How Leaky Gut is Making Us Sick and Driving Chronic Inflammation | This episode is brought to you by BiOptimizers and ButcherBox. Over the last seventy-five years, an array of serious, seemingly unrelated chronic illnesses—cardiovascular disease, diabetes, metabolic syndrome, autoimmune disorders, cancer, and brain disorders—have all been steadily rising, some at astonishing rates. While we’re living dramatically longer lives, many of us are suffering throughout them, creating a public health crisis of historic scale. A key principle of Functional Medicine is looking at the gut and how it impacts the entire body. All of the diseases mentioned above have a component of gut dysfunction, especially intestinal permeability, which is also known as leaky gut syndrome. When the digestive tract is inflamed and food particles are able to make their way into the bloodstream, the body goes into fight mode. This goes far beyond a stomach ache, as symptoms can occur throughout the whole body.   On today’s episode of The Dhru Purohit Podcast, Dhru sits down with Dr. Emeran Mayer, the author of The Gut-Immune Connection and The Mind-Gut Connection. He has studied brain-body interactions for the last forty years and is the executive director of the G. Oppenheimer Center for Neurobiology of Stress and Resilience, and the founding director of the UCLA Brain Gut Microbiome Center at the University of California at Los Angeles. His research has been supported by the National Institutes of Health for the past twenty-five years, and he is considered a pioneer and world leader in the area of brain-gut microbiome interactions and its clinical implications.   In this episode, we dive into:  -Industrial agriculture, antibiotics, and the implications on human health (5:35) -The connection between the overuse of antibiotics and weight gain (12:17) -How our gut bacteria evolved (17:02) -The intelligence of our gut bacteria (27:03) -How modern pesticides wreak havoc on our gut health (33:46) -How fermented foods increase microbiome diversity and lower inflammation (39:26)  -The importance of diversity in our diet (51:19) -Why there is a prevalence of food sensitivity in our diet (53:12) -How to figure out what foods are negatively impacting your gut health (1:03:09) -How sleep impacts the gut microbiome (1:13:12) -The gut-immune connection (1:19:15) -Chronic disease epidemic and the susceptibility to infectious diseases like COVID-19 (1:24:40)   Also mentioned in this episode: -A Fermented-Food Diet Increases Microbiome Diversity and Lowers Inflammation - https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2021/07/fermented-food-diet-increases-microbiome-diversity-lowers-inflammation -Missing Microbes: How the Overuse of Antibiotics is Fueling Our Modern Plagues by Martin Blaser - https://www.amazon.com/Missing-Microbes-Overuse-Antibiotics-Fueling/dp/0805098100 For more on Dr. Mayer you can follow him on Instagram @emeranmayer, on Facebook @emeranamayer, on Twitter @emeranamayer, and through his website https://emeranmayer.com/. Get his book, The Gut-Immune Connection: How Understanding the Connection Between Food and Immunity Can Help Us Regain Our Health at https://emeranmayer.com/the-gut-immune-connection-book/. Sign up for Dhru’s Try This Newsletter - https://dhrupurohit.com/newsletter. This episode is brought to you by BiOptimizers and ButcherBox. Right now, BiOptimizers is offering my community a few special bundles and for a limited time BiOptimizers is also giving away free bottles of their bestselling products P3OM and Masszymes with select purchases, just head over to magbreakthrough.com/dhru with code DHRU10.  ButcherBox has a variety of different boxes, and you can choose your box and frequency. For a limited time, you can sign up today and get 2 lbs of ground beef free in your first box plus $10 off by going to butcherbox.com/dhru. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices