Oh hey there, thanks for joining us on the body and soul podcast called Healthy Ish. I hope you are feeling healthy today, or perhaps you're feeling the ish bit or both together. Anyway, thank you for tuning in to our chat with doctor will Bolschwitz. I am Felicity Harley. Let me tell you more about doctor b as he is better known. He is a gastro entologist New York
Times best selling author. He is founder of a supplement company, thirty eight Terror, and he's going to well give his verdict on the claims on social media about cold therapy for better gut health. Plus, he will remind you of the importance of a diverse plant based diet. Now make sure you listen in to our sister pod, Extra Healthy Ish,
where well he talks more about supplements. Of course he does own a company full disclosure, but we do have an interesting chat around whether they do help gut health, and he also talks about the impact of the gut on women's hormone health. You can search for Extra Healthy Ish where you get your podcasts. Doctor b Welcome to Healthy Ish. How are you.
Oh, I'm grateful city. Thank you for having me. It's great to see you.
Yeah, it's actually nice to have you on the pod. I've had your book on my bookshelf for many years, so I'm looking forward to chatting all things gut health.
Got to dust it off, No, well, maybe.
Anyway, I want to talk about something that you put on your social media that caught my eye. Influencers claiming cold plunges. Well, it's kind of like a godsend for all aspects of health. But what about specifically for the microbiome? Can they help gut health?
Yeah, so, actually we don't have complete clarity on this, okay, but I think that the answer is probably yes. And before I dive into that, let me just start by saying that I think that there's more powerful tools that exist. Right, this is just a tool. It's one of the things that you can do. But certainly, if you want to be healthy, there's much more that we should talk about, and that includes eating a healthy diet with a wide
variety of different plants. Okay, when it comes to the cold plunge, the key with the cold plunge is that when you first get in, actually your heart rate will go up, all right, and it'll be a shock to the system. It activates the sympathetic nervous system. But then there's this response when we submerge ourselves in cold water. And by the way, it doesn't have to be like a total body submersion. It could actually just be your hands.
Believe it or not. Oh no way, yeah, So you can get a similar effect, Like it's going to be a more pronounced effect if you submerge your body, but you can get a similar effect just by submerging your hands or even by using a cold wet towel on your face. And what ends up happening as a result of this, they call it the diver's response. And what you get is actually activation of the parasympathetic nervous system through the vegus nerve. So the vagus nerve is what
connects our brain. It's one of our cranial nerves. There's these twelve cranial nerves. This is the only cranial nerve that connects directly from our brain, Like it literally is connected straight to the brain, and it weaves the skull and passes down into the body and it connects to all of these other parts of our body, including our lungs, our heart, and our gut, and it's collecting information sensing
and it's speaking between the gut and the brain. So when we talk about the gut brain connection, the most clear representation of this is the vegus nerve, And in this case, by doing cold plunge, we are activating the vegus nerve, and activation of the vegus nerve gets the body into a relaxed state. It's good for digestion, and the evidence would suggest that it's beneficial to our gut microbile and so it would seem to me that that cold plunch can in fact be good for the gut microbes.
There we go.
We look forward to seeing more research about that. But you did say there that there are obviously otherwise that you can improve the health of your microbime. And actually I pulled out a quote from your book and in it you're write, the single greatest predictor of a healthy gut microvime is the diversity of plants in one's diet. Okay, talk to us about this.
Yeah, well, okay, so you know we're we're taught to identify like singular foods, super foods. Hey, or here's this weird thing that we found in the Amazon rainforest, and like this is the thing that's going to fix all your problems, when in fact, actually the way that our body works is you know, in some ways it's simple, but in other ways, I'm like, wow, this is just it makes so much sense. There was a study that
was done. It was called the American Gut Project. And by the way, it was done by Rob Knight, who's from New Zealand, and it was and it wasn't just Americans. Yeah, and it wasn't just Americans either, Like they literally had people from across the world. But they called it the American Gut Project because it's based out of the United States. And in the study, they they basically were making connections between the health of the gut microbiome and diet and
lifestyle choices. And what they discovered was a surprise. The number one factor out of everything that they looked at, the number one factor that was predictive of having a healthy gut microbiome was the diversity of plants in a person's diet. Specifically, the people who were consuming more than thirty different varieties of plants per week were the people with the healthiest guts. Now, plants is many different things.
It's not just fresh produce it's not just salads, it's fruits, it's vegetables, it's whole grains, seeds, nuts, legomes, spices, herbs. They count two. Frozen food counts two. So we have a lot of different choices. But my message to the listeners is, don't count grams of fiber, don't count calories, don't count macros. Have fun and count the varieties of plants in your diet. You can gamify this. I like it,
you know, and real quick flicity on the topic. The reason that this works the way that it does is that every single plant is unique. Every single plant has a different mix of different fiber and polyphenols and vitamins and minerals and also these things that we call phytochemicals, and all of them make an impact and help to shape the microbiome and make it healthier. So when you eat a wide variety of different plants, in essence, what's happening on the inside is that you're feeding a wide
variety of different microbes. And when you feed a wide variety of different microbes, basically you're lifting up the whole system. You're rising the tide.
How do you you know? I mean, you're known as the Gut Health MD on socials. Do you keepe a account of you know, like a mental tally of how many plants you ate every week, or there are specific ones you make sure you include in your diet.
Well, so when you put this way, I want to I want to like keep itally and then when I hit thirty, I take my foot off the gap. From my perspective, I'm going to live my life. I'm going to enjoy the food that I eat, but I am going to incorporate this concept. So when I'm in the supermarket, when I'm in the kitchen, and when I'm at the at the dinner table, these are all opportunities for me to just quite simply look for opportunities to add more.
So a quick example of this felicity is like, look, as a family, we regardless of what recipes I may have in my book and my cookbook, right, we don't make a different recipe every night. We have like the same rotation of recipes every week. Because that's the way the families are. We have like we we like what we like, and we just keep going back to the well am making.
Us all feel sane.
That's the way we all are, right and it's okay to like it's it's cool to explore and try something new once in a while, and if you really love it, then keep it. Right. So when we make uh, we make pasta, right, most people they just put do pasta pasta sauce and maybe they add meatballs or whatever it is, or sausage or whatever they want to add to that. Right, But to me, the pasta sauce is a vehicle for plants.
At a minimum, we are dropping bagomes, oftentimes lentils, sometimes chickpeas. Like, at a minimum, we are dropping some lagoons in there, and then I'm gonna definitely get some onions and some garlic, some fresh basil. Right, And to the listeners at home, like, what would you if you opened up your fridge, what would you find in there that you could throw into this pasta sauce? Because the thing about pasta sauce is if you wet it, if you wet it stew, everything
sauce softens up and it tastes delicious. Right, I mean you could throw carrots in there, They're gonna taste amazing.
Yeah, Doctor Bay delicious recipe. Thank you for coming on, healthies, Oh, thank you well, friends, another reminder that we should all be consuming thirty plants or forty plants or somewhere in between. Eight week anyway, thank you for tuning in to this episode with doctor Will. We'll make sure listening to him on extra healthy issue where we have well. I found
it a very intriguing chat about gun health. If you did enjoy this one, tell us you can rate this podcast, also review it anything else hed to Body and Soul dot com dot you follows on socials. Grab ourprint edition which is out in your local Sunday paper, and until tomorrow stay healthy ish