Gut-Honest: Your Gut Knows Before Your Mind Does.

What Your Doctor Didn't Tell You!

Dr. Susan Payrovi is a Clinical Assistant Professor at Stanford University School of Medicine. She is an anesthesiologist, until multiple sclerosis ended her surgical career and sent her on a very different kind of medical education.

Now, triple board-certified and trained in functional and integrative medicine, she's traded symptom management for something more interesting: finding out why you got sick in the first place.

In this episode, Dr. Payrovi breaks down the science your doctor probably didn't have time to explain and the gut-brain axis. 

You learn how your microbiome runs your immune system, hormones, and mood, and why what you eat, how you sleep, and even your dog may be shaping your health more than any prescription.

She explains leaky gut in plain English and walks through her "inside-out" approach to chronic disease, including her own diagnosis with multiple sclerosis (MS). She shares surprisingly doable practices, more fermented foods, less ultra-processed everything, and actually respecting your circadian rhythm.

If you've ever felt like you were just managing your illness rather than understanding it, this podcast is for you.

Timeline

1:32 — Dr. Payrovi's Background & MS Diagnosis

3:22 — Journey into Integrative Medicine

8:18 — Holistic vs. Conventional Medicine

15:28 — The Gut-Brain Connection

17:05 — What Is a "Gut Feeling"?

20:39 — Gut Health in Daily Life

23:43 — Leaky Gut Explained

29:23 — Food Allergies & Rising Gut Issues

30:59 — Gut Health & Emotional Wellbeing

33:36 — Practical Tips for Gut Health

35:28 — Where to Find Dr. Payrovi

CONTACT SUSAN PAYROVI, MD

Website: https://www.drsusanpayrovi.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drsusanpayrovi/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drsusanpayrovi/

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

You're just unfinished, not depressed. This is a podcast for leaders, high achievers, and entrepreneurs who have built impressive lives on the outside and yet sense something is dying on the inside. If you ever stared at everything you have accomplished and felt strangely empty, this show is for you. Do you ever wonder why there are so many gut-related expressions in our daily lives and what they mean? For example, I had a gut check. Felt like being punched in the gut. My gut is tied in a knot, and my favorite is my head says yes, but my gut screams no. What do they all mean? And what is the relationship between gut and brain and our emotions? I'm honored to have our guest today, Dr. Susan Peyrovy. She's a physician and clinical assistant professor at the School of Medicine at Stanford University in the Department of Anesthesiology, Perioperative, and Pain Medicine. She specializes in treatment of chronic diseases, including autoimmune diseases, gastrointestinal, cardiometabolic, mental health, and cancer-related conditions. So let's get started with Susan and let's dig deeper into gut and brain connection and science.

SPEAKER_02 1:31

My family's from Iran. We left when I was about seven years old and settled in San Jose, California, and that's where I grew up. Spent another decade or more in Southern California for medical training and made the conscious decision to move back up to the Bay Area because we wanted to be around more trees. And that's where I wanted to raise my kids. I wanted cleaner air, I wanted quick access to nature. And I live in a magnificent small house that has forced us to become minimalists on purpose. But outside my door, there's a whole lot of nature. And that was by intention and design. So we had to give up some things to make this happen, like the comfort of just popping out to a grocery store or having flat land for my kids to ride a bike on. But uh this was an intentional decision about how we wanted to raise our kids. So I live in the San Mateo area, in the Bay Area.

SPEAKER_01 2:32

Northern California homes are small, residences are small, but you have nature around you. In some way, you know, when they say California or tree huggers, Northern California, that is true. We love nature, we spend time in nature, and nature heals, right? It's uh nature heals. I love that. Susan, how did you become an expert in health and your medical expertise and education?

