This is the transcript of an interview hosted on Ruth’s Feel Better. Live Free. podcast.
Ruth Soukup: Let’s be honest for a minute, getting older, isn’t all that fun. The aches and pains, the gray hairs, the laugh lines, the dry skin, and that’s only the beginning. But what if there was a way to actually reverse the aging process and get your body looking and feeling younger than you have in years? And what if the solution was as simple as healing your gut microbiome?
That’s exactly what we’re diving into with today’s podcast guest, Dr. Roshini Raj. She’s a board certified gastroenterologist, as well as the founder of Tula Skin Care, which you’ve probably heard of. And she has some amazing insight to share on this topic.
Roshini Raj is here to talk to us about the importance of gut—the gut microbiome—when it comes to aging and exactly what you can do to harness all the benefits of a healthy gut. Dr. Raj has been featured everywhere from the Today Show and Dr. Oz to news networks such as CNN and Fox News. She’s the contributed medical editor of Health Magazine, as well as the founder of Tula Cosmetics and her newest venture, Yay Day.
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Suffice to say, she’s pretty busy and I’m pretty excited that she’s with us today. And so without further ado, I am so So excited to be able to introduce you to today’s interview guest, Dr. Roshini Raj.
Let’s just start with kind of the background, who you are, what you do, and how you got to be doing what you’re doing now.
Dr. Roshini Raj: Yeah, absolutely. I’ll try to keep it to the abridged version. So I am a practicing gastroenterologist in New York city. That’s where I am right now.
And I basically started out…I was the only child of two doctors, always knew I wanted to go into medicine. I just saw how much my parents love their rewarding careers. But I wasn’t really sure which field of medicine until I got to med school, tried out all the different rotations. I love surgery because I love that immediacy of being able to see inside someone’s body and potentially fix something.
But I also loved internal medicine because you get to really develop long term relationships with people and go through their whole journey with them. So I felt like gastroenterology was a great middle ground between the two. So I do colonoscopies and endoscopies. I just did a bunch this morning. So those are like mini surgeries, mini procedures.
But I also have my long term patients who have anything from acid reflux to Crohn’s disease. So I get the best of both worlds. So I’ve loved doing that. I graduated med school in 1997. So I’ve been doing it for quite a while. But I also started over 20 years ago, a career as a medical journalist and medical expert on air contributor to many different national TV shows.
I was on the today show yesterday. So that’s another side of my career that I really love because I get to really explain health topics or the newest, study related to wellness or health and reach a very wide audience in a very short period of time. And then the third hat that I wear is author and entrepreneur.
So I’ve written a couple books. I wrote one many years ago called What the Yuck: The Freaky & Fabulous Truth About Your Body, which is just a fun collection of embarrassing health topics that people might not feel comfortable asking their doctor, but really should get the answers to.
And more recently—and this is really where my passion lies right now. I wrote a book called Gut Renovation, and it’s all about how your microbiome, which lives in your gut, has an impact throughout your body and pretty much almost every aspect of your health. I feel every day there’s a new study coming out linking the microbiome with everything from most recently autism, skin diseases autoimmune diseases for sure.
Heart health, mental health, you name it, there seems to be a connection there. So that has definitely been a passion of mine. And partly, one of the things that resulted from that is I started a probiotic skincare line called Tula about 10 years ago. We were really the first to ever. Think about putting topical probiotics in the skincare line and it became very well received, very successful.
And most recently I started another venture in the gut health space called Yay Day which is all about gut—mind, fiber, magnesium, digestive enzymes, all of those good things.
Ruth Soukup: That was trying to be the short version. Oh my goodness. Like, how do you sleep with all that stuff going on? I thought I had a lot of stuff going on, man.
Dr. Raj: No. Sure you do. We all do as women. I’m also the mom of two teenagers and that’s probably the most stressful at the moment.
Ruth: Yes, I concur. Also the mom of two teenagers and there’s nothing more stressful than teenagers. So I get it. I love it. We love talking about gut health. Here on this podcast, we talk about it a lot because obviously it’s such a crucial part of All aspects of our health.
And I think it doesn’t get talked about enough as much as it affects everything, like everything that we do and are all our entire body and all of our areas of our health is still doesn’t get talked about. But what I want to ask you specifically is how does gut health play such a crucial part?
Into like acute illnesses and chronic illnesses that start to affect us as we get older? Because I think you’ve done a lot of work there, right? In, in like aging and how the gut health can keep us young, which I think all of us as women want to know more about. So how does it play into that?
