandelion greens and oats and so on. And the fibrous part of the vegetable.

So if you think about like the broccoli stock, that's where most of the fiber is. It's not in the floret or vegetables like celery. So think of those dense, fibrous foods. Those are prebiotics. You're feeding your gut bacteria. We don't have evidence that a prebiotic pill or powder is doing anything.

And that's why I always tell people, as Maya Angelou famously said, when somebody tells you who they are, believe them. When you see the label at the bottom saying this compound has not been shown to treat or cure or fix anything that's wrong with you, believe it. They are telling you this is not doing anything and people are still buying it.

I don't get it. You mentioned hydration. How much water do we need in a day for healthy guts? There's pretty significant variation based on your activity level, how much water you're getting from the food you're eating, etc. But a good rule of thumb, Chris, is half your body weight in ounces of water.

So if you weigh 150 pounds, 75 ounces. If you weigh 200 pounds, 100 ounces as a baseline of just water. Not water with salt or minerals or anything in it. Just basic water. That's a really good rule of thumb. You said plants are good. What about animal products like meats and dairy, cheeses, milk?

Any of those good, bad for your gut or moderation? From a GI point of view, there's room for a little animal protein on the plate. I've treated thousands of patients over more than three decades. And I will tell you, even my patients who have severe complex autoimmune disorders where their gut is super inflamed, they can manage some animal protein.

So there are lots of reasons to not eat animals for the environment, etc., etc. But to say that the ideal diet from a gut point of view completely excludes animal protein, I don't think that's certainly not correct in my experience. That being said, I will tell you that for a lot of my patients with severe inflammation in their gut, increasing the amount of plants they're eating is incredible.

So usually what I'll say to people is, if you want to eat some animal protein, have one animal protein meal a day. It could be breakfast, lunch or dinner, where the meal is built around animal protein. And then for the rest, try and build it more around plants, including foods that are high in plant protein, like legumes, etc.

But to not have every meal be so animal protein centric, because then you tend to crowd out the plants. So I think that's a pretty reasonable way to do it. And you know, Chris, we talked about feedback, your body gives you that feedback. Because most people who go on like a serious high protein keto type diet, what's the first thing that happens?

They get constipated, right? We saw sales of psyllium husk that most people would know as Metamucil soar with the advent of the South Beach diet and the Atkins diet, etc. Because everybody was so constipated. Animal protein is fine, depending on your requirements for based on what you're doing and your daily activities, you can you can tolerate and you can probably tolerate more than the one meal a day.

But once you start to get constipated, that's generally a sign that you know that you need to cut back on the animal protein and add in some more plant, more plant fiber. Are there any other kind of sneaky things that play a negative or positive role? I know, I think I've seen you talk a little about artificial sweetener.

And how does that fit in? And are there any other similar things that it's that can have a really big impact? Artificial sweeteners are really problematic. And the worrisome thing is they've kind of snuck into everything, right? So people advertise like low sugar. And you think, okay, this has less sugar.

But what they mean is, it's got artificial sweetener in it. And we know definitively that these non-nutritive sweeteners, as we call them, the sucrose, the maltose, all the different oses, which are poorly absorbed sugars, that they really wreak havoc on the gut. The reason they don't contribute calories is because they're not absorbed in the small intestine.

So they float on down to the colon, where they get fermented by gut bacteria, but they get fermented into harmful post-metabolic products, not healthy things like short-chain fatty acids. And some of that too, they'll give you gas. If you've ever had like diabetic candy with a lot of artificial sweetener, one of the first things you'll see is like, oh, I'm having terrible bloating and gas.

And that's the products of fermentation. The other thing I want to tell people, particularly people who might be struggling with their weight and thinking, I'll have a low calorie sweetener since I don't want to have the calories, is that insulin, the hormone that will sort of signal your body that things should be stored as fat.

