We often don’t think about our gut health, but there’s a gut-brain connection that affects our physical health. Dr. Shawn Weiss joins Suzanne to talk about improving gut health.

Dr. Shawn says, “There’s such a gut-brain connection, it all affects your physical health. Your gut has its own ecosystem, called the gut microbiome. Think about this: there’s 100 trillion types of bacteria, viruses, fungi, all living in your gut, in this microbiome. And what’s funny, there are types of bacteria and organisms that are found nowhere else in the world, only in the human gut. It’s getting a lot of attention, I’m so glad now that people are paying attention to it. When I practice my root-cause health, I’m digging deeper into the gut and the root causes of the illnesses and the symptoms we’re having. We want to know what is affecting your gut… Poor nutrition, processed food, is going to certainly cause a lot of inflammation in your gut lining. Your junctions in your gut line are supposed to be nice and tight. They’re not supposed to be permeable. And so when you’re eating a lot of processed food, or things with a lot of toxic things, the junctions will separate and it’s called “leaky gut” Well, what happens with that? That stuff gets out into your bloodstream.

“A good example would be… an inflammatory food, a bunch of bread or pasta. You know when you eat crappy food, and the next day you wake up, and you feel really stiff, like your joints feel stiff? You feel a little puffy, you think you gained five pounds. Well, you didn’t gain five pounds, that’s impossible to do. You’re inflamed. That food that you consumed caused inflammation in your gut lining and permeated in through. And that’s when you wake up, and you’re like, ‘oh, I’m just so stiff. Like maybe I had a lot of sodium, I’m retaining water like it just feels stiff.’ So the gut is so important because it’s kind of its own filter. What you put into it is what you’re going to get out of it. We want to provide energy to our body. So what is in our gut is important, and there’s lots of things lead to chronic diseases. I say test don’t guess. If you’ve not had your gut tested and you do have problems with digestion or maybe you’ve had chronic issues with diarrhea, constipation, gerd, acid reflux, then you should get your gut tested. If you haven’t, it’s very easy to do. The labs can be delivered to your home. But that gives me a profile of what bacterias are in your gut, and are they the right kind of bacteria.

“I’ve always had chronic issues with digestion and when I looked at my gut — there’s good bacteria and there’s bad bacteria, and you need to have that balance — two of the most important gut bacteria were not even present in my gut. So then I know that’s the kind of probiotic I’m going go look for.”

Dr. Shawn adds, “I do a 60 days to optimal health program. You’re going to have a form to fill out. I’m doing sleep questionnaire, stress questionnaire, and we do gut testing. That’s how we start the whole thing. We want to lead you to optimal health by making small changes in all of those areas of optimal wellness. And I consider those stress, sleep, nutrition, gut health, emotional health, and exercise.”

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