Dr. Raj: Yeah, it’s a great question. And in fact, the subtitle of my book had to do with aging, the ageless, power of your microbiome and I think, part of it is like I like to first start with how do we define aging because aging means different things to different people.
But basically, the way I think about it is a few different aspects. So there’s certainly the visible signs of aging that we might see on our skin or in our muscles. Things are not elastic or tight as they used to be. They’re more saggy. We have less sort of firm muscles. We certainly get the wrinkles and the lines and less hydration in our skin, all of that stuff.
But I also think about aging as the development or accumulation of different chronic diseases. So eventually what ends up ultimately leading to our demise are things like heart disease or stroke or, neurologic issues like dementia, all of these things I think of as aging, because if you never got any of those diseases, you really wouldn’t be aging.
You would feel, you would look and feel very young. So your gut microbiome and your gut health overall really relate to all of the things I just mentioned. So how does it do it? We have this teaming community of organisms living in our gut mostly bacteria, but they’re also viruses and fungi and other great things in there.
And those really need to stay in balance between the good and the bad bacteria because if there’s, what we call, dysbiosis, or an imbalance there, that actually leads to tiny little, think about them as almost little cracks in the lining of your intestine. And what happens when you have those tiny cracks, that’s things can leak into your bloodstream that can trigger inflammation.
And inflammation is the root of all evils when it comes to many different diseases, cancers, heart disease, cognitive issues, but also even things as simple as wrinkle formation or lack of hydration in your skin. All of those can be consequences of overall body inflammation. That’s why that’s one of the ways your gut microbiome affects everything from head to toe, specifically regarding aging.
The other thing is our gut, our, intestine basically is the home of a lot of our immune system. And so if you have a compromised gut microbiome, you tend to have a weaker immune system. And that also can lead, I don’t think everyone realizes, but having a depressed immune system can lead to cancer development.
Can certainly lead to other chronic diseases, things like heart disease as well. And then finally, when we come, when we talk about mental health, which is incredibly important, and I feel like more of an issue now than ever before some of our neurotransmitters are also modulated by our gut or produced in our gut.
And so that’s another way that our gut health can really affect our overall mental health. And there’s a very strong gut mind connection which we can talk about a little bit more, but I find that aspect really interesting.
Ruth: So do you find working, in the sort of traditional medical community that this is something that people are becoming more aware of or, and that it’s getting talked about more, or do you feel like It’s still something that there’s so because there’s all these specialties, right?
I think that’s the part that drives me crazy about modern medicine is that, there’s neurologists to look at our brain and cardiologists to look at our heart and everything feels like it’s in this like bubble. And yet, as you’re talking, you’re like, this literally is affecting every part of piece of us.
So why is there not more connections? So do you find that’s that conversation is happening? Or is it still very segmented?
Dr. Raj: I think it’s still somewhat segmented. And the problem with, being a doctor in a traditional medical practice, a traditional medical world is When to bring about change, we really like to see hard evidence.
And that means like large, conducted studies that prove cause and effect or prove a treatment works. And we’re still relatively early in this in microbiome research. So while, for example, Neurologists by now have all heard that there is probably a connection between the microbiome or and probiotics, even an autism before they tell a parent.
I’m going to give you these probiotics. They want to see, a whole body of research, which just isn’t quite there yet. It’s starting and it’s very promising. Unfortunately, the medical world is Very slow and adopting a lot of these things. There’s certainly certain very specific cases where probiotics or modulating the microbiome in some way are very well established.
But unfortunately, I would say there’s still few and far between. And I think it is just slowly. becoming adopted, which is why I think it can certainly be frustrating for just the average person out there, but there, there are, and this is part of what I wanted to do in my book is there are ways that you can overall, no matter what disease you’re trying to prevent, really take care of your microbiome, keep it in good balance and just take different lifestyle and diet measures to make sure you’re doing everything you can to optimize it.
Ruth: So how do you determine that your gut is in trouble? Like how do you, cause you talk about a lot about the age of your microbiome versus your biological age. Talk, tell us a little bit about that and then what’s the difference and then how you even know like that you have a problem.
Dr. Raj: Yeah, so there’s some really fascinating studies looking at, very robust, healthy, let’s say, 80 year olds and then 80 year olds who are more frail and not as healthy, maybe have many chronic diseases.
