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Understanding GUT Health a conversation with Dr. Leke Asong
18 Plays3 months ago
Dr Leke Asong is a GP who specialises in gut health.
In this episode of Fit For My Age Dr Leke explains to host Michael Millward that most doctors are trained to treat a patient’s symptoms. But as Dr Leke says this is the first step of treatment. Doctors should also investigate the root causes of a patient's condition.
In a far-ranging discussion Dr Leke explains that what we consume has an inevitable impact on how our bodies, brains and minds perform. We can he explains improve our health by improving our diet and our lifestyle.
Key to improving and maintaining good health is understanding how our gut works, how our digestive system works and identifying how to life more harmoniously with our body.
As well as explaining the logic of gut health management Dr Leke also explains the types of food we should be consuming if we want to achieve good gut health.
More information is available from Dr Asong’s website
Fit For My Age is made on Zencastr.
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You can find out more about both Michael Millward, and Dr Asong at Abeceder.co.uk .
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Fit for My Age' on Zencastr
00:00:05
Speaker
Made on Zencaster. Hello, and welcome to Fit for My Age, the health and wellbeing podcast from Abisida. I am your host, Michael Ward, the managing director of Abisida. As the jingle at the start of this podcast says, Fit for My Age is made on Zencaster.
00:00:25
Speaker
Zencaster is the all in one podcasting platform on which you can make your podcast in one place and then distribute it to the major platforms like Spotify, Apple, Amazon, and YouTube Music.
00:00:40
Speaker
It really does make making content so easy. If you would like to try podcasting using Zencaster, visit zencaster dot.com forward slash pricing and use my offer code ABACEDA. All the details are in the description.
00:00:59
Speaker
Now that I have told you how wonderful Sankastra is for making podcasts, we should make one. One that will be well worth listening to, liking, downloading, and subscribing to.
Meet Leke Asong: Founder of GutHealthMedic.com
00:01:11
Speaker
In this episode of Fit for My Age, my guest is Leke Asong, who is the founder of GutHealthMedic.com. Hello, Leke. Hello, Michael. we're Very pleased that you can join us today. We're looking forward to our conversation. But I wonder if we could please start by you explaining a little bit about who you are and how a GP, medical GP,
00:01:35
Speaker
sets up guthealthmedic.com. All right. Yeah. Thank you so much, Michael. Thank you for inviting me.
What is Functional Medicine?
00:01:42
Speaker
And yeah, so my name is Leke. I'm a GP and a functional medicine doctor. Now it's not that common in England, functional medicine, but I explain what it is. I'm sure the listeners want to know. So functional medicine is a science-based model that emphasizes nutrition, health, and wellbeing.
00:02:03
Speaker
with a focus on finding the root cause of disease, not just treating symptoms. So it's very good fits for chronic disease, as opposed to conventional medicine that tends to focus on symptom management or symptom treatment only.
00:02:23
Speaker
So how did I come across functional medicine?
Leke's Journey to Functional Medicine
00:02:25
Speaker
It was due to my own personal health journey years ago, 25 years ago, when I had gut symptoms and strange aches and pains, pins and needles, bloating gas. And I saw the best specialists in the field. I had a colonoscopy, sigmoidoscopy, endoscopy, and they couldn't find anything. And I thought, hmm, I don't know what's going on here.
00:02:50
Speaker
And I kind of lived, learned to live with my symptoms for years. And when I started GP training, I realized there were lots of patients in the same boats like I was. And that really made me frustrated because I couldn't really help them. And that's when I realized I wasn't alone. There were other people with similar vague symptoms. And that set me on the kind of path to optimal wellness. And that's how I came across functional medicine.
00:03:19
Speaker
You mentioned chronic health conditions in your description there.
Understanding Chronic vs. Acute Health Conditions
00:03:25
Speaker
Do you just want to clarify what a chronic health condition is? Yeah, that's a good question. So I think by definition,
00:03:32
Speaker
conditions that last, I would say, arbitrarily more than three months. And these are ongoing conditions. So I'll give an example, diabetes, for example, is a chronic health condition, weight gain, obesity, emphysema, things like this, which don't seem dramatic, but they actually affect life in a great way. So ongoing, just smoldering conditions that go on for years and months. The sort of thing that people have, but they learn to live with, they put up with it. Yeah, absolutely.
