The Real Science Behind Leaky Gut (It's Not Fake) | #BILFPOD with kiran krishnan

0:00So you mean to tell me that if I really control the gut health and utilize fiber that I'll look young forever? Is that what you're trying to say? Absolutely. Not only will you look young, you'll feel young. And they did MRI scans and they found that 90 % of people had joint disease actively working in their system. Wow. 90 % of people have degenerative joint disease. It means that cartilage is shrinking. For every 10 grams of fiber that you add to your daily diet, you can reduce your risk of dying from any disease by 10%. That's all the way up to about 40%. Doctors are still fantastic. They're saving lives every day.

0:34But you have much more control over your health than your doctor does. I would estimate that at least 80 to 90 % of adults have some degree of leakiness in their gut. Welcome back to the BILF pod where authenticity trumps authority. Here on the BILF pod, we love to highlight women in the boardroom to movie stars to scientists. And today's guest is a mad. No, he's not a mad scientist. He is a scientist that really has perfected the study of gut health. And I really don't think we understand how important the gut health is and how it dominates and regulates our entire body. So welcome to the show, Karan.

1:11I'm super excited to have you. Thank you so much for having me. I'm a huge nerd and I love any opportunity to talk about all the nerdy things that are going on in my head. I don't think you are. I don't think it is nerdy. I think that we don't realize how much. I mean, I just know about gut health only because I'm super vain and I don't want to age. But, you know, it is something that I would say is probably a newer term. It's something, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, gut health, I think we focus so hard on the disease rather than what is causing the disease. So I'm excited to dig in and talk about gut health and how the gut affects everything in the body.

1:48Yeah. And what you just mentioned is something called root cause medicine, right? That's like the next evolution in medical care. It's not just putting Band-Aids on symptoms or chasing symptoms around. It's finding the true driver of it. And the crazy thing about it, when you look at most chronic conditions, simple things from anxiety, depression, skin issues, to much more complicated conditions, so many of them originate from dysfunctions in the gut. That is insane. That's so crazy. So how does one get involved with gut health studies? Yeah, so I'm a microbiologist by training. And what's amazing about the gut is it houses something called a microbiome.

2:29The microbiome is the totality of microbes and all the genetic elements that live within our digestive tract. It's the largest treasure trove of genetics and cells that run virtually every system in our body. Right. And as a microbiologist, that's a very comfortable area for me to dive into and understand what that ecosystem looks like and then how it affects the human system. So for me, I got into it about 22 years ago when the study of the microbiome was just kicking off. Like we didn't even know that we had all these microbes in our gut. No, I don't think. No, nobody was. It was like the same thing, like skin care and all this other care.

3:09Nobody was talking about that. Nobody was talking about it. So they had no, and let me give you some figures that actually will kind of enlighten the importance here, right? So there's something called the Human Genome Project. You may remember it. You might be too young to remember it. But the whole idea was that we're going to sequence the entire human genome. We're going to find a gene for everything that happens in our body, right? So every disease is going to have a gene, like heart disease and Alzheimer's and all that is going to have a gene. They sequenced the entire human genome, and what they found was about 22 ,000 functional genes, right?

3:44Now, that sounds like a lot, but just keep in mind that a cockroach has about 22 ,000 functional genes. An earthworm has almost 30 ,000. That's crazy. Right? Yeah. So genetically, we're not much more sophisticated than a cockroach or an earthworm is. That's disturbing. Which is crazy, right? Yeah, a little disturbing. But then how are we like this? How are we so sophisticated and all that? But then as it turns out, we've got over two and a half million microbial genes in our digestive tract alone. Right. And so we utilize some of those genes for functionality. So that in itself starts to show you how important the gut is for our functionality.

4:23Yeah, the gut is. I mean, you were talking about it earlier that it kind of coincides with anxiety or the different things that go wrong. So do you think that right now gut health is a controversial topic in medicine? It can be, yes. And part of that is because conventional medicine hasn't yet caught up to the research on the microbiome, which is the microbes in the gut, and their impact on health issues, right? So, for example, if you go to a gastroenterologist and you've got a GI issue, you've got IBS, for example, you've got loose bowels or irregular bowels or something, they're not considering what the microbiome of that massive ecosystem in your gut is doing to cause the problem.

