Sean Gibbons
speaker
36 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Sean Gibbons’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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So we know it does affect things, but I think more work needs to be done to understand it better.
So in this population of people we were studying, we had questionnaire data about their lifestyle. We found some perhaps unsurprising things. So for example, those people who were in this Goldilocks zone of pooping, they tended to eat more vegetables and fruits. So eat your fresh fruits and vegetables. They also tended to be more hydrated. So be sure to drink plenty of water.
That helps with motility. And they had higher levels of activity. They were wearing Fitbit trackers. So we could track how many steps they were taking. So between diet, exercise and hydration, these simple factors can help improve your bowel health.
Well, if you're experiencing chronic bouts of constipation or diarrhea, you should talk to your clinician because these could be underlying conditions of other problems in your body. But bowel movement frequency itself isn't often monitored that closely by clinicians. However, our study, I think, points to the fact that maybe that's the future, right?
Maybe the future of medicine should include this as a parameter that we pay closer attention to. Because even though we haven't causally proven that the rise of these metabolites in the blood due to constipation will eventually lead to something like a neurodegenerative disease, it seems likely that that could be the case.
And that by having long-term levels of constipation or diarrhea, we might be increasing our risk for chronic diseases. So it might be very important to pay attention to it and to keep in that Goldilocks zone.
I don't have a strong take on it. Again, I'm not a clinician. I'm a PhD, so I can't give medical advice. I don't have a lot of data on colonics, so I don't know a ton there, other than it is the case that people who are getting a colonoscopy get the functional equivalent of a colonic right there. They get cleaned out before the procedure.
What we find is in people who take Miralax or have themselves cleaned out, It's a window of opportunity for opportunistic pathogens. So we'll sometimes see that people are colonized by organisms like Clostridioides difficile. Even if they don't get sick, they're sort of benignly colonized by these things in these windows of opportunity when their commensal microbiome biomass is depleted.
And then it can lay in wait to a future date when maybe you take antibiotics and your microbes are again disrupted and this pathogen can look around and say, oh, now there's an opportunity to cause disease. But long story short, I think colonics, I don't know exactly what the health implications are other than they might be windows of opportunity for these pathogens to invade.
I guess I want people to think about their microbes. The microbiome, it's a fairly emergent field. It's about 20 years old now. We're just beginning to understand how to manipulate our microbiota to optimize our health. While the microbiome doesn't have a super, super strong effect on human health and disease in the short term, it seems to be critical for our long-term health and longevity.
disruptions to the composition and the functionality of our microbiota are associated with many chronic diseases like we were discussing earlier and you know if you're not paying attention to your microbes if you're not feeding your microbes with the kinds of things they like to eat like dietary polysaccharides from plants they'll start eating you.
They'll eat your mucus layer, which will thin and cause inflammation. You'll get constipation. And all of these factors can potentially increase your risk for things like diabetes or chronic kidney disease or neurodegenerative disorders. So to stay healthy throughout your lifespan, feed your microbes.
One of the reasons we embarked upon this study is the student working on it, Johannes Johnson Martinez, he had family members who had suffered from neurodegenerative disorders, in particular Parkinson's disease. And I myself actually have an aunt who passed away a few years ago and suffered for many years with Parkinson's disease.
And so we were we were interested in understanding what factors could give rise in the long term to these types of conditions. And for both of our family members, these individuals had suffered from chronic constipation for decades prior to the disease diagnosis. And this was a clue to us as to what might be driving disease in the long run and why we wanted to look in a cohort of healthy people
to understand, you know, is this just correlation or causation, right? Is bound movement frequency actually a risk factor in the long run for these types of conditions?
Thank you.
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