Dietitians, Aidan Muir & Leah Higl, review the documentary 'Hack Your Health, The Secrets of Your Gut' and provide a balanced review of the positives, interesting points, and negatives discussed in the documentary.
(0:00) - Background on the Documentary
(1:51) - Immune Health, Reintroducing Foods Slowly & Microbiome Variations in Different Regions
(4:59) - Fibre Intake & What Happens When You Don’t Consume Enough
(7:08) - Are We Missing Bacteria That Can Help Prevent IBS & IBD?
(9:25) - Microbiome Testing & Individual Variation in Extracting Calories From Food
(10:59) - Microbiome That Causes Weight Gain & the ABC Method
(18:23) - The Recommended Guidelines & How Microbiome Impacts Obesity and Blood Sugar Levels
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Our dietitians 👇
Aidan Muir @aidan_the_dietitian
Leah Higl @plantstrong_dietitian
Tyler Brooks @lift_dietetics
Hanah Mills @hanahmills
Samantha Staines @nourished.by.sammy
Monica Cvoro @fuellingperformance
Josh Wernham @josh_does_health
Katelyn Bowden @katelyn_dietitian
(upbeat music) - Hello and welcome to the Ideal Nutrition Podcast. My name is Aidan Jo and I'm here with my car, I slay a high goal. And this is episode 165, where we're going to be doing a bit of a review of the documentary, Hack Your Health, The Secrets of Your Gut. Normally nutrition documentaries are terrible sources of information, but we watch them because it's kind of part of our job, particularly if it weren't people ask questions about them and stuff like that. It makes sense for us to have awareness around them. So we're going to try and give a bit of a balanced review where we're going to be touching on positives, interesting points and negatives of the documentary. - Just starting with a very quick gut health overview. We didn't, we didn't go into watching this documentary expecting to learn a bunch of stuff about gut health. It's an area of interest for me. I know, Aidan, you obviously read a lot about gut health as well. So we didn't expect to learn a lot of new things. That wasn't the purpose of us watching this documentary. But as a general perspective, we know that the gut microbiome is linked with many aspects of health and wellbeing. It's kind of an endless list of complex interactions between the gut and other aspects of health. And there are so many positives that are linked with improving your gut health. In the documentary, we would agree that many of the points that they touched upon in regards to improving your gut health and then the flow and effects to that improvement in gut health is very interesting and factual. But like in said, we're going to split this up into three different sections of positives, interesting points and negatives and just try to go through it bit by bit, really. - Starting with the positives, and there were quite a few positives to go through, but trying to keep it brief 'cause I was just going all day about positive stuff. I will go through some key points I do think mattered. So one is that they were talking about how approximately 70% of our immune system lives in our gut. So it has a big role in our immune function, which is largely underappreciated. I talk about this bit particularly in relation to athletes and how probiotics can help with immune function. Maybe people get fewer upper respiratory tract infections than like that can help the training, like all of these kind of things. I talk about this stuff and it matters. And it seems weird that I'm talking about probiotics for immune function, but when you appreciate that, 70% of our immune system lives in our gut, it makes a lot of sense. They also highlighted how the microbiome is a flexible thing that we can change. And it also doesn't take that long to change these things of the stuff that we can change. That's a very positive message. Encouraging diversity of microbiome is great advice as well. They discussed how if we cut out foods, we lose aspects of our bacteria. So when we introduce those foods and fibers, it can cause symptoms. Sometimes people can feel like they can only eat like 10 to 15 different food types. And they can get trapped in a cycle where every time they try to reintroduce stuff, it causes issues. But they were kind of highlighting that and talking about how like, almost like this concept of starting low and going slow, whereas like you reintroduce stuff very slowly. Because if you don't, if you just jump straight to a large amount of these things, it creates a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy where it's like, the more restrictive you go, the more things will cause symptoms. And if every time you start relatively high with these new things, you get symptoms. So starting low, going slow, allowing your microbiome time to adapt makes a lot of sense. The biggest example of this in there was like, they're kind of making a joke about like micro-dosing potato chips, which isn't the approach that normally got hoofed out. I was just talking about that one. They were talking about at the start of like reintroducing it for that person who struggled with them previously. But it's genuinely an approach that makes a lot of sense from multiple angles. Because if it's microbiome related, it helps. It gives a chance to adapt and overcome that over time. If it's mental, it still helps. Like if somebody had a mental barrier to having a large amount of these things, like, well, if you had a small amount, you know that would be fine and you'd still be able to progress from there. And if it's fat, malabsorption related, it could likely help with that as well. Like for example, if somebody's normally on a very low fat diet and say they went extreme, they went on a ketogenic diet, where it's very, very high fat, they're likely to run into digestive