Many chronic health conditions—such as IBS, asthma, and autoimmune disorders—can be traced back to imbalances in the gut. Disruptions to the microbiome caused by antibiotics, poor diet, food sensitivities, and environmental exposures can lead to inflammation, malabsorption, and increased intestinal permeability (leaky gut). Addressing gut health through a structured Functional Medicine approach called the 5R’s of gut repair—removing harmful triggers, replacing missing digestive factors, reinoculating with beneficial bacteria, repairing the gut lining, and rebalancing lifestyle factors—can restore balance and improve systemic health. In this episode, I discuss, along with Dr. Elizabeth Boham and Raja Dhir, the Functional Medicine approach to healing the gut and why the gut is at the center of imbalances in the body, including many health conditions. Dr. Elizabeth Boham is Board Certified in Family Medicine from Albany Medical School, and she is an Institute for Functional Medicine Certified Practitioner and the Medical Director of The UltraWellness Center. Dr. Boham lectures on a variety of topics, including Women’s Health and Breast Cancer Prevention, insulin resistance, heart health, weight control and allergies. She is on the faculty for the Institute for Functional Medicine. Raja Dhir is the co-founder and co-CEO of Seed Health, a microbiome science company developing innovative probiotics and living medicines to advance human and planetary health. He specializes in translating cutting-edge microbial research into impactful products and leads Seed Health’s academic collaborations with institutions such as MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Caltech, and the NIH. Raja co-chairs Seed’s Scientific Board alongside Dr. Jacques Ravel, guiding research across microbiology, immunology, genetics, and ecology. He also directs LUCA Biologics, a company focused on the vaginal microbiome and women's health, and oversees SeedLabs, which drives environmental initiatives. Through this work, Raja plays a key role in accelerating microbiome-based solutions from discovery to market. This episode is brought to you by BIOptimizers. Head to bioptimizers.com/hyman and use code HYMAN10 to save 10%. Full-length episodes can be found here: What Is Leaky Gut And How Can You Treat It?How to Select a Probiotic and the Future of the MicrobiomeHow To Do The 10-Day Detox
How does gut health impact chronic diseases?
It goes on and on, right? And it takes some work sometimes. When people have been on an acid blocker for a long time, it takes some work for us to help wean them off because their body has gotten pretty used to it. Their body wants to make acid, so it's working against the medicine. So when you wean them down, sometimes they get more acid production.
It's called rebound. And it's sort of a trick. You get off it, but it makes you worse, so you feel like you have to get back on it. But it's actually not... True, and you can actually get off it.
Absolutely.
So we do that all the time.
We do it all the time. So re-inoculate, giving all the good prebiotics and probiotics, the good bacteria and all the things that feed the good bacteria. And then the fourth R is repair.
How do you know what probiotics it takes?
Oh, that's a great question. I wanna know, what do you prescribe? Oh my goodness, that's such a, that goes on and on. We could talk about that for the next hour. Yes, it's true. Right?
There's a lot, there's more and more probiotics on the market every day and they all have different roles and different functions. Yeah. And we're just sort of, honestly, I think, you know, we've been doing this forever, but it feels to me like we're at the infancy of this understanding of how to use these in medicine.
Yep.
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