00:04:03
Speaker
You won't know if you sort of saw a chronic disease sufferer. For for example, people were tired all the time or got a low immune system. They just look normal, you know, in quotes, but they're actually going through a very tough time. Acute disease is different. If you fractured your ankle, fractured your hip, it's quite obvious. Or if you've got a very bad pneumonia, it's quite obvious. But the chronic condition just burns continuously in the background for years and years. The sort of thing I suppose that you might not know that you've got until the symptoms become apparent, even though you may have had the chronic condition for a long time without really realizing you just got used to that is
Functional vs. Conventional Medicine: A Comparison
00:04:49
Speaker
how you felt and feeling that it's normal. Then the symptoms flare up before one to the better expression. And that's what takes you to the doctor, the GP. And from what you're saying, in the GP treats the symptoms
00:05:02
Speaker
rather than the actual root cause of the health condition. Yeah, absolutely. People would say it just creeps up on you. So typically, a patient would just say, yeah, I just learned to live with it. And they might not even realize it's not normal. Like some people feel tired all the time and see lots of them. After a while, they just think that's how, that's normality. But then sometimes they really have a bad relapse and that's when they tend to consult. And typically they would see lots of specialty specialists or see the GP and try different tablets. And after a while, if you get told nothing is found and everything is normal, you start doubting yourself and then you just think, well, that's just how it is. So it must be something wrong with me. In fact, some special specialists would say it's all in your head. I've actually heard
00:05:58
Speaker
Some especially say that to patients, say, look, it's all in your head. It's not really a physical thing. We can't find the cause of the symptoms. So therefore it must be something that you're convincing yourself that you've got. It's all in your head. Or I remember being in a doctor surgery GP and going through the symptoms and they couldn't find out what it was. So they just said, well, maybe that's just the way that you are.
00:06:24
Speaker
type of thing and I thought like no this may be the way that I am at the moment but it's not the way I want to be going further forward yeah it's these it's like the different type of approach I suppose you see but what you're highlighting for me when I listen to you describe this is that there's almost there are diseases chronic diseases of the 21st century the western world our lifestyle our diet all these various different things which we just accept that
The Role of Lifestyle in Chronic Diseases
00:06:53
Speaker
we've got. And I suppose in some ways there may almost be an element of, in some ways it's it's it's slightly cool in inverted commas to have a particular condition, shall we say. It gives you something that you can talk about with people because we liked we like to talk about our health, so to speak, rather than actually dealing with the causes of the symptoms. Yeah, that's a good point. I think there's so many reasons. I think the first reason is
00:07:22
Speaker
Doctors, the conventional medical model doesn't really tackle chronic disease the right way, I think. And it's not the doctor's fault. It's just how we're taught medical school. So if you look at things like functional medicine or other ancient healing modalities like traditional Chinese medicine or Ayurvedic medicine, it's based on the premise the body's in a state of balance and anything that tips it out of balance and causes symptoms.
00:07:50
Speaker
So that's kind of a different medical model. And two, the look at the body as a whole. So it's a systems based approach. So for example, if you're depressed, conventional medicine, things are problems in your head, you know, but actually it could be coming from your gut. So functional medicine kind of links to your brain, to your gut. So, and also nutrition is not really taught in medical school.
00:08:19
Speaker
So from a nutritional point of view, doctors are clueless, generally speaking, not all of them, obviously. So yeah, that causes an issue in looking at how patients present. So we look at symptoms, think about the disease in the medical book. If it's not there, then we just think, well, it doesn't exist. So the ah doctor's training is is about looking at what you're presented with by the patient and focusing on that and trying to match what you're seeing and what you're being told.