And when they look at the compare the microbiomes of each of those groups, they find big differences. And so what that suggests is just because you’re 80. That doesn’t mean you’re always going to look or feel a certain way and part of how you look or feel may actually have to do with what’s going on inside your gut.
And so we talk about this concept of having a microbiology biologic age, as opposed to just a regular chronologic age. And I definitely see. In my practice, I can have a 45 year old, walk in slowly and hunched over and just looking really miserable, but also looking much older than the age on their chart.
And I can see the opposite where I had literally the other week at an eight year old woman who. jumped up onto the table, like higher, easier than I think I could have done. And she just was super healthy, didn’t take any medications regularly, had really no medical issues. And so I suspect I didn’t do it there and then, but if I compared their microbiomes of those two people, I would see a very different picture.
Ruth: The fact that how our microbiome is in balance and how that is aging can affect how we overall age, I think is very important to keep in mind because there are things, that’s something we can actually control, which is nice. So how do you like, do you, did you do tests in your office for people?
Like, how do you do the tests and how do you actually start to explore to know even where to begin?
Dr. Raj: Yeah. And that’s a great question. I realized I didn’t answer the second part of your question, which is how do you know if you’re in trouble? So yes, testing is interesting because it’s still again, it’s an early field.
20 years ago, we didn’t really know about this, the power of the microbiome and its impact. And in the world of medicine, 20 years is not a long time. So testing is still not, I would say, optimal and accurate in terms of determining like you, if I tested you today, does that mean it would be the same next week?
And Can I really draw strong conclusions from that? So testing is not something routinely done. Now there are companies that offer testing and claim to tell you everything you need to know about your gut microbiome. I’m not 100 percent convinced that any of them are at the level that it’s worth doing right now.
So I think it’s more a question of one, seeing how you feel, because that can be a good indication of what’s going on in your gut. And signs that you have an imbalanced gut microbiome would be things like bloating abdominal pain, irregular bowel movements. Those kinds of things, sometimes even like low mood, low energy, those can all be potentially signs of an imbalanced gut.
Now, those can also be signs of a lot of other things. And I definitely want people, if they’re experiencing these significantly to discuss it with their healthcare provider and make sure nothing else is going on. But. They certainly could be a sign of that. But the other thing is, even if you feel fine from a digestive standpoint, most people could use some optimization for their gut health because fiber, for example, it’s recommended to get 25 to 30 grams of fiber a day.
And. And they say 90, over 90 percent of Americans are not getting that. And fiber is probably the most important thing you can do for your gut microbiome. It serves as prebiotics to help fuel the growth of your good bacteria. So I would say thinking about gut health is something everybody should be doing regardless of whether you have symptoms or not.
Ruth: Because there’s basically no downside. There’s no downside. And we know it’s so important for every. every aspect of your health. So it’s not just about disease, right? It’s about especially for women, we tend to be a little superficial. I’ll speak for myself. I tend to be a little superficial, right?
But it affects how we like actually how we look. So talk about that a little bit. How does it affect your skin, your sleep, your, all the yeah, beauty, the beauty aspect.
Dr. Raj: Totally. You’ve hit on a couple of topics. Exact points. One is that we can start with skin and I did have a probiotic skincare line.
So it’s definitely a passion of mine. So just like I was saying, how we have this gut microbiome, if it’s imbalanced, it can lead to inflammation. That inflammation actually can affect your skin and cause wrinkling as well as loss of hydration, dry your skin. But also we have a skin microbiome.
So these are the bacteria that are on her skin and you want to make sure that is balanced as well. Because if that’s imbalanced, because maybe products you’re using or even things that you’re eating that can also cause dulling of the skin, hyper pigmentation, inflammation of the skin as well, which can cause redness and irritation.
So there are a lot of benefits to having Topically balanced bacteria in your skin as well as internally having a balanced microbiome. So that’s just one way where you would have more hydrated, plumper, more elastic skin if you, if your gut microbiome is in check and your skin microbiome is in check, but sleep is another thing you brought up because, of course, being sleep deprived affects our appearance for sure.
But it also affects so many other aspects of our health, our mental health. It, being chronically sleep deprived can absolutely lead to the development of different chronic diseases like heart disease. It increases your risk of stroke and diabetes and high blood pressure. Getting sleep is crucial and there is definitely a connection between the two.
Your gut and sleep. So we know that if you have an imbalanced gut microbiome there are actually studies looking at very specific bacteria that are linked with insomnia and other bacteria that are linked with poor quality sleep. Yeah, so it’s so fascinating but there is really a connection there.
And the reverse is also true. So that if you had a healthy microbiome, but then you start to have disrupted sleep for many nights in a row. They did a study actually on med students who notoriously, do night shifts and don’t get a lot of sleep and they showed the microbiome was affected negatively and they started to shift unhealthy pattern.
So it’s almost like a vicious cycle that you get into. So you really want to work on both sides of that equation. So you work on your gut microbiome with the things where we talked about and we’ll talk more about, but things like fiber, probiotic rich foods, all that. But you also want to work on your sleep separately so that, can help foster a healthy microbiome.
Ruth: And what about energy? That’s very closely related to sleep, but how does like, how does it specifically affect energy levels with it? I would imagine with the inflammation.
Dr. Raj: Yeah, absolutely. And so that was part of what I was saying when they looked at the eight year olds who are more robust.
What I mean by robust is they would do different things. exercise tests and how quickly they’re walking as opposed to being frail. I just saw something yesterday about marathon runners and just long distance runners in general and how having certain microbiome profiles, better, more balanced ones can allow them to process, lack, process lactic acid in their muscles more efficiently.
So they’re able to run faster and have higher endurance. So for sure having the right bacteria and the right balance can help with your energy and your sustained kind of stamina.
Ruth: Yeah. So let’s talk a little bit more about the fiber, the probiotics, like what would be like the recommended regimen that you’d be like, okay, if you’re going to do some things to fix your gut, what do you need to do?
Dr. Raj: I definitely want to talk about diet first and foremost, but I also want to point out The reason I named my book Gut Renovation, which I just love the name, first of all, the main reason, but the reason it made sense to me is it was a metaphor for a house or a renovation of a house. And each chapter is named after a room.
So the bedroom is talking about sleep and your gut, the kitchen, of course, diet and your gut. We have the home gym, exercise in your gut. And my point in telling you all this is, It’s not only your diet that affects your gut microbiome. So how much we exercise versus being sedentary, that can affect the balance of our microbiome.
How much we sleep, we just talked about can affect it. How much stress we are experiencing and how we’re experiencing it, that can negatively affect your microbiome. So I just want to point out that diet is probably the most direct and important thing that you can do to help your microbiome, but the other aspects of your life also need to be taken into account because those can positively or negatively affect what’s going on internally.
Ruth: So I always like to hear things like this, and I talk about stuff like this all the time on the podcast as well, right? Like you got to have less stress and we talk about stress and we talk about sleep and it’s so important.
And I’m, Pretty type A. And I imagine you are probably pretty type A doing all the things that you do. And so type A personality is okay, if I’m going to go into this, I’m going to go in I’m going to be the Health Fixer of all time, right? Everything has to be like so hardcore. And then, but then you talk about all these things, the sleep and the exercise, and it almost gets to a point where you stress yourself out about trying to lower your stress, right?
Have you ever experienced that? Okay. Like I lose sleep over trying to get more sleep or I get so insistent that everything has to be perfect or it doesn’t count that I basically self sabotage. And that’s something that I’ve really had to work on in my life, especially my own health journey.
But how do you, how, like, how do you deal with that? Like, how do you say you have to do all these things, but then still make it feel manageable in the everyday that it’s okay if it’s not perfect.
Dr. Raj: Totally. I think you, you already said it, which is acknowledging and accepting and embracing the fact that it’s not going to be perfect.
And you’re just trying your best. You’re trying to keep all of these things in mind, but one day, one thing might fall through the cracks and that’s okay. And just saying if it’s 80% of the time, then you’re doing great. But for example, I’m not a huge cook. I just, I knew how to cook in high school and then I got to college and med school and I completely just didn’t have time or the interest.
So even in my book, the recipes that I put in there are really simple, easy, quick recipes. When I cook for at home, like I have the same thing three days in a row. And then I have I only am cooking twice a week because again, like it’s not my thing. And at least it’s healthy, but I’m not like claiming to be this master chef.
I don’t know anybody that lives in New York that actually cooks. Yeah, you’re probably right. You’re probably right. I have to pay your rent. So you’re probably working. Let’s go shop. But yeah. But yeah, so I think it’s, and I really tried to do this in the book. I didn’t want to lay out some very unrealistic, super athlete sort of plan, even with the exercises, all of these things are really manageable.