Insulin is released in response to sweetness, not in response to calories. So even if something says zero calories or 10 calories, and you burn it in a calorometer, and it's low-cal, when you ingest that substance, and if you've ever had something sweetened with an artificial sweetener, you know artificial sweeteners are typically very sweet, usually sweeter than regular sugar.

So you ingest that, you get the same or more insulin release, which is why diet sodas are just as big a likelihood of you gaining weight as regular soda, and sometimes more, because sometimes the insulin releases more. So it's pretty misleading for consumers. They say, oh, zero calories. And that may be true, but not zero weight gain.

You're still getting the weight gain because you're getting the insulin release. And so I really try and stare people away from any sort of diet, anything, non-nutritive sweeteners, because of that, but also because they're really tough on the gut and particularly disruptive to the gut microbiome. So one way to get around that is to, I always say have the regular sugar, but just have less of it.

If you usually put a tablespoon of sugar in your coffee, try a teaspoon or half a teaspoon. So just gradually train your palate to have a little less of the sweetener. In terms of dairy, part of the problem with the dairy is that the dairy industry in this country is full of antibiotics.

Typically, the dairy cows are being given antibiotics prophylactically to prevent other infections, etc. And it becomes then sort of a highly processed product at the end. That's often the animals have been exposed to antibiotics. But if we look at something like cheeses, like a good quality cheese, cheese is a fermented product.

And if you're in France and where you can eat a different cheese every day of the week and never have the same cheese twice, and you can get like a really great, you know, locally made cheese, have some cheese. And if you're not terribly lactose intolerant, and you really like cheese, it's okay to have a little cheese, have a good quality, like a hard Parmesan, like a Parmigiano Reggio or something like that.

Don't have a processed cheese. And is milk in the same bucket? For most people who are lactose intolerant can tolerate a little hard cheese, but they're not going to tolerate milk. And there's not much reason for an adult to drink milk. Because, again, milk is what allows a little small calf to grow into a big, huge dairy cow really quickly.

So, I mean, if you're trying to put weight on quickly, you know, milk has a lot of sugar in it, etc. That could be something reasonable. But milk is a health food, not so much. It's very calorie dense, has a lot of sugar in it, and isn't really contributing much in terms of calcium and so on.

What we find is that eating green leafy vegetables and small bone fish like salmon and sardine is more useful than having dairy for growing strong bones. This episode is brought to you by Built Rewards, which is an amazing points program with so many ways to earn, including on your rent, where you don't even need to check with your landlord.

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chrishutchins.com/built or the link in the description to start earning points on your rent payments today. I have one more topic that I was surprised didn't come up earlier. When we were talking about the symptoms, you know, you went through the symptoms of reflux, the symptoms of bloating. We're pretty far in this conversation.

We haven't talked a lot about poop. It's not not a common topic on the show, but you mentioned a couple of times like, oh, you want to make sure you have healthy poop. I don't think most people know what that is. So maybe we can do a quick rapid round and run through what people should be knowing and thinking and doing about their poop.

Fantastic. Before we do that, I asked Mel Robbins this when I was on her podcast last year. I asked Dan Harris this when I was on his podcast a few weeks ago. And I'm going to ask you, tell us about your bowel movements, Chris. I'll tell you, Dan got super uncomfortable.

He turned bright red. But I think you can tell us. Are you like an everyday kind of guy? Morning? I am not as consistent in that. Like, I don't have a time where it's like, oh, it's like an hour after breakfast. That's the time. But I would say definitely feels like an everyday kind of thing, but not a three times a day kind of thing.

It wouldn't feel alarming to me if a day went by without a bowel movement. Like, I wouldn't be like, oh my gosh, what's wrong? But mostly because I think it's, it's not so regimented in time that I don't even know if I would notice. And is there some ease associated with it?

It's a much quicker thing. Like I know some people love to just go and, you know, sit and play around and, you know, check the news and read a book. I'm like in, out. So you have just described stool nirvana. So we eat every day. We should be pooing every day, but you can miss a day here and there.

If you're a five times a week or a six times a week, that's perfectly fine. If you're a twice a day or even a three times a day, that's fine too. If the consistency is pretty good. One of the things you said is really key, which is your in and out.

The worst thing is to take your phone in or a magazine or something, because you're training your bowels. Your bowels actually have nerve cells. We talk about the second brain in the gut, the enteric nervous system. And our, our gut has about seven times as many nerve cells as our spinal cord, not as much as our central nervous system.

So it's a very well innervated organ and it's very sensitive to training. Think of potty training with kids, right? And so if you go in there with your phone or a book every time, what you're training your gut to do is to take your time. You're saying, oh yeah, we got all day.

We're reading the news feed, take your time. So you never want to go in there with anything. You want to get in there, you want to get on the john, you want to try and push something out, or ideally you have the urge. You can give that a couple of tries.

If nothing happens, you want to leave and then come back. And in terms of what the stool should look like, one of my favorite podcast episodes was mama jama poos. It is, if you want to know how to have a mama jama poo, this is an episode to listen to, including size.

You want the stool to be about the size of a banana, ideally. Now it might not all be in one piece. It could be like, okay, here's three parts and you put it all together and it's about the size of a banana. And the reason that's important is not just because of elimination and how important that is for our body to detoxify and eliminate.

It's because there's a really strong correlation between size of stool and colon cancer risk. And colon cancer is now the second leading cause of cancer deaths in women under 50 and the number one in men, in men under 50 and it's prostate higher up. So we're seeing this, you know, alarming increase in colon cancer in young people.

And it's probably due to lots of stuff. I'm sure the food is contributing, but having a large bowel movement about the size of a banana is really protective against colon cancer because it means that you have sufficient fiber in your diet that you're having this really good elimination. And you want it to be a good chocolatey color, like not necessarily a dark chocolate, and you want it to have some form.

It's okay if it breaks apart, but you don't want it, when it falls into the bowl, it should retain its form. It shouldn't then fall apart. And you know, a little on the soft side is good. It's totally normal to see a little flex of fibrous foods. Like if you're, you know, had a big kale salad the night before and you see a little bit of green, that's totally normal.

If you are having diarrhea and you're seeing undigested food, like rice grains and stuff, that's a problem. That means that maybe you're not digesting the food properly. Maybe you're not absorbing it properly, or maybe the transit time is too fast. It could be any one of those things, but it's okay to see some vegetable matter, particularly if you're a, if you're a good fiber eater and position is really important.

So the ideal position for having the stool shoot out, if you're bendy, you could actually sit back on the toilet and then put your feet up on the front of the toilet bowl. Because when you do that, you're adjusting the angle of the puborectalis muscle and you open up the angle and it really allows the stool to release.

It's also the much better position for childbearing too. We're supposed to be squatting. We're not supposed to, you know, be lying on our backs, but that that's for another episode. And so when we look at countries, like countries, again, that are less developed, like parts of sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, where people still squat a lot over, you know, when, when I was in Turkey two years ago and a lot of the bathrooms in Istanbul, you had this sort of Western stall, but then you also had the option of a stall with a hole and you could squat over it.

And trust me, there is an art to that, but squatting like that is much more efficient for getting the stool out. Any other tips. If people are like, I'm not, I'm not at Nirvana yet. Um, you know, you said fiber, you said hydration. Yeah. Well, the hydration one, I mean, you obviously want to be hydrated all through the day, but this one is really important.

My husband and I have been married almost 25 years. And the other day I did this and I said to him, I was like, you know, when you drink this chug a whole bunch of water in the morning before you go, it really helps the stool could come out.

And he got pissed. He was like, we've been married almost 25 years and you're just telling me that now, but keep a bottle of water by your bed. That's like 20 ounces and chug it in the morning, right. When you get up before your feet hit the ground, what that does is it triggers something called the gastrocolic reflex.

And the gastro meaning stomach colic, meaning colon reflex is a reflex where the first thing that's in your stomach in the morning, it sends a chemical signal to the bottom of your digestive tract, your colon saying, okay, food is coming in time to empty out and the colon starts to contract.

And that helps to give you that signal. So a lot of people find with coffee, right? And they think coffee helps them go and it does. But for a lot of people, it's just because coffee is the first thing that they're having. If they were having, you know, some water or something, the reason I recommend the large volume is that that will really distend your stomach.

And that really helps to trigger the gastrocolic reflex. A sip of coffee or tea may not do it. And you don't obviously don't want to chug 20 ounces of coffee in the morning. I don't recommend that. But if you really fill your stomach with water, 20 ounces where you're like, ooh, my stomach is quite full now, you're much more likely to trigger that gastrocolic reflex.

So if you're somebody who tends to be a bit sluggish in the morning with the bowel movements, and you're like, oh, I think I have to go, but I'm not sure I have to go, try that chugging, and then go. And you will see it will likely trigger that gastrocolic reflex.

So the combination for stool nirvana in the morning would be, of course, the night before, you've had a lot of fiber that day. And then in the morning, you chug your 20 ounces of water, and then you get in there and you put your feet up, that can make a huge difference.

And you said the night before, is that the general timeframe? Is it like 12 hours from eating? Really the day before, the transit time can be anywhere from 12 to 48 hours. So I should have said earlier would be better. So if you have like a huge fibrous lunch, that would be great.

And a lighter dinner. For a lot of people who are experiencing bloating or constipation or just abdominal discomfort, calorie shifting where you're having a bigger breakfast and lunch and a lighter dinner will really help because the digestive tract functions in concert with a light dark cycle, the circadian rhythm.

So once the sun sets, your GI tract really slows down. And so if you're having your biggest meal at dinnertime, you're likely to be uncomfortable, that food isn't really getting digested, maybe it's triggering some reflux. So ideally, your big fiber load should be a bit earlier in the day at breakfast and lunch.

Okay, we talked about bloating. But what about gas either from either side? How does that fit in? I really like to think about gas as good gas versus bad gas. Good gas is, I had lentils and Brussels sprouts for dinner. And you know, now I have gas. And that is because those foods have a lot of poorly digestible fiber.

And we don't have the enzymes. So for example, if you look at something like beans, there is an enzyme alpha-1 galactosidase. We don't make it. And that's because the beans, the fiber in the beans is really there to feed our gut bacteria. The idea is that, you know, we absorb what we can.

The gut bacteria ferment the fiber, the poorly digestible or indigestible fiber, and then they make all these important things, the short-chain fatty acids, etc. So you're going to get some gas with that. That's different from the gas you get from, oh, I ate a bunch of sugar-free candy, and now I like have pain and feel terrible.

Or I'm severely lactose intolerant. And that gas is usually accompanied by like queasiness and, you know, you just, you don't feel good. So there's a distinction there. And when people will say to me, well, you know, I love beans and I know they're good for me. When I eat them, I have gas.

I usually recommend, well, eat a little bit less. Eat them earlier in the day. Make sure you're soaking them before you cook them. You can cook them with a sea vegetable like kombu. Those are all things that can help. But I would never recommend somebody completely stop eating beans because they have gas because you're supposed to have some gas with beans.

And is gas actually a problem or is it more like a cultural problem? It's more of a cultural problem, although it can be painful, Chris. A lot of the gas that I see is because people are constipated. So they're not overproducing gas in their GI tract. They're just plugged down below.

And that can happen even if somebody's having a bowel movement every day. They can still be constipated because what they're having is incomplete evacuation. They're going, but it's just a little small stool and they've still got a plug of stool there in the rectum. And the gas that would normally just be dissipating out where you wouldn't even feel it is now all plugged up in there and now they're uncomfortable.

So gas is rarely a problem. I mean, I don't think in my 30 plus years I've ever had a medical emergency of gas. Although if somebody has a narrowing in their intestine, a stricture, we can see that after surgery. We can see it in people who have Crohn's disease.

