Episode 026 - Finding Treatments for IBD

Learn more about this episode's guests and the topics discussed - https://insidematters.health/

The following is a conversation with Professor Konstantinos Yerasmididis, a professor in clinical nutrition at the University of Glasgow, who has a special interest in the gut microbiome and dietary interventions to treat disease. We also had Dr Richard Hansen, consultant paediatric gastroenterologist, who was on episode number one of the podcast.

This is the first time I had two guests participating in the Inside Matters podcast at the same time. It was an absolute pleasure. Given that Costas and Richard are experts in inflammatory bowel disease and that they've collaborated on several different research initiatives, we spent a lot of time talking about inflammatory bowel disease.

We spoke about their work which is focused on using nutrition and personalized dietary therapy in the context of Crohn's disease in particular. So they've been involved in a program called CD-TREAT where they've tried to mimic the effects of something called exclusive internal nutrition, essentially an entirely liquid diet with a diet that contained real food.

Why is that important? 

Well, for four out of five children with newly diagnosed Crohn's disease, a form of inflammatory bowel disease, this exclusively liquid diet has a profound impact on Crohn's disease. So four out of five of them go into what we call remission. i. e. no clinical symptoms.

However, there are challenges associated with EEN. Most notably, it's very restrictive. You can't eat any food for six to eight weeks. So what Costas and Richard have been trying to do is, can we give children and potentially even adults a diet that contains the same components? as a liquid diet. It allows people to eat real food without having to have an exclusively liquid diet.

We also talked about some common myths and misconceptions associated with the microbiome. We asked the question, does the microbiota cause obesity? We also spoke about the microbiome field more generally and how it's progressed over time. and some of the challenges that both the field and the academic researchers have faced over the last decade.

This is a really interesting conversation that I think should be accessible to most of the listeners. We did go quite deep on some areas but we always brought it back to well, what does that mean for the listener and what can a listener take away from it?

I believe that you will particularly enjoy this podcast if you're someone with inflammatory bowel disease or if you know somebody suffering from inflammatory bowel disease. You will also enjoy this podcast if you're interested in diet, nutrition, and how the diet interplays with the microbiome and how the microbiome interplays with the rest of the body.

Timestamps

00:00:00 Intro

00:04:00 Welcome to the guests

00:04:48 What is a healthy microbiome?

00:09:24 Microbial therapeutics

00:14:00 Intersection between disease and diversity in the biome

00:17:41 Insights from research

00:22:36 Should we drink milk

00:31:47 CDG

00:34:39 Mediterranean diet pt1

00:40:51 Carnivore diet

00:47:52 Personalised dietary intervention pt1

00:50:22 Microbiome testing

00:55:14 Personalised dietary intervention pt2

01:02:23 Measuring inflammatory cytokines

01:08:55 Mediterranean diet pt2

01:14:40 Fermented foods

01:18:59 Plant-based diet

01:22:10 Microbiome and obesity

01:26:50 Do the scientists take supplements?

01:30:12 Composition of microbiome

01:37:43 Treating IBD

01:43:28 Training gastroenterologists

01:47:16 Importance of hydration to the guy

01:47:57 Obesity and the gut microbiome

01:56:31 What’s next?

02:00:12 The future of research and treatment