Gut Health - it’s all the buzz but what’s the evidence?

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Happy to Health with Dr Preeya 44 min 1 speaker 5 chapters transcribed 3 hours ago
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What is the gut microbiome and why does it matter?

Dr Preeya Alexander 0:00
A legitimate expert in this space, Professor Felice Tracker. We're co-evolved with trillions of different microbes that live all over. We so we're gonna go all into gut health, gut microbiome, what works, what doesn't. I'm not a big one for supplements. And there's a lot of BS being marketed to it. Yeah, you're just feeding your gut bugs if you want to keep yourself healthy. Because a lot of it is actually here. Welcome to another season of Happy to Health coming to you from Waranjiri Country. This podcast is all about making complex medical stuff more digestible, but it does not replace the need for you to go and see your own qualified health professional. This season of Happy to Health and It Is season three is brought to you by AIA, a leading life health and well-being insurer supporting healthier, longer, better lives.
Dr Preeya Alexander 0:49
Protect what matters most and AIA will help you do it for life. Strap in friends, here we go.
Dr Preeya Alexander 1:02
This is an episode that I'm very excited for because gut health, gut microbiome, what I call the gut zoo is something that everybody's talking about. You've got things being marketed to you, supplements, drinks, juices, diets. We've got an actual expert, a legitimate expert in this space, Professor Felice Jacker, who is a deacon distinguished professor in nutritional psychiatry. and founder and director of the Photo Mode Centre at Deakin University. It's such a long, amazing title. I have been so excited to have you on. For three seasons I've been dreaming, Felice. Oh, thanks. It's a real pleasure to be here. Very excited. Can we so we're gonna go all into gut health, gut microbiome, what works, what doesn't, how does this kind of happen, the brain and gut interaction, the talking.
Dr Preeya Alexander 1:48
Can we make sure we're all on the same page? What is The gut microbiome referring to, what is it? Um
Prof Felice Jacka 1:57
Well, we coexist and we've co we've co evolved with trillions of different microbes that live all over us. They live on our skin and in our mouth and up our nose and in all our nooks and crannies.
Dr Preeya Alexander 2:10
I can just imagine my six year old son going, Oh, I love this mummy
Prof Felice Jacka 2:15
So the the bugs in your bum, as we term it for children, um the the gut microbiota are all of the microbes that live in your gut. The microbiome refers to all of the genetic material of all those microbes. So you've got bacteria, but you've also got viruses, you've got fungi, you've got archaea, there's all sorts of other microbes in the gut. We have been able to sequence the um DNA of m m bacteria. for a while and our ability to do that is getting better and better and we're just starting to build the libraries for the viruses and the fungi. I'm really not an expert in the genetic or the lab based side of things, but um What we are starting to be able to do, uh I this is the Royal Week, it's all the really clever postdocs and PhD students in my team who can do this stuff, um, is start to understand maybe how these things are working together synergistically.
Prof Felice Jacka 3:12
But as you can imagine, that's super complicated. So if we keep it just really, really simple. The largest number of the microbes that live with us, um, symbiotically is in the gut. Their primary role in the gut from the simplest point of view is to break down aspects of food that our human enzymes can't break down. So once food hits the stomach and um the small intestine it you know gets broken down into smaller and smaller and smaller par particles and things like our fats and proteins and simple starches get absorbed. But um fibre, which comes from complex carbohydrates like whole grains, legumes, um cool you know, some some vegetables, fruits, these sorts of things, plus the phytochemicals like polyphenols that are in
Prof Felice Jacka 4:01
A lot of the really colourful vegetables and fruits. They don't get absorbed, they don't get broken down and they make their way down to the large intestine. And it's in there, um, pretty much as soon as it hits the large intestine that these microbes start to break down those bits of food that our own enzymes can't break down. And they use it as food. And um the primary way they do this is by fermenting and what

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