00:08:52
Speaker
with what is in the medical encyclopedia. Functional medicine is much more about the balance of the the different parts of your body and accepting that when all of those parts are in balance, so like the four humors of the body,
00:09:12
Speaker
I remember back doing my GCSEs and one history and one of the things that we studied was the the history of medicine and how we've gone through ancient ay Greek type medicine all the way through to Alexandra Fleming and our level of knowledge increases as a society but you're taking it back into the
00:09:35
Speaker
where people were more interested in how the body as a whole functioned and looking at the functionality where that stops working as you want it to and then investigating the causes of that breakdown. Yeah and this is a good point and I think a big difference between functional medicine and conventional medicine is emphasis on health and well-being as opposed to disease. So there is a difference between the science of health and the science of disease. So functional medicine really focuses on the science of health. For example, how your liver works to detoxify, for example, how your gut microbiome works to control your brain and your immunity. So the organism is one. So it's science of health, how things function normally. But as doctors, we focus on when things go wrong.
00:10:33
Speaker
So for example, if you went to your GP and you were coughing for three months and listened to your chest, you've got pneumonia, here's some antibiotics, that's perfect. So you've got pneumonia, that's the science of disease. However, if you went to your GP and said for the last 10 years, you keep catching infections, then conventional medicine doctor will get stuck because you haven't got a disease at that time. You just keep catching infections, but you want to know why.
00:11:01
Speaker
And that's where functional medicine comes into place. It would look at your microbiome, how to optimize your hormones and the other body systems, you know, detoxify liver, and then to optimize your immune system. So the concept of optimizing immune system and balancing hormones and detoxification, these are prevalent in functional medicine, but not in
Impact of Toxins and the Importance of Choices
00:11:24
Speaker
conventional medicine.
00:11:24
Speaker
This sounds like going back to that idea that some of the large part of the health issues that we face would be down to the lifestyle choices that we have, which are in some ways governed by the messages that we receive and the back to the lifestyle, we create our own issues in lots of ways because of the decisions that we take about what we are going to eat, what we're going to drink, the exercise that we're going to take, all those types of things. And that if we understood more about functional medicine ourselves, we'd understand more about how our bodies work.
00:12:09
Speaker
and be able to see the signs of, that the early signs perhaps, of what was not quite in balance with every other part of our body. So we'd understand more about it ourselves as well as our doctors understanding more about it. Spot on. In fact, using the functional medicine model, there are five main causes of disease, which are poor nutrition, so processed foods and stuff like that.
00:12:36
Speaker
chronic stress. This is a big one. Lots of my clients have got chronic stress, allergen. So, you know, things like pollen, for example, or gluten, that could be an allergen, chronic infections and toxins. So chronic infections could be, again, not something causing pneumonia, but something just hiding in the background that cause low grade problems over time is a chronic infection that could be hiding in your gut, for example, and toxins. So drinking from plastic bottles, you know, you get the toxins from there or aluminum or pollution. These affect your liver and they will cause problems again.
00:13:23
Speaker
ah functional medicine doctor can deal with these things but your GP can't because we're just not caught in that way. So if I'm drinking from a plastic bottle or a plastic beaker there is a chance that part of what I drink will contain some element of the plastic, some element of the aluminium.
00:13:41
Speaker
Yeah. And that is me taking in a toxin, which then my liver has to deal with. Yeah, absolutely. So I am better off, yeah, I'm better off drinking from a glass bottle. Well, I don't, I find it difficult to drink from cans and bottles personally. Give me a glass, please.
00:14:00
Speaker
I should drink from a glass or from a a porcelain china earthenware milk rather than something that is plastic. Yeah. ah But sometimes it's difficult. I mean, if you're in the car, you get on a journey, you go to a petrol station, you get yourself a bottle of water. It's normally plastic.
00:14:20
Speaker
But you could try your best to reduce plastic because it's just ah got. to Yeah. But even from, from a plastic bottle, but also from a plastic beaker would be a problem potentially. Yeah, I think, yeah, this low grade, I mean, that's why you see, for example, um BPA free, for example. So BPA free right plastics can reduce.