issues straight away. But we do know that many times people build up solely over time, they can overcome that as well. Not saying somebody needs to go ketogenic, I'm just using an extreme example there. And then they also touched on how there's many differences between the Western world and less industrialized worlds in relation to microbial diversity as well. So heaps of goes through there, but like a lot of positive angles from this whole thing, we're talking about how gut health does influence pretty much everything. - Yeah, absolutely. And moving on to the next section of interesting points. This is probably where we'll spend majority of our time because the documentary itself was quite interesting. So going through some of these, starting off kind of basic in regards to fiber intake. So the documentary makers did note that the FDA in America recommends consumption of 28 to 40 grams of fiber per day. And then in comparison, an average American eats around 15 grams of fiber per day apparently. And on the flip side of that, scientists recommend over 50 grams of fiber per day. So I think just seeing all those numbers in terms of what people are doing versus what is recommended by things like the FDA and like government bodies versus what scientists say is really interesting and just seeing that discrepancy. Obviously a majority of people in America and we know Australia as well under consumed fiber and that would absolutely have an impact on our microbiome and the diversity of bacteria we have there. Moving on to a more interesting hot take though that they had is something that I guess really, I guess, piqued my interest. And I was like, "Hmm, seems a bit sensationalized." But they basically said not eating enough fiber leads to the microbes in the gut, not having enough to eat, which leads them eating the mucosal lining of the gut. Then the microbes can get through into the bloodstream where maybe otherwise they wouldn't have through that increased permeability of the gut lining. And this can also be known as, I don't know if they necessarily used this terminology, but you might hear the term leaky gut and are flying around the internet. So that's kind of what they're referring to. And then they also linked this leaky gut, increased permeability to things like inflammatory bowel disease and types of IBS, so irritable bowel syndrome. In general, I think this is a hot take just because the wording is so strong. I think whilst there absolutely could be some merit to a really low fiber intake and poor gut health leading to increased permeability of gut lining and then that having flow on effects, I think, yeah, there is a grain of truth there. But to me, that wording sounded really, really strong and I don't know if I'd necessarily word it like that myself. The documentary makers also asked the question, are we missing certain bacteria that are here to protect us in relation to developing things like IBS and IBD? And overall, I think that is a great question. I personally find that when you look at the research with fresh eyes, it is hugely promising in relation to questions like that. Like there does seem to be some link between certain gut bacteria being missing and then having certain conditions like IBS and IBD. But as of 2024, we just don't have the evidence for solving things like IBS and IBD. We just, it's through a simplified lens of this person is lacking ex-bacteria, so let's say bifidobacteria, let's solve this and then that is going to solve this particular health condition. I think whilst there is merit to a degree, it's kind of impractical and we just don't have the research to really solidify that right now. - Yeah, that's something that I'm excited about for future stuff but it's clearly not at this space right now. Like I have done a lot of reading of studies looking at stuff like that where they've looked at people with either IBS or IBD and found a lot of bacteria being lower on average. And then that makes you think about being like, well, what if we could individually test and see what is lower in this specific person? Like it makes sense. And then we also have the stuff right now looking at probiotics supplementation. I know that's obviously not the beel and endol. But say there's certain things that are lacking in IBS in general and we've got a probiotics that covered that, that should help noticeably. But the research isn't at that point. We are seeing probiotics supplementation helping a bit in IBS, far less promising in inflammatory bowel disease, although there is a little bit of promise in certain areas. But the research kind of makes it look like it should be more promising. But there's still so many gaps. Like firstly, a lot of probiotics supplementation is done with just a single strain. Whereas if you purchase a product, it will probably have like 10 different strains in there as well, which starts to get a bit more promising 'cause it's like even without testing, then we can be like, well, do we need to be that individualized when we've got 10 different strains? Like I don't know, you could go so deep down the rabbit hole. There's so many things we could say there. But once again, we're just not quieter at that point yet. More interesting stuff to go through. So they did microbiome testing. And like, I was always waiting for this. Like, ah, here we go, moment. Here we go, now it's gonna get weird. But like the lead researcher just cut like straight in, like it seems right away where she highlighted, I don't think it makes sense to do at this time. Plus there are a lot of positive steps that we can do that we don't need an analysis for. But if you want to know, go ahead. And for research, it's a great tool. - I really enjoyed her saying that and I was like, yes. - Yeah, like