Ask the Doctor - Gut

Series Synopsis:

Episode 8 of "Ask the Doctor", an Australian factual television series currently streaming on Netflix.

The theme of the series is to explore healthcare options, the latest in medical treatments and answer viewer's questions to help them understand those treatment options. The series covers a broad range of topics from allergies to diet, sleep to senses, exercise and obesity, and touches up on some other most basic questions of the general population, who are neither experts nor experienced with these.

Episode 8

Deals with the understanding of gut, how much attention should we really pay to our gut and What can our gut really tell us when we do pay attention to it? It takes us through two different tracks of information

Basic Preamble

The anchors set the tone of the episode with briefs about gut microbiome, the huge neural network our gut has, and how the interaction between the two is key for everything.

Track 1

  • The anchor adopts two contrasting diets, one westernized junk foods and other largely gut friendly healthy diet, for a period of two weeks each.
  • The junk food diet largely involves fried foods, carbonated and alcoholic beverages, while the gut friendly diet largely involves vegetables and resistant starch-based diets.
  • He goes through a series of tests, primarily a gut microbiome test of his poop collected over a period of two weeks, with each kind of diet.
  • He also goes through his moods during these diets, which is a key factor to understand gut and mood.
  • In the end the gut microbiome and metabolite testing shows how the two diets changed the gut microbiome and its metabolites, from being relatively unhealthy with junk food diet to healthy with gut friendly diet.

Track 2

  • Here the possibilities and potential of Fecal Microbiome Transplant (FMT) will be discussed with some specialists.
  • Takes us through an FMT procedure.
  • How healthy microbiome transferred from healthy donor to patient can thrive and resolve the patient's symptoms.
  • They speak with an FMT recipient about the experience and results.

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