SPEAKER_02 3:02

Yeah, my medical career took some wacky twists and turns, and I didn't always start out in the area of integrative medicine and functional medicine. I actually trained originally as an anesthesiologist and practiced for a few years. I had my first child. I had a weak left arm. Within a month, I was really recognizing my left arm and hand weren't cooperating. And nine months later, I got diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. And my main symptom was a weak left arm, which incidentally is probably the strongest body part you need to be able to performly practice anesthesia because instruments are left-handed. And so that ended my career, and it set me on this path of figuring out how do I take care better care of myself? I have wonderful neurologists who were trying to help me with the medical management side of things, but they weren't really able to tell me much more than that, which was frustrating. But on the flip side, I was also a physician and I didn't know what else to do beyond the pharmaceuticals. So I ended up randomly at a conference, an integrative medicine conference in San Diego, and that changed my life. Within the first hour, I just knew that this was going to be a big part of my personal life. It's so wonderful that if I could learn this and teach it to others, because it was a completely different way of thinking about the human body.

SPEAKER_01 4:31

What was it about that the different way of human body? You got you got me real curious now. What's in your letter?

SPEAKER_02 4:37

It was the it was an integrative medicine conference. And it was the coming together of all kinds of allied health professionals, people who are healers in their own way, but who had also incidentally had some of their own health issues, which I find really interesting because people go into integrative medicine or functional medicine not often after they've experienced some health setbacks themselves, because it reshapes how you think about health and illness. And in that first hour, they did this mind-body exercise where there were these singing bowls and these people came in and you could feel the vibrations in your body, and it was just profound. Don't really have words to describe it other than I felt something in my gut. I was like, this is where I need to be right now, exactly. There's nothing else I should be doing right now. And so my intuition just told me that to keep paying attention to this and to keep learning this. And at first, I started applying those tools to myself, practiced on myself, and eventually started practicing it at my clinical practice at Stanford.

SPEAKER_01 5:44

That's fine. I love that you mentioned that there was a knowledge that it felt real, you felt it in your gut.

SPEAKER_03 5:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 5:51

And it changed your mind. And there's another thing you mentioned, Susan, that some of the best healers, whether it's in medicine, is in psychology, then in the diet, their breakthrough came from their own healing. They were in pain, they were having a diagnosis, something wasn't working for them. And then they said, there got to be a better way. And they went on a quest. It's almost everyone has a hero's journey. And then you learn something, and then your journey is that the world needs to know this. That's exactly what happened to me for the listeners. That these days my only focus is on depression. Growing up in a family, and all my life, myself, my parents struggle with depression. I'm a psychologist, and you learn depression, it has a biobiological, genetic, family, dynamics, education, so on. But they don't teach you exactly what is depression. So you just accept it, you go to therapy as I did year after year. It was only when I realized our knowledge of depression actually, there are gaps in it. We don't know what depression is. We talk about symptoms of depression, but that's not depression. So I went 30-plus year journey to unpack depression, and my work this day is that once you understand what depression is, it can be healed.

unknown 7:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:22

Well, Brenda, so you went through the singular journey about your own healing, you got multiple sclerosis.

SPEAKER_02 7:29

Yeah, because living a diagnosis gives you the opportunity to go deeper and understand what it's like to have your health change and what that feels like to be at the receiving end of medical advice and to have treatments, and that it's nobody wants a diagnosis, but so on that point, Susan, that you still practice medicine, you still teach.

SPEAKER_01 7:52

So when a patient comes to you with your new knowledge versus the Susan, a new doctor. How are you different now? How do you practice? What do you see in a patient versus the patient that you used to see before your uh renewal?

SPEAKER_02 8:17

Yeah, as a conventionally trained physician, what you do is take a history, you try to formulate a diagnosis, you try to match that with a treatment, like a surgical procedure or pharmaceuticals more often, and that's it, right? And you monitor, you monitor for side effects, you monitor for efficacy, and that's what you're really doing. It's symptom management. And that is helpful. That is an important tool, but it doesn't address everything. Just no tool out there addresses everything, right? And so having my career be disrupted by my diagnosis put me on this journey to go and learn other frameworks, other body through different perspectives. In conventional medicine, we look at the body as organs, we chop up the body into organs, and each doctor picks their favorite organ and goes and learns it and specializes in it. And then they become a cardiologist, a nephrologist, a hepatologist. But what I learned in the world of integrative and functional medicine is that for better or worse, everything's connected. And it's the physical is just one dimension.

SPEAKER_03 9:36

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 9:37

There's the mental, the emotional, the spiritual uh dimensions that also need to be tended to. And oftentimes that's actually the heart of it. Like, for example, you can have a patient with GI symptoms. They have terrible IBS, let's just say, irregular bowel habits, bloating, discomfort, food reactions. And there are medications that can help with that. There are herbs that can help with that. There are dietary strategies that can help with that. But sometimes it's really about addressing the mental emotional aspect of that person, like just figuring out like what is going on in their life, what is driving and contributing to these symptoms. And that's the upstream approach that I learned in integrative emotional medicine, really trying to figure out what's the underlying imbalance? What can we do to improve that so that hopefully there's less symptoms that we have to deal with downstream?

SPEAKER_01 10:37

So, Susan, when a patient comes to you and you bring this more holistic 260-degree knowledge to work with them, how do they respond to your approach versus then there are family members? I know this thing, I want to go to a doctor, I just want to pill. I have this struggle, that is struggle. So, how do your patients respond to your holistic approach?

SPEAKER_02 11:06

Yeah, I don't get to see those patients that just want the pill. They get weeded out of my practice real early because there's no quick fix, there's no magic potions. Sometimes people come in looking for supplements. They're willing to spend whatever it takes on supplements because they think that's what's going to heal them. But it doesn't. They don't. In my experience, that's never been the answer. I believe that the answer lies in really examining a person's life and looking all at all the different forces in play and trying to understand what are the forces that are driving a disease process? What are the forces that are triggering their symptoms? What were things in their early history that maybe set them up for whatever disease condition they're experiencing? And it's not until you really start peeling away all those layers that you start getting closer to the heart of it. And people, what one thing I do with patients, and this is a something I learned in functional medicine, it's the functional medicine intake. You just create a timeline, you draw a line across a piece of paper, you put birth or conception on the left side and their current age on the right side. And I will plot out their life events under the line chronologically, their age. They went to college here at this age. They got married. This is where they live. This is the work they did. And then above the line, I'm putting down their health events, symptoms.

SPEAKER_01 12:37

Nice.

SPEAKER_02 12:38

So above the line, I plot out their health events, like their symptoms, their diagnoses. And then once you zoom out, you start seeing some patterns around maybe stresses that within a few months or a year or two have led to a major diagnosis. Sometimes people can see that their symptoms get worse every time this one thing happens in their life. And so that's really important information. But it's not lowering the amount of symptoms and it's not slowing down that process that's creating symptoms.

SPEAKER_01 13:12

Yeah, that's good. So, in other words, illness is a story. Illness is a story, historical story that is not just part of me is not working and I have ailment. It's a story of how you ended up here. And then the story unpacking that can help you with your healing. To the lesson, Susan just spoke of a very simple practice. Get a piece of paper, we don't have to make this complicated, put it horizontal, and put your birth date, birth year, and then draw a line to now. And all the key milestones, education, travel, people in your life, people who left your life, and then put about the major events that you believe influenced you, shaped you above the line, and below the line, some of the emotions, experiences, things that enlightened you, excited you, or they were just frustrating. All that information resides inside you. You already have it.

SPEAKER_02 14:20

I mean, and that's it, Ardishair. People have a lot of answers to their problems. But because there's so much commotion and chaos in our daily lives, it's hard to get to those answers, right? And this is where I really tell people you gotta just descend down into your knowing, connect with that gut feeling where intuition resides, and just think about what it is that you need more of and what do you need to let go of.

SPEAKER_01 14:49

That's right, that's right. So, on that journey, and that's what you do with your patience. Tell me about God. How did you arrive at the knowledge of God and the way that I learned about God? And in fact, a number of books behind me. I'd no idea the science of gut is a massive science, and it's so fascinating. So when you talk about gut, what falls under gut science?

