The 4 Food Types That Repair Your Gut Barrier: A Gastroenterologist's Guide To Beating Inflammation For Good with Dr Will Bulsiewicz #677

Will Bulsiewicz (0:01)

We think of the gut as being where digestion occurs.

But actually, there's a much bigger story there. Those microbes, they have a powerful influence over our digestion, but also our immune system, our metabolism, our hormones, our mood, our brain health. So this is the command center for human health.

Rangan Chatterjee (0:20)

Hey guys, how are you doing? Hope you're having a good week so far. My name is Dr Rangan Chatterjee, and this is my podcast, Feel Better, Live More.

Could the food you ate yesterday already be reshaping your gut and reducing your risk of chronic disease? Well, this week's guest says, yes, it absolutely can. Dr Will Bulsiewicz is an award-winning gastroenterologist and the author of the new book, Plant Powered Plus. And few people can explain the science of gut health as clearly or as compassionately as Will. In fact, if you think you already know everything there is to know about digestion, fibre and plant foods, well, I imagine you may be in for a few surprises. In our conversation, Will shares the four nutrition work courses that feed and protect our gut, the specifics of how the fibre we eat turns into short-chain fatty acids like butyrate, the most anti-inflammatory compound he's ever come across, and why he's such a big fan of resistant starch found in foods like cooled potatoes and green bananas. We also discuss the different ways our gut microbiomes are shaped by our closest relationships, why he no longer sees Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis as straightforward autoimmune conditions, and whether it's really necessary to aim for 30 different plant foods a week. Towards the end of our conversation though, is where I think this episode becomes even more transformative. Will opens up about his own health journey, and a family breakdown he avoided addressing for over a decade, and he shares how that trauma, more than any poor diet or lifestyle choice, showed up in his body long before he understood why.

It's a valuable reminder that our gut's health and our overall health, isn't only about the food on our plates. So whilst yes, fiber can be incredibly helpful, sometimes the best way to move forward, is to simply listen to the signals our bodies are sending.

I wanted to start off by putting to you something that Hippocrates said over 2000 years ago, all disease begins in the gut. What's your take on that?

Will Bulsiewicz (3:04)

I think he was right. And I do think that there's ancient wisdom there. To me, and I'd be curious what your thoughts are on this, science is the art of observation, right? The world is going to carry on.

Things are going to happen. And science is how we start to observe what's happening. And it took us so long to finally circle back to this. Now Hippocrates is not the only one, right? Ayurveda has a strong tradition of discussing the ways in which things focus through the gut. But what we have now is finally the scientific tools that we need, the power in our computers, in order for us to finally study these microbes that we were unable to get access to.

And we're discovering that this is the interface between not only our body and different health systems within our body, but it also is the interface with the outside world. And so everything that we're going to discuss today, it converges in this location. And I think Hippocrates was exactly right.

Rangan Chatterjee (4:07)

Yeah, it's interesting to me that so many ancient traditions have spoken about the importance of the guts. For me, growing up as a kid in an Indian family who emigrated to the UK, so many things that I now write about and talk about that modern science is confirming, is kind of what mom and dad used to do with me when I was a kid, which I actually find very liberating.

But I sort of feel that as a profession, we denigrated so much stuff that has existed for many, many years because we never had the evidence. Meditation is an example, right? Meditation was looked down upon for many years by Western scientific culture until we got the evidence to go, oh, actually, there's a lot here. Do you know what I mean? So I kind of, I think we have to acknowledge that as Western trained medical doctors that what we're talking about, both you and me, is stuff that other cultures have sort of had an instinct towards for many years.

Will Bulsiewicz (5:09)

I think what you're getting at is the humility of being a medical doctor, the humility of being a scientist, not believe that I'm absolutely correct, but instead to say that there is this bigger story and what I'm trying to do is put the pieces of the puzzle together.