that's like such a balanced take, particularly that last mobile, like for research, it's a great tool. Like everything I just talked about being like, how I'm personally excited about like, where this could go in the future. The way we get there is by doing stuff like that. So there's clearly a place for it. I just wouldn't want individuals out there thinking that that's the solution right now. So super balanced take, love that. They mentioned how different people extract a different amount of calories and nutrients from food. That's also true. I've largely de-emphasized how much this matters for many cases and individual cases. Like when people talk about this, they're often kind of being like, see, this is why you shouldn't pay attention to calories 'cause you don't even know how much you're extracting from them. I would just take a little bit less of that approach in terms of just thinking they still matter. Like something's still going on just 'cause we can't track it necessarily perfectly. Doesn't mean we should completely ignore this topic. I think it just makes sense to be aware that there is a little bit of margin of error and there's a little bit of individual variation there. Particularly if you once again go deep down a rabbit hole and you actually look at the differences in absorption, like it's not this huge thing that dramatically changes the game. And then another study that I've personally talked about previously, not on the podcast, but I've found it interesting, but they mentioned this mice study with twins. So this twin mice where there were two lean twins, they added the microbiome of an apiece mouse and then they were in the same environment, same everything, eight to same food, all those kind of things, but one became obese even though the other one didn't. And that creates this interesting chicken or the egg scenario where it's like, oh, adding the microbiome made this mouse obese over time. But that then makes us think how relevant is that for humans? Do we have real controlled examples of seeing stuff? Like I've never personally seen anything as compelling as that mice study in humans. It raises a lot more questions than answers. We could go deep down that rabbit hole. I think I'm just gonna leave that as an interesting point for now. Quickly jumping in here to interrupt myself and Aiden to tell you about my secondary podcast, Plant Strong Co. If you like what Aiden and I do here, but would love to hear it from the lens of being plant-based or vegan, you will love what we have going on over there. We release a podcast every Monday focusing specifically on plant-based sports nutrition. I have my lovely co-host Caitlin Arnold from Plant Forged for Zeke joining me each week to engage in conversations about navigating a plant-based diet as an active person or athlete. The Plant Strong Co podcast is available on all podcasting platforms, including Spotify and Apple podcast. Now back to the show. Another interesting point that I feel like a lot of people might be drawn to is when the documentary was talking about certain bacteria being linked with having a quote-unquote tougher time losing weight and things like increased hunger. But then they go on to say things like it's never as simple as one bacteria because no bacteria acts alone, even though previously they kind of said like, oh, there's these few bacteria, bacterial colonies that might be linked with having a tougher time losing weight. Adding our two cents here, people who are obese on average do have different gut microbiomes than those who are lean. So there absolutely are differences, but this comes back to a chicken or the egg scenario. It's like which one comes first and how do they influence and interact with each other? It's like this is probably more complex than what the documentary made out at times. And then when it comes to the mouse thing, it makes it seem like the gut microbiome causes obesity. But that's a bit of a stretch. Again, it's very strong wording. We know that these documentaries like to be a bit more sensationalized. That's entertainment. But once again, if you found this, like what would you actually change? So if this was to be true, how would you then action on it to change the outcome? Like shouldn't we all be trying to do things that are good for our gut microbiome regardless? Because generally that's going to be linked with general good health anyway, particularly when it comes back to eating an abundance of plant-based foods in a wide variety. Like that's typically something that we would also recommend for weight management and weight loss through a controlled calorie intake and just general health and positive health outcomes. So it doesn't, even if it was true, that this gut microbiome staff was one of the leading causes of obesity. I'm not saying that, but let's say it was true. Would what we do to address it actually change? I don't necessarily think it would. And finalizing the interesting points component of this episode is one of the researchers talked about what they called the ABCs, which stands for always be counting. And they preface this for saying not calories, but plants. So aiming for 20 to 30 different kinds of plants per week. So really pushing this variety of plant-based foods. They did make a big emphasis on the but not calories component of that particular statement where they're like, always be counting, but not calories. I just think in terms of taking everything into consideration, especially when we're talking about weight loss and weight management, obviously calories do matter and we shouldn't focus on just one variable of this very complex system and completely just disregard everything else. So I would probably, if I was to say that, I'd probably take out the but not calories component in a way that is like, you don't need to count calories, you just need a diverse gut microbiome. It's way more complex than that, but I still think at its core, this push to increase the diversity of plant-based foods in your diet is obviously an awesome thing to do. - Yeah, and I don't wanna go on too big of a tangent here, but something that this whole concept always gets me thinking about is bariatric surgery and how this fits in with all of this. So I'm very neutral on bariatric surgery. I think there's certain situations where it makes sense to people, I think there's certain situations where it doesn't. Let's just ignore that for a second and let's say somebody's had bariatric surgery, let's say they've lost a lot of weight through that bariatric surgery and now they're so maintaining their weight but they have a limited intake of food because they have such small stomach capacity, so they can't eat a lot in one sitting. One of the biggest things that is always prioritizing that situation is ensuring that they get enough protein. They have less of an emphasis on getting things like fruits and vegetables in, although that's still encouraged, obviously. A lot of their micronutrient needs are aimed to be met through multivitamin supplementation, particularly with specific bariatric multivitamin, but one of the things that gets deprioritized the most 'cause they just can't fit everything in, even in a case of protein, they're often falling short, is things like whole grains and other high fiber foods that a lot of people might be looking at specifically from a gut health perspective. And it is really interesting working in that space, being like, we know how important gut health is from a variety of things completely outside of even just weight loss type of stuff. And it's a real interesting challenge. I don't know if you've had many things in that case or anything like that. - I have to say my work in bariatric surgery is not being huge. - Yeah, I do hate to say hi. So just 'cause like, full context, like many, many years ago, I worked in a bariatric surgery clinic just under another company I was working for. And I did like six weeks in that specific role, and it was just interesting to me. Hey, I just really enjoyed it. I didn't think I would before then. So even to this day, I will always have like a few people in my book sewer in that space 'cause I enjoy that. Going through the next stuff. So once again, one of those moments, we're like, oh no, here we go. It's the competitive eater. The competitive eater, I was waiting for them to try to use the microbiome to explain why he wasn't hungry. And I was like, there's clearly so many other reasons why he wouldn't be hungry. Like, even if we simplify down to the stomach being stretched and all that brain stuff linked in with that. But then that's what they said. Then they didn't try to use the microbiome to explain that. And I was like, is he just like a red herring? Like, why is he in this documentary? Like, it's not really overly relevant. But like, it was good to see that they didn't try to use that 'cause one of the closest things I'd say to a negative with many of these things is that they seem to hyper focus on gut health, but they didn't try to use that as an explanation in this case. I do think that there was maybe an excessive link between gut health and other health outcomes. We know that it's super important, but looking at it in isolation for stuff like OBC is a bit of a stretch. Even using that OBC stuff very quickly. We can unpack that by being like, do we have evidence that doing things for gut health leads to weight loss in isolation? Like, if we're really narrowing down to in isolation, which is almost impossible to do with this type of stuff, we could be like, does probiotic and fibres supplementation in isolation lead to large weight loss in studies? And that's not something we see. That could be another area where it's like, well, what if we individualize for an order if we find better testing? What if we replace what's missing? What if we do all of these things? But based on what we have right now, we're not really seeing that stuff, which means I would once again de-emphasize the link there a little bit. - One thing that I did like about them looking at the competitive eater was that when they did test his gut microbiome, they were like, oh, your gut microbiome is actually looks really great and looks really diverse. And they linked that to him, you know, typically consuming a well balanced Japanese diet and then saying that that had the biggest impact on his gut microbiome as opposed to these, like the occasional competitive eating component where he was consuming a lot of like, high fat, low nutrition food, where they just emphasized the importance of knowing that the gut microbiome is actually really resilient. And it's about what you're doing most of the time, not some of the time. So I think that's like a good point to take away in that one of the other people in the documentary, she had like, I guess very restrictive eating behaviors that she was trying to improve the health of a gut microbiome, trying to make things a little bit better, but had, I guess overdone it to a certain degree. Like she's taking like a billion different supplements and all these things. And then we look at that competitive eater who was, you know, occasionally eating these like insane amount of hot dogs, hot dogs and things like that. And they looked at his gut microbiome and it's like, oh, it's actually looking really good because otherwise outside of those circumstances, his diet was great. So I just liked that more nuanced. - I think they now thought that taking that one, like one did that, killed me a little bit inside was like, in his exit interview, it's like, I've got to keep working on my gut health. - Yeah, and I was like, don't you don't. It was fine. One line that does or did annoy us a little bit was the in the obesity section. And we can never really let this slide is where they said the population has been doing what we have recommended for many decades, yet the obesity epidemic has not slowed down or reversed. It is such a stretch to say that the population in America, in Australia, whatever we're talking about, follows the nutrition guidelines of their country, even looking at Australia, like, we know the percentage of Australians that get even adequate fruits and vegetables is what below 5%. - Yeah, it's around that. - Yeah, it was like about 5% of the population. So, okay, the population is not necessarily doing what is recommended. - That's just one thing in the guidelines. Like one of the big arguments that, I don't get too passionate about this, but like one of the big arguments I see in that space is it's almost as if this like push for quote unquote, low fat foods has caused an increase in refined carbohydrate intake and sugar intake. And like, we look at that fruit and vegetable thing and so, well, no one's listening to that thing. It'd be awfully odd for us to cherry pick and just be like, oh, we should eat more refined carbs. But like, if you do look at the guidelines, they're not saying to eat more refined carbs. Like they are emphasizing like minimally processed foods. They are emphasizing whole grains if you're eating, like, I don't know. People, like, if we just go with that one variable and be like less than 6% of people are doing this one thing in the guidelines. And there's multiple things in the guidelines. It's a stretch to say that the population has been doing what has been, quote unquote, recommended for many decades. - Yeah, we have guidelines, just the uptake of them is not amazing. - The other one I did want to touch on is that based on the stats, our intake of quote unquote discretionary foods makes up a bit over 30% of our calorie intake. And like once again, that's the section that's like limited. It's like encouraged to limit those foods. So, yeah, crazy. - Yeah, absolutely. - Crazy. - Another claim that they made in that particular section is your blood sugars, two hours after a meal, are directly related to weight loss or weight gain. This is worth addressing because it's, I mean, it's just not true. And when they started measuring the blood glucose after eating, like, I saw it come up on the screen. I was like, oh, no, not this again. We've spoken a fair bit about this on the podcast. And I think I'm just going to summarize it with, it's just not relevant. It's not what your blood sugar is, two hours after a meal in the absence of diabetes and whatnot. Like, it's just not related to weight loss or weight gain in the slightest. - Cool. 'Cause we're going a little bit over time. I'm going to try and breeze through this last like negative section I've got. But one of the things was that, two specter was featured in a documentary and Zoe, the company that he co-founded, has largely been working based on a lot of the principles mentioned in this documentary, but taking them steps further. Like, they are doing that microbiome testing. They are individualizing food intake based on continuous blood glucose monitoring. They released a study late last year, which I think is super relevant here. The study from the app, it had quite underwhelming results. The change in triglycerides that they found was promoted, but the difference of triglycerides was still quite small. But meanwhile, there was no significant difference in things like insulin, glucose levels and blood pressure. The average total weight loss was 2% of body weight over 18 weeks. And it's hard to control for compliance, obviously. I always give people benefit of those kind of things. Some people, like people who stick to the plan better will get better results. But I think it's worth mentioning this study, particularly in relation to the body composition and overall health markers. Particularly when they were doing all this individualization with blood glucose levels and gut microbiome stuff and just didn't seem to matter. I don't want to go too deep down that rabbit hole like talking about that type of stuff. But it is fit for thought being like, if you left this documentary with the impression that all you need to do was kind of ignore everything that you've ever learned and just focus on those two things and set your compliance with the average of what we would expect. Like, this is what is kind of being seen there. Like, I think it's way better to just take one step back and just think about it as very multifactorial through the lens of the microbiome matters. It influences like absolutely everything. But also a lot of our aspects about nutrition that we are aware of such as calories and all these things also matter as well. To wrap this up and put a little bit of a bow on it, somebody on Instagram sent through the following summary that we really liked. And they said, overall theme of the documentary I got was eat a diverse range of fiber-filled foods to increase diversity in the gut microbiome. They tried to make links to diseases and conditions where in some cases it seems like there was less than solid evidence. As a summary though, prioritizing whole foods has a positive impact on your microbiome and overall health. And I think that sums it up pretty damn well. - Yeah, I like that. - This has been episode 165 of the Ideal Nutrition Podcast. If you liked this one, please leave a rating and review. But otherwise, thanks for tuning in. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] (upbeat music)