5:10Right. They're just going to look at they might do a scope. They might do some excisions. They might cut some stuff out or they might use some harsh medications to try to slow things on and improve things. But they're not looking at what the root cause drivers of it. Same thing with almost any other practice or joint health. You might go to a joint doctor. You might go to a rheumatologist. You might have rheumatoid arthritis and knee pain. But they're not considering what's happening in the gut primarily because it hasn't made its way into the conventional medicine training. I mean, it makes total sense because one thing I do suffer is from anxiety.

5:44And as soon as the anxiety kicks in, guess what happens? My stomach hurts. Yep. Every single time. Yeah. So I think I've had it my entire life because I even remember as a kid going to school and my stomach would hurt so bad, but it was from the anxiousness of whatever was going on in my life. So it is funny. And I'm assuming that if you have rheumatoid arthritis and you get your gut health under control, whether you're losing weight or eating better, I'm because people talk about this all the time, their diet all of a sudden triggers their health and they become healthy. Yeah, absolutely. And this is why you look at all of these studies on lifestyle and diet changes, right?

6:19The most profound diet change you can make to improve your overall health and life is adding fiber into your system, right? So for example, there's studies on millions of people, right? These are large scale studies over years. What they found was that for every 10 grams of fiber that you add to your daily diet, you can reduce your risk of dying from any disease by 10%. And that's all the way up to about 40%, which means imagine that you could reduce your risk of dying from any disease and aging in an accelerated manner by just adding 40 grams of fiber to your daily diet. You'll reduce that risk by 40%.

6:57So when you say fiber, are you talking about like the fiber that comes in the powder form that you're adding, or can you have it in the physical form as far as like certain things that contain fiber in the food? I always recommend to do both, right? The good part about this powder, the supplements, is that you can be very measured about it, right? So you know for sure you're getting X amount if you supplement every day. So I'll tell you what my strategy is, right? So I try to get 40 to 50 grams minimum of fiber per day, right? Now, nobody should start there if they haven't been using fiber, right?

7:30The standard American gets about 8 to 10 grams. You'll be in the bathroom all day. You'll be in the bathroom. You'll be bloated. You'll be angry, right? So what you want to do is do an incremental increase, 4 to 5 grams every day for a few weeks, and get yourself up to 45, 50 grams of fiber per day. So the way I do it is I make sure to supplement at least half of my fiber needs, right? That way I know for sure I'm getting 20 grams or so from the powders that you can get, The psyllium husk, the inulin, the, you know, partially hydrolyzed guar gum. There's lots of different fiber products out there now.

8:05And then the other half I get from food. And foods are like resistant starches, so like sweet potatoes and cucumbers and roots and tubers, nuts and seeds. And, of course, every kind of fruit and vegetable has fiber in it. Yeah. Right? I love it. So, yeah. So every meal you want to have somewhere around 10 grams of fiber per meal. Yeah. I mean, that definitely makes sense. And if you can add, you know, 40 % to your life, I think that's a win. And you were talking about anti-aging too. And this is like a big topic because anyone that knows me knows I don't want to age. So you mean to tell me that if I really control the gut health and utilize fiber that I'll look young forever?

8:46Is that what you're trying to tell? Absolutely. Not only will you look young, you'll feel young and you'll function younger. Yeah. Right? And here's what's happening under the skin and in the cellular level. So the biggest driver of aging, and this has been validated over 60 years of studies, the biggest driver of aging is inflammation. And in fact, it's re-termed inflammaging. You may or may not have heard that term before because it's aging that's driven by inflammation. But it makes sense. Definitely, it makes sense. And we're talking about chronic inflammation, right? So your inflammatory system is elevated and on all the time.

9:25And people with gut health have some of the most inflamed systems because the gut becomes one of the most potent sources of systemic inflammation. So we want to control that. Now, what happens when you have increased inflammation for a prolonged amount of time? There are lots of cells in your body that are designed to rebuild systems. So when you damage something, they rebuild it. And then they maintain youthfulness. They maintain functionality. When those cells are exposed to high levels of inflammation, they stop rebuilding things and they actually break things down. Your joints are a perfect example of that, right?