Like for example, during COVID. the gym that I go to was closed. I ended up using this exercise video, which was 30 minutes. It’s like a no equipment, high intensity thing. And I still use it to this day because if I’m pressed, I don’t have 45 minutes or an hour. I could just throw that on my TV. It’s in the middle of my living room.
I move over to the coffee table and I just get something done. There are definitely little things you can do that still work. And yeah, but definitely not holding yourself up to this perfection standard is really important.
Ruth: Okay, so exercise, sleep, reducing stress, eating the right things. Let’s talk about the diet because that is really important.
Dr. Raj: As I was saying, fiber is a source of prebiotics. So probiotics are literally good bacteria, healthy bacteria that give you a health benefit. We have them already in our intestine. You can also take them in a supplement form or eat foods that contain them. So fermented foods, things like kefir, yogurt, sauerkraut, tempeh, Miso, these are all things that contain probiotics, and I do recommend trying to get a serving or two per day.
For me, the easiest, unfortunately I don’t like sauerkraut, or Oh! Oh, I love it. I love it, my friend just the other day was like, I have it every morning, I’m like, that’s, I’m so jealous, and I wish I liked it, because it’s so healthy What about kimchi? Do you like kimchi? I do like kimchi. I don’t know if I’d have it every day though.
Yogurt I can easily have every morning. So I do that. And then prebiotics, these are basically anything that fuels the growth of good, of your probiotics. So it’s like food for your probiotics. And most prebiotics are basically different types of fiber. So not all of fiber’s foods are prebiotics, but all prebiotics are essentially fiber.
Psyllium husk is just like the tried and true kind of fiber, but there are other things like inulin. There are many foods like raspberries or artichokes different things that contain good prebiotic fiber. So it’s important to get those in your diet as well. And then the other thing in terms of just overall gut health and even your microbiome.
You want to make sure you’re having high antioxidant foods, and that’s mostly in fruits and vegetables. Omega 3 fatty acids are really good for your gut as well. So we get those in, fatty fish or walnuts. And then there are also things you want to avoid. Alcohol is not great for your gut or your microbiome.
Yeah, even wine has some beneficial ingredients like resveratrol, for example, but probably the negative effect of the alcohol outweighs that. So in moderation, because again, we’re not saying everyone has to be perfect all the time, right? You should be doing on a daily basis if you’re thinking about your gut.
And the other thing is really diet. But probably the worst thing you can do for your microbiome is take antibiotics. So sometimes they’re necessary and I prescribe them when they’re necessary for my patients, but you really want to really use them sparingly and only when absolutely necessary because unfortunately, antibiotics, in addition to killing the virus.
Infection bacteria can kill off a lot of bacteria.
Ruth: How long does it take to recover from antibiotics? Like, how long does it take your gut to recover if you do have to take them? Which I did recently. I’m super anti antibiotics. I knocked out a tooth and they made me take them. You need them.
Dr. Raj: It can take, on average, I would say a couple weeks to recover. That being said, sometimes people unfortunately don’t recover and that’s the problem, and especially if you’re having repeated bouts of antibiotics. So there are studies looking at kids who had recurrent ear infections and unfortunately needed many courses of antibiotics in their childhood.
And then they look 20 years later and They have a higher risk of certain autoimmune diseases and things. So it really can wreak havoc. And again, it could be necessary, but you want to, and, some of this has proven some of this is more logic than proof, but really trying to keep up with probiotic rich foods, while you’re taking them and certainly right after because you want to just do whatever you can to maintain a healthy microbiome.
Ruth: Yeah. So let’s talk a little bit about the studies because I feel like that’s a really interesting piece of this, especially because it’s so new. Are there like what studies have been done recently on the gut microbiome or gut health that, that you’re like, people are starting to lean into?
Dr. Raj: Yeah. Yeah, there are many.
There are many. So I think some of the things that are very established with the gut microbiome are things related to digestion. So we know, for example, that There are there’s a disease or infection that can cause diarrhea and inflammation in your colon. It’s called C. difficile. And this is something that occurs sometimes after people take antibiotics because they take antibiotics for 1 thing.
They wipe out all their good bacteria. They get an overgrowth of this bad bacteria. So that’s a clear example of how good and bad bacteria work and what the sort of evidence is there. The immune system is also something that’s been pretty well studied the link between the microbiome and the immune system.
So we know COVID was actually a really interesting time for microbiome research because they show that If you had a certain healthy profile in your microbiome, you were either less likely to contract COVID or if you did get COVID less likely to have severe COVID. So I thought that was really interesting because again, how important it is for your immune system.
Ruth: How did that connect to like commonalities? Because that was a big thing for COVID. Like the most of the people who died, it was shown that they had a lot of other preexisting health conditions. And I would thing because those are so tied to gut health as well.
Dr. Raj: Yeah, I think they did try to tease out that factor as well.
So even if you had the same commonalities, the gut microbiome made a difference, but you’re absolutely right. If you have an imbalanced gut microbiome, you’re more likely to have those diseases, which also make you more susceptible to severe. But some of the things I find lately, the most interesting is really the gut mind connection.
There have been some studies that are so fascinating. There are studies on humans showing, taking a bunch of people with clinically diagnosed depression and people who don’t have it and showing that they have very different microbiome profiles. So off the bat, we know there is something different going on.
Now, it’s always hard to prove cause and effect. Is the depression, whatever’s going on with the neurotransmitters and depression, is that why their microbiomes are different? Or are they depressed because their microbiomes are in balance? It’s still not 100 percent clear, but there have been some really interesting animal studies looking at personality, which is hard to think about when you’re thinking about like mice, for example, like how do you prove personalities?
But they did some studies where they took these sort of. Risk taking mice and the way they define that is they give them certain tasks to do or like a treadmill or doing little things and transplant the microbiome from the riskier one to the more risk adverse one and then the risk adverse one became much more adventurous and brave just really transplant.
Yeah, so I just, it just blows my mind that yeah. These bacteria in your gut could actually affect your personality and whether you’re shy or outgoing or, so I just, and again, like recently, just recently I saw some, there’ve been talks about autism in the microbiome, but everyone’s very cautious before making any statements about autism.
This study that came out just like a few days ago, experts are actually Saying that they think it’s pretty compelling and interesting. Really do early diagnosis of autism because they found that through stool tests, they can pretty accurately diagnose autism based on a certain microbiome profile.
Ruth: Interesting. So does that mean then that there’s potential that autism would be reversible if you could improve the microbiome?
Dr. Raj: Good question. And certainly it raises the question of, is that something that’s going to be down the road? Can you treat yourself? Interesting. And same thing with depression
Ruth: Yeah. The depression one is personal for me. I went through in my early 20s, terrible depression was hospitalized for two and a half years. And, did was on every antidepressant electroshock therapy, like the whole gamut. And now that I like, do what I do and talk about all this stuff.
And I’m so obsessed with health and gut health and all the things I look back on that time. And it’s so interesting to me because when I think of all the doctors I had and all the time I spent in all these different hospitals, never once, not one single time did ever anybody asked what are you eating?
What are you? And I probably wasn’t eating healthy, right? I was a 20 year old kid. I was eating crap. I like garbage and nothing but processed foods and I wasn’t eating meat. So I wasn’t probably getting enough protein. I certainly wasn’t like actively working on that side of my health. And I think like that, like, why is that not the first line of defense instead of just like piling somebody with a million different medications, which probably were just making my gut issues even worse.
Dr. Raj: Yeah, no, you’re absolutely right. And it’s starting to change. I’m not fast enough, but there is a whole field now called nutritional psychiatry, because exactly what you’re saying is that what we’re eating, what we’re putting in our bodies. And in my mind, the reason is the way our food is interacting with our gut microbiome.
But either way, what we’re eating can absolutely have an impact on our mental health. And so now people are finally starting to make those connections and look at, are there different foods or are there different ways to optimize your microbiome that will then help with mental health as well.
And then exercise is part of that because Exercise has been shown in some studies to be as beneficial as antidepressants to treat depression. We know now that exercise helps your microbiome. So there are just a lot of different interrelated factors that have nothing to do with medication that should be explored for sure.
Ruth: Oh, interesting. So have the part about the mice and the fecal transplants got my interest. Have they done that? Like I’ve read some stuff where they’ve done it in humans, right? I know it’s not super common or people talking about it, but is that a thing now with, because I know that they’ve shown that can actually cure disease for people.
So what do you know about that?
Dr. Raj: They are basically used in terms of like regular clinical practice in one condition. And it’s the same one I was talking about, the C. difficile bacteria. It’s a nasty infection that people get because they get an imbalance of their microbiome and sometimes can persist and become recurrent and really problematic.
