Hi, my name is Dr. Rongan Chatterjee, medical doctor, author of the four-pillar plan and television presenter.

I believe that all of us have the ability to feel better than we currently do, but getting healthy has become far too complicated.

With this podcast, I aim to simplify it.

I'm going to be having conversations with some of the most interesting and exciting people both within,

as well as outside the health space to hopefully inspire you, as well as empower you with simple tips that you can put into practice immediately to transform the way that you feel.

I believe that when we are healthier, we are happier because when we feel better, we live more.

I'm incredibly excited to introduce today's guest for the podcast.

It's someone who is arguably one of the world's leading researchers into gut health and the microbiome, with a particular interest into the guts, the brain and our stress levels.

He's published over 400 articles and he's co-author of the book, The Psychobiotic Revolution, Mood, Food and the New Science of the Gut Brain Connection.

He's won numerous awards, he's done a couple of TED talks, it's Professor John Kwan.

John, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you very much, it's my pleasure.

So John, I have recently realized that a lot of the work I've been looking at with respect to the microbiome for the last sort of five or ten years and been lecturing on,

actually you are behind, you and your lab are behind a lot of that research, so it's an incredible pleasure for me to have you on the podcast.

I thought I might start by asking you John, how did you come to being an expert and actually spending a lot of your research time studying the gut microbiome?

Well that's a really interesting question in many ways.

So for my entire research career, I've been focused on trying to understand how stress affects the brain and affects the body.

I'm a neuroscientist, so it makes him very strange that as a neuroscientist I'm, I've really started to work heavily on what's going on in the gut.

And when I moved back home to Ireland, now 13 years ago, I started to collaborate with people here who were very interested in stress-related gut disorders like irritable bowel syndrome.

And I think that the bowel syndrome or IBS is a very common and unloved disorder in many ways, but it's very clear that it's a disorder of the gut brain access and that it's very much flare up in it can be driven by stress.

And so understanding it mechanistically was very much driven around understanding how stress affects the body in a general way.

And so, rather with my colleague Ted Dynan, who's the head of psychiatry here, we developed a research program around irritable bowel syndrome.

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