10:03So there was a study done called the Framingham Joint Study where they looked at 50-plus-year-old people and they looked at everyone's joints and they did MRI scans. and they found that 90 % of people had joint disease actively working in their system, right? In one or more joints. 90 % of people have degenerative joint disease, means that cartilage is shrinking. And so when you get in there and you go, well, why is it that 90 % of adults, right, basically have degenerative joint disease? A lot of it is driven by the significant amount of inflammation that people have. And those cells that normally rebuild and repair your cartilage, that would do it when you're younger for you.

10:43stop rebuilding and repairing and instead break down the cartilage. Yeah. Right. That happens on your skin. That happens in your heart. It happens in your muscles and everything. No, it makes sense. Cause if you, like you were saying 22 years ago, I mean, I remember growing up on like, remember there was like salami we were eating, like packaged foods. Nobody really knew. That's when Lunchables had just come out and nobody was really. And I remember my mom, like in my house, everything was no fat, low fat, everything. Yeah. There was like we were eating NutraSweet, which was like not a late years later.

11:14We found out NutraSweet is like the worst thing you can give your kids. But I mean, it makes total sense what you're saying, that it all kind of goes hand in hand. But I heard this phenomenon that you use. It is the leaky gut phenomenon. Yeah. And I know that some people are because it's a controversial term that you're using. What do you have to say when it comes to that? Is it like a trendy term or is this more of like is this a real term? Yeah. So it's funny because the term itself becomes a little bit controversial, right? Because it sounds a little silly, leaky gut. The thing is, the scientific term for it is actually metabolic endotoxemia.

11:52It doesn't roll off the tongue as well as leaky gut, right? No, leaky gut sounds so much better. Exactly. And so metabolic endotoxemia as a scientific, as a biological process is absolutely non-controversial. I mean, it's been published by the NIH. There's thousands of studies on it. I wrote a chapter in a medical reference book about it. So it's a very clear thing that happens to the vast majority of us at some point. The leaky gut is just a term that people say, oh, that sounds too goofy. But it's absolutely true. Not only is it true, it's the biggest driver. of chronic disease in the modern world today.

12:30And that's been shown in a number of studies and write-ups on all of the research around this topic. In 2015, there was a publication in Frontiers of Immunology, which is a well-respected journal, and they basically showed that leakiness in the gut, which means that your gut is leaking in toxins and food particles and microbes that it shouldn't be leaking in, right? So that's going from the lining of your gut into your circulation and through the liver. When that happens, that is causing so much chronic low-grade inflammation in the body that it sets up the risk for the vast majority of chronic conditions.

13:07Interesting. Yeah. So leaky gut is a real thing, and it's the biggest driver of chronic conditions. So what would you say would be a food? I'm assuming a food or probably alcohol, too. What would cause gut issues or leaky gut? So it'll often start with your diversity in your gut microbiome. So your gut microbiome has this super complex ecosystem, right? There's thousands of microbes in there. It's the role of the microbes that maintain the barrier of your gut lining. So for your gut to not be leaky, you need a high diversity of microbes within your gut. When that diversity comes down, your gut starts to become leaky because the microbes aren't there to monitor things, right?

13:49So anything that brings the diversity of the microbes down will start to cause leakiness. So some of the most common things are overuse of antibiotics, right? Antibiotics are great. They'll save lives, but they are overused. Yeah. And then they overuse them in food supply as well, right? All our cattle and poultry and all are inundated with antibiotics, right? And then we're getting exposure to them. All the pesticides and herbicides and all that are used on foods, those are all strong antimicrobials and they kill off bacteria, including good bacteria. Then processed foods, highly processed foods have things in them like, you know, antimicrobials and preservatives.

14:28Those things all kill off microbes in the gut. Lack of fiber, right? The microbes in our gut really need fiber to thrive. That's what they digest. And then things like stress and anxiety also create dysfunction in the gut. Lower diversity, make your gut more leaky. And as a result of your gut becoming more leaky, it makes you more susceptible to stress. So it becomes a continuous cycle, right? So those are the most common things. And just the fact that we're not conscious at all about feeding this ecosystem, right? We both have kids and we would never think to not feed our kids, right? We are their guardian.

15:10We're responsible for them. What I want to do is get people to start thinking about this guardianship of this amazing ecosystem that lives within us that allows us to function the way we are. So we have to put food in there. I mean, that's so interesting. I mean, I try to buy organic because I know not necessarily because I'm gut conscious as much as I should be, but it's because of the pesticides and all the hormones. I mean, you see the chickens, but it goes back to the 22 years ago where we were eating Lunchables. So now I try to really regulate it. But I personally take a probiotic. Would you recommend taking a probiotic as well?

15:46I do. But not all probiotics are created equal. So in fact, the best probiotics are a spore-based probiotic. I've actually, yogurt will have some ferments. They don't really have probiotics. So there's a category of probiotics that are called spore-based probiotics. A good example of that is a product called Just Thrive. Just Thrive probiotic. there's research on that probiotic on stopping leaky gut, right? So published research. So to me, that is one of the most foundational things we all need to do because I would estimate that at least 80 % to 90 % of adults have some degree of leakiness in their gut.

16:23I would agree, especially people our age, because we just didn't know years ago. And our parents were feeding us all kinds of stuff back in the day. And our parents didn't know. So I would assume, but I think this generation is a lot more conscious. their skin conscious, their gut, you know, their gut conscious. I know a lot of them are going like alcohol free, which I'm sure definitely helps with the gut because when you drink, which unfortunately I do drink from time to time, you feel it in your gut the next day. It's always that feeling. Well, so, and my goal for this, right, because I love to have a cocktail or two from time to time, my goal, and people always ask me what my health goal is, my health goal is to build resilience, right because the goal should be that you that you don't need to be perfect in your choices in order to be healthy you need to have a degree of resilience right like i have an 80 20 rule yeah where i want to make 20 bad decisions and still be fine love it yeah because there's a lot of living that happens in that 20 absolutely and then what else are we here for right so um i don't want to be uber strict i don't want to have to do 17 different things every day and rituals and all that, I want to be able to live.

17:31So when you build resilience in your gut, you can actually do that. You can have 80-20. You might even be able to do 70-30. A little cheat day. Totally. And be perfectly fine. Cheat days. Yeah, exactly. You know, like you don't have to be perfect all the time. You can have gluten from time to time. You can have alcohol. You can just sit in bed all day long if you feel like it one day, you know. You can be resilient and that's really the goal. why do you think that we don't talk enough about gut health? Why do you think this is something that's been kind of like not at the front surface, but maybe at like the back?

18:04Yeah, I think that's a great question. And I think the primary reason is because most people still think of gut health as digestive issues, bloating, cramping, you know, like, oh, there's foods I don't tolerate. Oh, when I eat certain things, I get bloated or I'm irregular. I have loose stool. they think of gut health just within that element, right? So, and then the crazy thing about it is most people learn to live with those dysfunctions, right? Most people will have some degree of gut dysfunction that they feel as digestive issues, but they learn to live with it. And they go, oh, I'm totally fine as long as I don't eat these nine things because these things will make me bloat or this will make, you know, and then they're like, I just avoid those, right?

18:48Or they accept some degree of irregularity in their bowel movements. What they're forgetting is that those things are signs and symptoms of a dysfunction in your gut that then can impact everything else. It impacts your brain, your mood, your skin, your joints, your muscles, everything. So why we don't talk enough about gut health is because we don't make enough connection between how your gut functions and then the rest of your body. That bridge needs to be made. Would it be fair to say that you think that the drug administration might have something to do with it? Because, you know, it's a lot easier to diagnose someone with a disease, pump them up with pills, than really address the underlying issue and change the diet.

19:34Yeah, absolutely. The hardest thing for any medical professional to do is improve a patient's lifestyle, right? Yes. And lifestyle has the biggest impact on your health. it's so much easier to put a label on a condition and then write a script right and and in fact given the volume and the lack of time that doctors have with patients and all that that's just what the medical system has become right it's become a you walk in i feel this i have this let me do a test this is your label now you have this autoimmune condition you have this skin condition and then here's a pill here's a cream here's a drug and you go off right the question is almost never ask as to why do you have that and where is it coming from, right?

20:15And then what do you need to do to stop those things? The beauty of this, the beauty of all the microbiome and the gut research that exists, that even I've done, is that the vast majority of conditions have some origin in the gut. And if you start building resilience and diversity in your gut, you can protect yourself from the vast majority of those issues, right? So each of us have so much more power in our hands than we think to control our health outcomes, right? It's been the longest time, like in our parents' generation and the way we grew up, you leaned on your doctors for your health, right?