And in those recurrent cases, the fecal transplants have been approved to be used and are actually quite effective. In terms of research, they’re being tested for many other things. Obesity is one actually. We have a about it, but definitely the microbiome profile of people that are obese or overweight.
It’s different than healthy weight people. So the question is if we transplant a thin microbiome to an overweight person, does that help them? And they’re still doing the studies, but I think it probably would because we know your microbiome can affect your hunger and your hunger hormones, the hormones that make you feel full, because we know if those are out of whack, you’re more likely to eat unhealthy foods or binge eating.
And even on a sort of very cellular level, if you have a certain microbiome and you eat a meal, you could potentially be extracting more calories out of it than someone who doesn’t have that microbiome. So it’s like, it doesn’t seem fair because two people get on the same meal and one person could maybe gain more weight from it.
So there are just so many different ways that I think the microbiome can affect weight and how we eat and our eating patterns. So it’s definitely a very active area of research right now.
Ruth: Wow. Wow. Bottom line, fix your gut. That’s all you need to know.
Dr. Raj: Exactly right. It’s so early. All of this research is like really fascinating, really promising.
There’s definitely something there. It’s not unfortunate the point that we can say like you take this one you take that probiotic you do and which is why we should all just be in a broad sense taking care of our gut.
Ruth: Yeah, for sure. I feel like I could talk about this all day, but I want to be mindful of time and I want to hear a little bit about your new product.
Yeah. So what is this? And I would love to. So basically, I did the probiotic skincare line and that was all about the gut skin connection and I had just an amazing time with it. And I’m still involved, but I was really ready to. Go a little bit back to my roots as a gastroenterologist and writing the book, which I published two years ago, just brought all of this amazing research to the forefront in my mind.
And I was like, we like what we just said, everything is connected to your gut. We don’t exactly know the specific strain of probiotic you should be taking, but what we do know is the more fiber, the more prebiotics you get, the better. I also was really interested in the gut mind and the gut sleep connection.
So when I thought about a new product, I was like a hundred percent, it has to have a healthy amount of fiber. And, but I also want something for gut, mind, and sleep. And that’s why we put magnesium in there as well. So unlike many products, fiber products. This one is meant to be taken at night because magnesium helps calm and helps you get a good night’s sleep, which we know is great for overall health, but also great for your gut health.
And when I just think about my patients, like what are the two things people complain about most? It’s either not sleeping and not just patients, my friends, my life, myself, not every mom, and then irregular bowels or bloating or some digestive symptoms. And then with fiber, I really, we wanted to reinvent this category that people tend to find doesn’t taste good.
It’s old fashioned. I feel like a grandmother, like all of these things. So not that there’s anything wrong with being a grandmother and hopefully I will be someday. But we wanted to make it something that was delicious, something you felt really good about taking. It’s part of your self care ritual at night, not a chore.
Or a medicine that you have to like grin and bear it. So we really did make a great tasting formula. Not just with psyllium, but many types of prebiotic fiber that I think are amazing. And then lastly, the other big barrier to fiber, because I prescribe fiber. to, I don’t know, 70 percent of my patients because it’s good for constipation.
It’s good for diarrhea. It’s good for hemorrhoids. It’s good for so many things, weight management, not to mention cholesterol and all sorts of other benefits. But one of the big barriers that I find, people can get bloated when they take fiber. And so they end up stopping it because, many, Fibers that are available commercially cause a lot of bloating.
So we wanted to make sure ours didn’t do that. We put digestive enzymes in that specifically partially digest the fiber. So it doesn’t cause bloating. And so that was the triumvirate, the magnesium, the prebiotic fiber and the digestive enzymes. And again, I wanted to keep it fairly simple These days, gut health is a very popular topic.
There are a lot of products out there, but they can end up being complicated, overcomplicated, like 20 different ingredients. I wanted this to be just really simple and effective. And basically the three things I thought patients of mine, people I know would need the most and want the most. Awesome. So where do we get it?
So you can get it at myyayday.com or Amazon.
Ruth: Awesome. I’m excited to try it and we will definitely put the link for that in our show notes. So if you’re listening to this right now and you’re like, I need some of that, then go to the show notes. You’ll be able to get the link.
Dr. Raj, this was awesome. Thank you so much. Tell us where can we find you online? So I’m on Instagram with Dr. Roshini Raj, and then my website is also the name of my book, which is gutrenovation.net.