Somebody has colon cancer. You can have a buildup of gas that can be quite an urgent situation. But the average person, there's no gas emergency. And one of the rules of thumb is if you can let it out, you should. You don't want to hold it in like that.

That's really not good for your GI track. So excuse yourself, go to the bathroom, try and let it rip. That's definitely good. And if you're having a lot of gas, even just all the time, not with beans or kale or things like that, think about whether your bowel movements could need a little enhancement.

Because if you're not emptying fully, you may be experiencing more gas just because of that plug at the bottom that's not allowing things to release. And if that's not the case, is this where aerophasia, if I'm getting it right, could play a role here? Or for someone who's like, no, bowels are great, feel like I'm emptying lots of gas, what could that be?

Absolutely. I'm so glad you mentioned that. Aerophasia refers to air swallowing, aero, air, and phasia swallowing. And it is a very underdiagnosed but common problem. And most people who are swallowing air are doing it inadvertently. What causes people to have aerophasia? If you have a deviated septum. Say your nose was broken and it didn't, you know, it didn't heal properly.

If you have a deviated septum, you tend to be a mouth breather. Or if you have allergies. So if you have a little bit of hay fever allergies, you'll tend to be more of a mouth breather than a nose breather. If you're a mouth breather, you're more likely to swallow air.

If you are talking fast, you're more likely to swallow air. If you are drinking and talking, if you are sucking on hard candy and chewing gum, carbonated drinks, seltzer, champagne, beer, things like that, it's normal to swallow a little bit of air. But if you are experiencing the triad of frequent burping, abdominal distension, where you're really uncomfortable, and pain like that, then you may actually have aerophasia.

And there's some really effective techniques. Usually it's a speech pathologist who take care of it. Once we've done our evaluation as gastroenterologists and made sure, you know, it's not an ulcer or heartburn or anything like that. They'll usually evaluate people's speech and swallowing. And they're able to determine that they're air swallowing and sort of give them some training and redirect them to do whatever it is they're doing differently.

I think both of my kids would say like, there's no cultural problem with passing gas anywhere around the house. And they are right. It's not beans. It's not it's not aerophasia. It's just that's just normal, I guess. Absolutely. There is a and kids are generally much less shy about it.

Right. So you're going to notice it more because you're like quietly excusing yourself. And they're just letting it rip right there, which I love. So good. And kids, kids find it so funny. Do you kids find it funny? They find it hysterical. But I and I think we probably do, too.

So we probably compound that effect. But I always wonder, like, is there an amount that is concerning? And it sounds like if everything else is normal. No, no. Correct. And, you know, it can be a sign of a food intolerance like lactose intolerance, fructose intolerance, etc. But those things usually have other symptoms like they're having diarrhea or they're nauseated.

So if it's just gas and everything else is fine, generally not something I would worry about. Just to keep going down this rabbit hole, like is does the smell of that gas mean anything related to your gut? It can. But that alone is not a problem. And, you know, I always tell people really look for the change in, for example, the change in your bowel movement could be that you've been colonized with some bacteria.

If you traveled overseas or something, you may not have a serious infection, but your gut could have been colonized with something or you've eaten some food that hasn't agreed with you, something like that. In the absence of other symptoms, blood in your stool, pain, a change in the consistency of the stool or the frequency, generally not an emergency.

But if it persists over time, something to think about getting checked out. Okay, super helpful. I'm sure that there are some doctors out there or medical professionals that might kind of have a dissenting opinion on gut health. What kind of evidence would you point to someone or what would be your reaction if you were in a debate with someone that's like this isn't as important as you're saying it is?

Again, I would have them look down at their belly and say, okay, look where that is located. That is feeding everything. There is no brain health, no immune health, no lung health without gut health. Because think about it, Chris, even if you are eating a fantastic, super nutritious diet, if your gut is not able to digest the food and assimilate the food through the lining, let's say the enzymatic activity is off or the microbiome is off because the microbes are involved in breaking down the food also, or the gut lining is compromised, you are not going to be able to absorb and assimilate those nutrients properly.