SPEAKER_02 15:21

Gosh, my understanding of the GI tract.

SPEAKER_01 15:26

Can we say GI for GI stands for oh gastrointestinal tract that we also refer to as the gut?

SPEAKER_02 15:35

Just I use all those words interchangeably, GI, gastrointestinal, and gut. Yeah, so my understanding of that system has shifted quite a bit from when I was practicing conventional medicine to now digging deep into how all of the different systems in the body are connected to the gut. Actually, I didn't know what a gut microbiome was when I finished residency in 2007. It never came up. I never learned it. And it wasn't until I started digging into integrative medicine that I was like, oh, the microbiome, got it. Really important. But it's just an amazing system. The GI tract is a huge interface with the outside world, huge surface area. And barriers help keep us safe. And having a nice tight barrier in the GI tract allows us to control what enters from that hollow tube of your GI tract across the lining of the gut into the body, and what stays out and comes out the other end. And it's a remarkable set of processes that orchestrate this. And this requires the nervous system to be involved. It requires the immune system to be involved, the hormone system. So even though it's the GI tract, all of these other systems are embedded within it.

SPEAKER_01 16:57

So, Susan, when somebody says, and it's all over in literature in all the way like in your daily life, someone says, I have a gut feeling. What is it me?

SPEAKER_02 17:07

The gut, the GI tract, and the brain are very closely linked to each other. There's the gut-brain axis, meaning that these two systems are connected. There is bi-directional communication between these two systems where they're passing back and forth different chemicals or neurotransmitters, which are the communication molecules of the nervous system.

SPEAKER_01 17:44

Yeah, interesting. And topic of gut always comes up, usually not the first session, but in the second or third session, and usually follows into these categories. One, I ask people, what are they sensing in their body, especially gut? And they say, So, what is it about gut? And I tell them, God is the first body organ that they get shaped as we are in the fetus and develop. In terms of evolution, gut was developed before brain developed. And gut is a sense center of anxiety. That's where in our stomach tracks that adrenaline and the cortisol get created for stress hormones. So people, when they say my gut is tight, it's the cold bang, which means I'm anxious, I'm feeling overwhelmed, and really I'm basically hungering down and I feel the tightness in my gut. There are also people who say that I can't feel anything in my gut. I just feel there's a hollowness, or just some people have said actually, it's I feel a big bowling ball sitting there. That could be unresolved, pain, emotion, heartbreak, trauma that still sit there and have it being processed. And there are other people who say, My gut is almost like there's fire. I just feel that there's shooting, like volcanoes going there. Just already get unprocessed emotions. So it's always come up.

SPEAKER_02 19:22

We think of the gut as the second brain, right? There's the enteric nervous system where a big portion of just our nervous system sits in the gut. In fact, I think there's about a hundred million neurons, some crazy number of neurons that sit in the gut, and it's even more than more neurons than in the spinal cord. So there it's it shouldn't surprise us that stress, anxiety, mood disorders would affect our GI area.

SPEAKER_01 19:51

So for listeners that we look at gut, it's almost like you're driving your car, you never take it for too much, you never put new oil in it, and it's just there. The only time we pay attention when there's a problem, we go to doctors. So in our daily life, what do people need to know about gut health?

SPEAKER_02 20:14

The gut is a very dynamic place, it's constantly changing and responding to the environment. And the signals we send into the gut, into the body, largely shapes how the gut behaves. It will also change your gut microbiome, those collections of good, friendly microbes that live in the large intestine, also called the colon. And so we can choose to send danger signals into the gut by eating ultra-processed foods. Weirds that the body was not supposed to ever come in contact with. We can have enormous amounts of stress that goes unmanaged, lack of sleep, lack of movement. Or we can send different signals by choosing to eat something different that has more color and more plants in it, getting an extra hour of sleep, getting a little more movement, avoiding environmental toxins, which are a huge problem that we're just not talking about. And what is the gut microbiome? Those microbes are shaped by environmental factors. Very simple things, whether or not you, for example, have pets will help determine whether you have a healthier microbiome or not. Whether or not you've had a lot of antibiotics, what smoking, drinking, emotional stress, all of those things can influence the gut. And so it's a very dynamic system, which is actually good news because just as we can damage the gut. Microbiome and inflammation in the GI tract, we can also repair it. There are even some studies that show that with a rapid shift, a dramatic change in diet. Let's say you're a carnivore and you go to a plant-based diet, within a day and a half, there are very noticeable changes in the gut microbiome. That gives me hope. There are things we can do to make dynamic in kitchen. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 22:23

Something like pets, we have a family golden retriever. What is the relationship of pet and gut?

SPEAKER_02 22:31

Yeah, you're just coming in contact with different microbes, right? And there's studies that say kids who grow up with pets have lower risks of allergic type diseases. But you can oversanitizing your house. You want to come in contact with ordinary, boring germs that are just there taking up space, not causing disease. Because they actually look up microbiome is a fascinating thing. For every one cell in your body at our share, there's about five to ten microbes in you, which is crazy, right? There's actually more of them than us, and we're outnumbered. And they're not just there taking up space. We give them a free place to live. We give them food through like some of these fiber-like foods that we eat, prebiotics. And in return, they produce a lot of important molecules for us that we don't know how to do for ourselves. We actually depend on them. And so they can actually help produce vitamins, neurotransmitters. And so this is why there are studies that show that placing the gut microbiome by taking a probiotic supplement, not replacing it, but supporting it, can actually help improve depression, for example. Now that doesn't mean you have to go and buy designer bacteria. You can actually consume these through foods, fermented foods.

SPEAKER_01 23:47

Susan, these days you hear a lot in the social media about leaky gut.

SPEAKER_02 23:53

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 23:54

What does that mean?

SPEAKER_02 23:57

Leaky gut is my bread and butter.

SPEAKER_01 24:02

It's a crazy, where did that term come from? Just such a it's almost bombing in the house. There's a leak in it. What does it mean?

SPEAKER_02 24:09

That's right. There's another word for it too, hyperpermeable gut. So remember how I said your GI tract is a large tube, hollow tube that extends from the mouth all the way to the anus. So imagine that this tube is lined by a single layer of cells.

SPEAKER_03 24:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 24:27

Okay. And if you eat something or you ingest the bacteria or a toxin, for that thing to actually enter your actual body, to go from the hollow tube to into your actual body, it has to go across the lining of your GI tract, which is a single cell layer, just one layer.

SPEAKER_01 24:49

Single cell layer.

SPEAKER_02 24:51

Yes. And what happened when the gut gets damaged is that these cells or these imagine if they're bricks, they pull apart from each other. They're no longer touching each other and able to tightly regulate what comes in and what stays out. Now things can leak in between the cells rather than going through the cells. Does that picture?

SPEAKER_01 25:16

Yeah, so it's not things that are unprocessed, it goes through.

SPEAKER_02 25:20

Yeah, whether or not it's processed, what you know, whether it's a fully digested piece of food or undite partially digested, whereas normally the partially digested would not make it through because it's too big. Now, here's the thing that you have to know about leaky gut. Because if that big piece of food, that partially digested food, because maybe you didn't chew it enough or you don't have enough stomach acid or digestive enzymes from the pancreas, that food didn't get digested all the way down to a small size, let's say. And now it's trying to leak between leak into the body by sneaking in between two cells, what it encounters is the immune system. See, the body's smart. It's like we can't have just one checkpoint, you have to have a second layer of defense. So the immune system, which 70% of our immune system sits in the gut. Maybe 80. I don't know, but it's a lot. And it makes it should make sense to us because it's uh again, the GI tract is a large interface with the outside world. And we want to make sure badness doesn't enter. And so the immune system sits sitting there is going, like, what the heck is going on? That looks like a piece of egg, but the molecular size of it is a little too big.

SPEAKER_01 26:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 26:40

I don't know that's really egg. I think I'm gonna mount my defenses and fight this thing, and then you produce allergy and rashes and all this thing cut out. And this is how we think food sensitivities start. In fact, in functional medicine, we say you need three things to get an autoimmune disease. Helps to have the right genetics, yeah, helps to have leaky gut, and the third is a trigger. A trigger could be like a stressful event, for example. But leaky gut is a sort of a sentinel events, leaky gut, and trigger.

SPEAKER_01 27:15

So those you those three need to be in balance for you to live a happy life, if you're lucky.

SPEAKER_02 27:20

I would say so. And we are just now catching up with ancient kinds of medicine where Chinese medicine, Ayurvedic medicine, Persian medicine tell us that disease begins in the gut. I would also say good health begins in the gut, because again, it's such a large system. And if we can get the gut to calm down, many things improve. Like, for example, I have lived with eczema my whole life. Yeah, we think of that as a skin disease. You don't go to your GI doctor for eczema, you go to the dermatologist.

SPEAKER_03 27:55

That's right, that's right.

SPEAKER_02 27:57

But if you can think a little bit more holistically, if the gut is inflamed, it's going to send different signals out to all the other systems. And skin conditions can flare. And I can tell you, every time my stress levels go up or I'm not sleeping, gut acts up, my eczema acts up.

SPEAKER_00 28:19

I really get on the call and call a number of my friends and family. Did you know this?

SPEAKER_02 28:24

This is information, helpful information to know, right? Because you I have put steroids on my hands my entire life. And it wasn't until I started working with stress management and settling down my gut that I don't really deal with eczema as much anymore. From time to time, I still do. I'm not cured, but the burden of my skin issues are is way down.

SPEAKER_01 28:47

Yes, sir. Let me ask you this. So really this topic. So we have a young son, he's a the 24-year-old adult who lives in San Francisco. But growing up, going to school, so many of his friends, boys and girls, had food allergy. It was amazing how many allergies, different guidelines, do this, don't do that. And some of them almost it was entire food categories that allergies. What would you tell those parents? What do they need to know to pay attention to? Because they had all sorts of epiphen, all various medication data. How do you see those conditions?

SPEAKER_02 29:26

There's a huge rise in food reactions, and there are many different types of reactions, some that involve the immune system and some don't. But even in my, I remember in my kids' kindergarten class, it was like all the kids' mugshots with the food. You can do allergy testing, you can take antihistamines, you can avoid the foods, you can have the epi pens. Those are all important.

SPEAKER_00 29:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 29:51

But if you really want to make progress, you got to work on gut health. There are functional tests, lab tests that can be done. They're not done by your general doctors, they're done by integrative and functional medicine doctors that can shed more light on what might be going on with a child or an adult who's got food allergies, autoimmunity, inflammatory diseases, mood disorders. It doesn't matter. And that might help inform next next steps. But to be honest, I don't do a lot of that testing upfront, especially because I know what the test is going to show. It's going to show some GI inflammation, it's going to tell me your gut microbiome's out of balance. We need to support digestion. So why don't we just go ahead and do those things? Right.

SPEAKER_01 30:36

Exactly, exactly. So, Susan, now coming from gut health to emotional health. That's where I spend most of my time. Don't go to the gut health, inner health, but the clients that always have some sort of gut complication, the stomach, diet issues.

SPEAKER_02 30:56

Yeah, it's both ways. Just like we can have emotional stress, yes, and our GIS symptoms may act up, or we might feel something in our belly area. The reverse is also true. Gut inflammation can actually communicate back up and worsen mental health conditions like depression. That's right. So it's important to know that connection exists. And also, I would say the gut microbiome, again, those collection of friendly bacteria that live in the large intestine, they in a way act like the switchboard between and the brain, the gut and the hormone system, the gut and the immune system. They actually make things smoother and more efficient. And so working on gut support is really helpful for mental health conditions. And what I would say is if there's food that you're that you want to use to improve gut health, there's two categories there's prebiotics. These are the foods that are the fuel for the gut microbiome. They actually help these bugs grow and thrive. You know, onion, garlic, green leafy vegetables, bananas, kiwi, many foods that are high in this type of prebiotic fiber. And then so giving them the fuel, the food will help them grow and thrive. And then you want to replace the good bugs in through fermented foods to be fermented vegetables, fermented dairy like yogurt, kefir, or kombucha, our personal favorite at home that we make. It doesn't have to be hard, it's not quick, but is it worth doing? If you really want better health, I can't think of what else could be more important.

SPEAKER_01 32:45

I mean, you're doing it's on a steady basis versus just filming the good heavy diet of kombucha or garlic, you're just building to remember that the gut is dynamic, right?

SPEAKER_02 32:55

It's shifting to the environment. If fermented foods are coming in for five weeks, you'll have a gut microbiome. And then if you stop, yeah, you revert back. So it ends up being a lifestyle, it's a long-term commitment to yourself and your well-being.

SPEAKER_01 33:11

So, Susan, I know that the center is actually what do I do on a busy professional, busy mom, busy dad, go. What are some of the nuggets that people should know to have healthier guts that work in their lifestyles?

SPEAKER_02 33:33

Oh, I like things that don't cost money. Okay, I want to make sure that everybody can take advantage of this. I don't lower the barriers. Uh, and things that have long-term potential, right? That's something that's sustainable. And this is going to look different for everybody. I have patients that go spend time outside in the morning before, let's say, 10 a.m. to get natural light. What does that have to do with gut health? You're connecting to nature, you're supporting your circadian rhythms. That's helping orchestrate gut function. And it doesn't have to take time. You could, if you have to work or eat breakfast, go sit outside and eat, or if at the very least, sit in front of a window and get some light. It could be abstaining from things that suck up your time, like scrolling on Instagram and just being exposed to these fast-changing screens that are very hard for the nervous system. Loading up your nervous system with a lot of visual information, a lot of emotional information that's really unnecessary. We can find time, right? Throughout the day to attend to self-care. It could just be eating different foods. We now know there was a lot, very large meta-analysis that was done recently that said that basically the people that eat the most ultra-processed foods have higher risks of death. So these foods are killing us. And ultra-processed foods are when you turn over the label and there's many ingredients that you can't pronounce. That's it, versus a minimally processed food that's just been changed a little bit. You don't have to do it all at once. You just pick what feels right to you and go from there.

SPEAKER_01 35:11

So, Susan, for listeners who want to learn more about you and your practice recommendations about living healthier, where do they find you?

SPEAKER_02 35:24

You can go to my website, dr SusanPairovi.com. And we also have an upcoming podcast called How Doctors Heal, which I'm very excited about. Um, it's myself with a very good friend and colleague of mine, KT Sloan, and Dr. Terry Jaclyn, who's a naturopathic doctor. And all three of us have multiple sclerosis as a diagnosis, but we really talk about our own healing journeys as people and as practitioners, and how we have found our way through our own health challenges so that other people might glean something useful for themselves.

SPEAKER_01 36:01

This is beautiful how doctors heal. I look forward to that. Also for the listeners that you have a fabulous Instagram account that I see you in your own kitchen making food for the morning, for the afternoon, feel good food. So they get to see you up close and personal. And what does it feel like and looks like to take care of yourselves? If there's one thing you want the listeners to know, what would that be?

SPEAKER_02 36:34

I would say that you have way more influence over your health than you think.

unknown 36:40

Right.

SPEAKER_02 36:41

So we are in a medical system that tells us to take these pills and that's the end of it. I think that feels disempowering without following that up with here are like a hundred other things you can do to help yourself, but it's just not part of our mainstream medicine yet. But I think it's coming.

SPEAKER_01 37:23

So this conversation was about the gut and brain interconnection, and if having the struggles, if you're having health conditions, getting clear about what is going on versus I need a medicine, I need to practice this. So the bringing you here and hearing your wisdom, Susan, thank you so much, Dr. Peru.