The Sunday Show: Gut Health, chronic illness and Fecal Transplants

Chris Woollams interviewed Dr. Julian Kenyon on how a healthy gut microbiome is the best way to prevent and treat any chronic illness; they also covered how you can test your microbiome and how you can rebuild it.

A course of antibiotics can render certain strains of gut bacteria extinct. If that happens you may become deficient in an important compound that they made; and pathogens they controlled may grow in number, their micro-RNA over-ruling your own. A parasite can dramatically change your microbiome, (do you remember the food poisoning you had 15 years ago?); so can binge drinking, smoking or stress and, of course, a poor diet.

How can you test to see if you have a problem - and how can you correct a faulty microbiome? Remember the gut microbiome links to the lung microbiome, and also to the brain microbiome and skin microbiome. Asthma and allergies, pulmonary problems, eczema, acne, psoriasis and common signs of a gut problem. But now we know more, we know cardiovascular disease, dementia, Parkinson's, Diabetes, strokes and cancer are all linked to an imbalanced microbiome.

Dr. Kenyon runs the Dove Clinic in Hampshire, England and has been using Fecal Microbiome Transplants to correct the gut for several years now, but he thinks he has found something cheaper and better. Called Gut Flora Replacement Therapy or GFRT, he has written two of the top three papers on the subject in the world.

And these Fecal Transplant 'alternatives' are vitally important. If the first thing you might do, on developing Alzheimer's or Colorectal Cancer, were to have a complete gut overhaul and it could make a significant difference, you'd kick yourself if you hadn't listened to this inspirational show!