And we see that all the time. So of course, the goal is to eat the most nutritious, the healthiest diet you can, but you also have to make sure that you're also cultivating the healthiest gut you can so that those nutrients can be properly absorbed and appreciated by your body.

It is really the engine for the entire body. It is not just a digestive organ. It is a defensive organ. It traps toxins in that gut lumen and expels them. It decides what nutrients get absorbed in through the gut lining to travel through the bloodstream to the other organs.

It unravels viral protein to keep us safe. What about mucus? It produces mucus. Most people think about the lungs with mucus, but the gut is a main producer of mucus and mucus traps viruses and pathogens and then expels them either down below or you spit it up. So like now with pollen season in DC, I have all this mucus and I have to remind myself, don't take an antihistamine or something that's going to decrease your mucus production because the mucus is being produced to trap the pollen to get it out of your body.

Okay. I feel like we covered so much. What's the one takeaway or next step you want someone who's thinking about this to do with regard to their own? I want people to look at their GI tract as a sort of living laboratory in their body and to start figuring it out like, hmm, what would happen if I drank 100 ounces of water a day instead of only the 17 ounces I'm getting?

I want to try that for a week. What would happen if I massively increase my fiber consumption by committing to a huge salad every day or my one, two, three rule, one veggie at breakfast, two at lunch, three at dinner? What would happen if I had a big lunch and a light dinner or maybe no dinner?

Get playful about it because your gut will give you that feedback with whether it's taking away something that you're doing that you think, oh, maybe I shouldn't be doing this or adding in something that you're not doing. Like literally an apple a day, it actually does make a difference.

So I want people to think of their gut as this laboratory, if you will, that is going to give you this positive and negative feedback. And then I want you to pay attention to it. So when you do all these things and then you have stool nirvana, then don't stop, right?

Don't be like, oh, okay, that was good. When you see that bowel movement come out, I mean, it's telling you so much. So I want people to turn around and take a look, as I say, after they have a bowel movement. You know, you could see something really important.

Like you could see blood in the stool that could be a sign that there's something serious going on. I mean, maybe it's just a hemorrhoid, but maybe it's an early sign of colon cancer. You could see a very narrow stool coming out that could be a sign that you're developing something like diverticulosis.

So there's so much that your gut can tell you. Just paying attention to these things and not thinking of this stuff as like, oh, that's gross. And, you know, we shouldn't talk about that. That's just something you do in private. And then you never think about again. Absolutely not.

This is some of the most important feedback that your body's giving you. And we need to like really pay attention to it and talk about it and examine it and follow the crumbs to a healthier gut. Having a really great bowel movement is the ultimate form of detoxification. And for anyone who wants to go even deeper on this, you've mentioned a few of your books.

We'll link to them in the show notes. You mentioned one episode. We'll put that there. But where can people just find everything you're working on? Gutbliss.com is a place to find me. One word, G-U-T-B-L-I-S-S and the Gutbliss podcast. I have a weekly podcast. Episodes are nice and short and digestible.

New episodes drop every Thursday and we get into it. Mama Jama poos, air swallowing, turn around and take a look. How did I forget? You can join the Gutbliss Gut Club. So twice a month, you can join me. It's a one hour monthly Q&A. Ask me anything about gut health.

Literally no question is too big or small. And then one hour masterclass every month. I'll often have guest experts with me, but we'll dive deep into a topic, whether it is side effects of GLP-1 drugs, the link between brain diseases like Parkinson's and gut health, stool microbiome testing. And the cool thing with the Gut Club is that people get to vote on the topic.

So I love having these conversations. The podcast is great, but it feels like a conversation with myself because I'm not getting to talk to people. So join the Gutbliss Gut Club for riveting conversation twice a month. Awesome. Thank you so much for being here. Oh, thank you for having me.