00:14:46
Speaker
your toxin load. That's one way to get around it. Right. Okay. So it's like the low grade plastics would be an issue, but you can get a plastic beaker, plastic bottle. Yeah. Which has less of a problem. I'm looking at a bottle of water on my desk at the moment and now thinking, okay, what type of plastic is this? But it is those sorts of things that actually, yeah, it is important to know and it is,
00:15:13
Speaker
like what we put into our bodies affects how our bodies work and the different parts of our bodies we can overload them we can under load them it's understanding what goes into our bodies impacts the performance just in the same way as if you put it the low grade fuel into your car as opposed to the high grade fuel you'll have a different impact on the engine absolutely it's a good analogy then if you're using good quality good quality oil and petrol and it is one of those things that we don't learn enough about i think so i'm thinking you know what are how do i know that there is something wrong with my gut health if my tummy isn't rumbling so to speak well are there other symptoms more subtle symptoms that would tell me that i need to think about my diet and all of it seems to be
00:16:09
Speaker
around what you put into your body creates the impact that will mean that something isn't functioning as it should. It's the fuel that creates the function. And if the fuel is wrong, the function will be wrong, which then has the potential to create the chronic health problem.
Why is the Gut Microbiome Vital?
00:16:29
Speaker
Yes. Good question. So Hippocrates said it thousands of years ago, that all disease starts in the gut.
00:16:37
Speaker
And with the discovery of the microbiome, we're now seeing, this is absolutely correct. So the microbiome, which is the community of bacteria and viruses and fungi that exists in the gut and not only in the gut in the mouth and the vaginal area and the skin as well, that controls lots of body functions. So secretion of hormones, other biactive compounds, it links the gut.
00:17:07
Speaker
to your brain, secret vitamins and much more. So if you've got any sort of symptom, especially coming from a gut health specialist like me, you've got to optimize your gut because it could be any symptom. It could be headaches, for example, you can have a gallbladder problem and that would cause chronic headaches. In my case, the first symptom I ever had was pins and needles. So I thought,
00:17:33
Speaker
It's a nervous problem. So I saw a specialist had nerve conduction studies done and said everything was fine. But after the pins and needles about a month afterwards, I then started with bloating. Yeah. So lots of, and again, depression, low mood, that can be traced to the gut. I mean, about 80% of its serotonin is made in the gut. So people think depression, brain, but actually it could be a gut problem.
00:18:01
Speaker
Again, immunity, about 70 to 80% or probably 90% of your immune system lies in the gut. So if you've got low immunity, catching viruses all the time, you've got to optimize your gut function and then things might settle. So yeah, whatever symptom you get.
00:18:21
Speaker
start with a gut. That's where having the right type of diet actually helps your gut function more effectively and more efficiently. So obviously balanced diet. I've been reading all sorts of things recently about how different types of fruit will affect your mood. Different types of fruit can help help prevent you from getting things like dementia as you get older. Having the right type of food in your diet can prevent illnesses and diseases and also help um crew cure the chronic illnesses as they come up. There's so many questions going around in my head at the moment about this because it is so fascinating, but it's also like I ah keep on coming back to this thing like the ultra-processed foods, the processed foods, those are the things which are harming the function of our gut. If you have too much of that,
00:19:16
Speaker
then that will cause problems for you.
Improving Gut Health with Whole Foods
00:19:18
Speaker
And we need to go back to more so sort of unprocessed food, food that we prepare ourselves at home and make sure that it's got all of the right type of ingredients in it so that we're creating that balance that enables the the gut to function effectively. Yeah. We've got a big problem. Yeah. Processed foods are real. They're everywhere. You go to supermarkets, they're there. You can't escape them.
00:19:43
Speaker
Um, I've got a mnemonic, uh, called gods and I call them the evil gods because they're bad. So G style stands for gluten. Oh, for oils, which are refined vegetable oils, D for dairy and S for sugar. So that's an mnemonic to help cut out processed foods. So yeah, essentially refined carbohydrates. So the evil gods, the oils.
00:20:12
Speaker
dairy and sugar. Yeah. Right. What's left? Thinking about my dad. What is left? I did a video a few months ago and people said, what's left? There's so much left, whole foods, basically. Right. So lots of vegetables, lots of. Whole foods, fruits, vegetables. Yeah. This is a word, butternut squash, sweet potatoes, kale, delicious, endless. Meat is okay. No, no you can. Again, this is a very simplistic formula.
00:20:42
Speaker
Gluten is a difficult topic. I mean, there are different theories about gluten and gluten sensitivity and non-gluten sensitivity. Celiac, of course, that's a no-no. Then refined vegetable oils, those are bad. Olive oil is good, so you can always have olive oil. Dairy, again, there's a difference between commercial dairy and farm dairy. Again, so the quality of a dairy matters.
00:21:08
Speaker
and sugars everything including fruit juices are bad but fruit juices in moderation will be a fine but anything like visit drinks that's quite bad. Right, so eat the orange rather than the art drink the orange juice, especially if it's come from a carton. So the you get the fiber as well, but we shouldn't be eating too much of those four the different types of food, the gluten, the refined oils, the dairy, and the sugars. We should be aiming to to buy the best quality food and that we can.
00:21:47
Speaker
in order to make sure that we're putting the right type of ah food in. And buying the best quality food doesn't necessarily mean, I'm getting the impression it doesn't mean, from what you're saying, that we have to spend an awful lot of money on luxury foods. It's just buying foods that aren't processed, that don't contain huge quantities of that gluten, refined vegetables, dairy and sugars.
00:22:18
Speaker
And we're changing our diet, but we're actually fueling our bodies in a more effective and efficient way. Yeah. That way we get more fruits, more vegetables, leafy green vegetables, high in nutrients, low in calories, eating a rainbow. So that equates to different polyphenols, which are beneficial plant compounds. So the more color, the better. Yeah. Lots of water. Eating a rainbow. I like that expression.
00:22:48
Speaker
Yeah, it rainbow. Yeah, it's different colored vegetables. So tomatoes, red, got lutein, carrots. They've got beta carotene. So different phytonutrients have a different color. So the purples, for example, a different phytonutrient there. Lots of vegetables. So yeah, the more variety, the better.
00:23:10
Speaker
So we could actually end up eating more, but we're eating fewer calories because we're eating less refined food. There's less sugar, there's less dairy, there's less of the refined oils, there's less gluten, but it opens up a whole range of different types of foods.
Episode Conclusion and Resources
00:23:26
Speaker
And I suppose it's the diet before the refined, the food processing industry took off in the 20th century. it's It's going back to that.
00:23:37
Speaker
functional diet, which has lots of variety, lots of color, lots of, and lots of vitamins, proteins, all those sorts of things. You know, okay. I think we are just about scratching the surface of this in this podcast. So, you know, I'm presuming that there is lots more information about all of this on your website. Yeah. At healthmedic.com. guthealthmedic.com. People will be able to find a lot more information about this on that website. Yeah. And I've got an Instagram gut health medic and Tiktok gut health medic, lots of yummy recipes I do all the time. Great stuff. Of course, also as well as being a ah medical GP and a gut health specialist,
00:24:19
Speaker
I have seen from on your profile on the internet that you're also a bit of an inventor in the kitchen so people will be able to see all of that on your various different socials there and we will put links to all of those in the description but like a It's been so interesting and like I said I think we've just scratched the surface so I encourage people to visit guthealthmedic.com and hopefully we'll be able to persuade you to come back again to fit for my age and talk about some things in more detail again very soon but for the moment thank you very much for spending some time to meet with me today to scratch the surface of this fascinating subject. Thank you very much.
00:25:00
Speaker
Thank you, thank you. I am Michael Millward, the Managing Director of Abecedah, and I have been having a fit for my age conversation with Leke Asong, who is the founder of guthealthmedic.com. You can find out more about both of us at abecedah.co.uk. There is a link in the description along with links to all of the social media contacts that Leke mentioned.
00:25:27
Speaker
I must remember to thank the team at matchmaker.fm for introducing me to Lekke. If you are a podcaster looking for interesting guests, or if like Lekke you have something very interesting to say, matchmaker dot.fm is where matches of great hosts, that's me, and fabulous guests like Lekke are made.
00:25:48
Speaker
There is a link in the description to matchmaker.fm along with an offer code. And if one of the things that you enjoy about travel is trying different foods, the best way to plan your travel is with the Ultimate Travel Club. You will find a link and a membership discount code in the description. It seems like the description is well worth reading. But if you have liked this edition of Fit For My Age, please give it a like and download it so that you can listen anytime, any place.
00:26:17
Speaker
To make sure you don't miss out on future episodes, please subscribe. And remember, the aim of all of the podcasts produced by Abecedah is not to tell you what to think, but we do hope to make you think. And thank you to you for listening. Thank you.
00:28:20
Speaker
Yeah. Try this.