When it comes to working with her patients, Bindiya Gandhi, M.D. has a goal of getting to the root cause of certain issues and making patients feel healthy in the most natural way possible. As a family medicine physician with a passion for functional medicine, Gandhi couples her traditional education and training with a nutritional medicine lens, making her a unique, cutting-edge professional in the medical field. Gandhi offers some great tips and advice (you’ll seriously want to listen to this episode of the podcast with a notebook and pen in hand), on a variety of topics we can approach with a “food is medicine” mentality, ranging from balancing hormones, taming inflammation, and fertility. Another topic she covers as she chats with Olessa Pindak, mindbodygreen's Chief Content Officer, is how she advises her patients to optimize their gut health. Gut health should be a priority, Gandhi states, because of its ability to affect so many other processes in our bodies. When our gut health becomes compromised, it can lead to chronic issues like IBS, SIBO, and Chron’s disease, and can even have an effect on our brain health. “The gut is so important. You want to diversify it and keep it healthy,” she says. “If you have an imbalance of good bacteria,” Gandhi says. “That's going to link to heart disease later on in life, or Alzheimer's, or other medical conditions, or autoimmune conditions. So to me, gut health is so important. All medical problems start in the gut.” The good thing is, we can take control of our gut health (and our overall health, for that matter!) by eating a diverse diet and making sure we get our fill of probiotics and prebiotics. Food really is medicine, take it from Gandhi, herself. To contact the mindbodygreen team with comments, questions, or speaker ideas, please email [email protected]. For all sponsorship inquiries, please email [email protected]. Want to join our podcast email newsletter? Sign up here! Enjoy this episode! And don't forget to subscribe to our podcast on iTunes, Google Play, or Stitcher, and sign up for our podcast newsletter! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices