Episode 67: Healthy aging takes guts. Literally.

After several years of suffering her own gastric distress, Maya Gangadharan consulted the Nutritional Therapy Association and learned a ton about how so much of our bodily function connects back to our GI health. Digestion is an inflammatory event, it starts in the brain, and it can become more complex as our bodies’ relationships to insulin, hydrochloric acid, and belly bacteria change with age.

Now a functional nutritional therapy practitioner, Maya discusses the phenomenon of “leaky gut” and the scarcity of shortcuts to treat it properly—like probiotics, which aren’t always what they’re marketed to be. The key to understanding your gut health is a willingness to approach your body as a unique science experiment, with singular weaknesses that can only be determined through trial and error. But it will also respond to treatment and care, because at its core your body is very zen—even when it’s unwittingly trying to kill you.

We also talk about outliving your body’s memory cells, the triumphant rebirth of Jamie Lee Curtis’s career, and why you owe it to your biome to stir up an Old Fashioned every so often.

Other links

• Find Maya at Intrinsic Origin, as well as on Facebook and Instagram

• Blueberry supplementation improves memory in older adults

• Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride and the GAPS diet

• How to play Red Rover

• The health benefits of senna

• Gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD)

• Ignatius J. Reilly‘s troublesome valve

• CFUs = colony-forming units

• Hashimoto’s thyroiditis

• The End of Alzheimer’s by Dale Bredesen

• “Get back into life … with Depends!”