Best Tools for Gut Health & Weight Loss | Dr. Chris Thompson

Dr. Chris Thompson (0:00)

There's all sorts of evidence that, if you don't have a lot of fiber, your microbiome is not healthy. Feed your microbes, they need to be fed, and what they eat is fiber, okay? That's what you want them eating, you want them eating fiber. And if you're not feeding them fiber, they'll eat your mucus layer, okay? And we already talked about how thin that barrier is, and all of this may start eating your mucus layer.

They're not producing the butyrate you need, and the butyrates needed to maintain the tight junctions, right? So there's layers to this, it's like a snowball effect, that if you're not feeding those microbes, microbiome and keeping it healthy, you're going to run into all sorts of trouble.

Andrew D. Huberman (0:35)

Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.

I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a Professor of Neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Chris Thompson.

Dr. Chris Thompson is a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He is also the Chief of Interventional Gastroenterology at Mass General Brigham in Boston. He is a renowned expert on the intersection of gastroenterology, metabolism, nutrition, and obesity medicine. And in today's episode, Dr. Thompson explains how to improve your gut health, including the roles of your diet, gut microbiome, and gastrointestinal motility, as well as how your gut communicates with the rest of your body, which of course includes the gut microbiome. But as you'll learn today, much more. Dr. Chris Thompson is a guest on this podcast because he's not just a GI tract and obesity medicine expert, he's also credited with having created an entire new field of treatments and perspectives on GI and metabolic health. So the knowledge he shares today is truly at the cutting edge and applicable, which is why by the end of today's episode, you will have a clear understanding of how your gastrointestinal system works, and you will have a set of new, modern, evidence-based tools for improving and maintaining your gut health. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Dr. Chris Thompson. Dr. Chris Thompson, welcome.

Dr. Chris Thompson (2:14)

Thanks so much. Good to be here.

Andrew D. Huberman (2:16)

A lot of us hear these days about the gut microbiome, the gut brain axis.

We hear about GLP drugs that help people lose immense amounts of weight and stop feeling this food noise thing, and on and on. But can we start by just having a conversation about this tube that is the digestive tract, and get real basic, and just educate people a bit on what happens that stimulates them to want to eat, why perhaps for certain periods of day or night they don't want to eat, and then what the passage of food through us looks like as a series of steps. This is such a critical part of our biology and our lives.

Dr. Chris Thompson (2:56)

It's becoming more and more complex all the time, the gut, and it does a lot of things. So it's obviously involved in digestion, but it's also an endocrine organ. You can hear it called the second brain. There's a lot of different ways we think about the gut, and it is compartmentalized, and each area has a different job. So first you have the esophagus, and its job is to just move the food into the stomach safely, and it's thick, right, it has different linings, so it can handle things that might be a little rougher, and it pushes sequentially down into the stomach, so it's taking that food bolus and driving it into the stomach. And you can have all sorts of problems in your esophagus, right? So each one of these organs has things it's supposed to do and then things that it doesn't do well.

Sometimes people don't swallow well. It gets too tight at the bottom. There's a condition called achalasia, where it's just the bottom of the esophagus doesn't relax, right? And so we have procedures we can do, and my line of work where you can tunnel down in between the layers of the esophagus. It's very thin, a few millimeters. You can tunnel down into there and cut that muscle to relieve the obstruction.

Andrew D. Huberman (3:57)

What are the symptoms of that?

Dr. Chris Thompson (3:58)

So inability to swallow.