20:53The white coats, yeah, that's it, right? If your doctor said so, you do it. And if you don't feel right, you go to your doctor and you've kind of followed their thing. Doctors are still fantastic. They're saving lives every day. I don't want to sound like I'm disparaging them, but you have much more control over your health than your doctor does. Yeah, I agree. You have to be your own advocate. And you were talking about earlier, you were saying genetics or genes. So do you think like, so my dad died of heart disease at 38. Do you think that you can, I don't know if you can prevent, I don't know that much about genetics and how that works, but by taking care of your gut, I'm assuming, because I'm a lot more health conscious, that that genetic or that probability, which is low, I took a test, but if there was a higher probability, could you kind of reverse that by taking care of your gut?

21:42Yeah. So in virtually every disease, including heart disease, if you took care of your gut and you took steps within the lifestyle to reduce your risk, because heart disease is a multifactorial issue, right? So there is the LDL cholesterol or ApoB, right, which is more specific. But then there's a lot of other drivers, hypertension, stress, fiber intake, all of those things, right? So you absolutely can reduce your risk for conditions, even if you have a genetic susceptibility to it, in order to, by focusing on your gut health and your lifestyle. Virtually everything that we know to be good for you in lifestyle changes, right?

22:25So exercise, sleep, getting outdoors, being close with other people, relationships and all that, right? All of those things actually improve gut health, which is how they translate to biological benefits, right? So exercise, for example, it's great to maintain muscle strength. It's great to build strength and maintain flexibility. But one of the things that exercise does, especially resistance training, is it releases this set of chemicals called myokines. and that actually is a profound effect on your gut. And so one of the most profound things you can do for your gut is actually lift weights, right?

23:02And so lifting weights is known to be great for you overall, but one of the ways in which it's benefiting you is by improving the gut. Yeah. Now, do you work out? I do, yes. Yeah. I have to. For me, it does a couple of different things. Number one, it's a great stress relief. A hundred percent. Right, yeah. That's the number one reason I work out. It is. The gym is just like, I need that time. It's amazing. And there's biological reasons for that, right? So when you go through stress, your body goes into something called fight or flight mode, right? Which means that everything inside your body is gearing you up to physically run or fight something, right?

23:46Now, if you sit down and you're just in fight or flight mode, it's just going to get worse and worse over time. That's all that's happening. You're just swirling. Exactly. That's all that's going on. Yep. And so if you go to the gym and you start lifting heavy things and you're moving, your brain goes, ah, okay, they are fighting or flying or running away from something. I can turn the signal down now, right? Because now your brain goes, okay, they did it. They did the fight or flight. We can calm down. So as actually a little bit of a hack of that, if you're sitting at your office or sitting at your desk or home or whatever, you start to get anxious, right?

24:17And, of course, you're not going to change your clothes and run to the gym. You can actually just do stuff right there. So stand up, right? Number one, accept that the anxiety is there. Don't be afraid of it, right? Because you're not going to die. Although it makes you feel like you're going to die, but no, you're not. You get up and you actually just do some jump squats or you do a wall sit. Do something that causes a burn in your muscles, right? And even if you do that for 20 to 25 seconds, you'll feel way better after it, right? I think the two things or three things with anxiety is, number one, learn to accept that you have it and allow it to come in, right?

24:56We fear the coming of anxiety to begin with and we ruminate about it, right? So allow it to come in, know that you're not in danger. Number two, do some movement when you feel anxious. Number three, work on your gut because your gut is the biggest driver of why you're anxious in the first place. Interesting. Yeah, you know, speaking of like the anxiety, like I told you, I suffer from it. The best advice I ever got was from a Holocaust survivor who suffers and said, just let the anxiety come on. Know what's coming and you're not going to die from it. That's it. Just embrace it. You know, it's and I and I've kind of taken that my whole life.

25:29But I mean, it totally makes sense. And then for me, like I was saying, my stomach starts to hurt. So when you're talking about anti-aging and gut health, how would you remedy somebody if they want to really keep their gut clean as well as stay young? That's a great question. So it can be very complicated for people, right? You hear lots of different things out there. There's tons of experts that talk about different things. So what I've actually done is I've boiled it down to five pillars. And it makes it very simple. So there's five pillars, and I want people to think about doing one thing in each pillar.