Aaron Hartman, MD gives practical, low-tech advice to improve digestion (chewing slowly, mindful eating, walking after meals, eating real food) and argues that advanced gut microbiome testing can be helpful but should generally come after patients clean up lifestyle factors and maintain changes so test results are interpretable and actionable.
Chapters
Just chewing slowly, taking time to experience your food is going to increase digestive enzyme production. It's also going to slow the processing of food in your GI tract to give your gut more time to actually break down things. And so there's so much stuff we can do before advanced testing, but again, by time. I've seen people, they've already done most things, seen five to six practitioners, and we do the testing on them. So it's a yes and no. Is advanced testing helpful? Yes. But you really should clean up things first before you do the test, because you don't want to know. Are you, you know, is your gut messed up as you're feeling horrible? Of course it is. The question is, if you clean things up, what's your gut look like then? I guess that's the basic summary of this, is using it in the right situation and then maintaining your lifestyle changes. Whether it's having a moment before you start your meal, whether it's being thankful when you eat, whether it's going taking for a walk after you eat, just eating real food. Whatever changes you've made, you just really need to stick with them. If people maintain the gains made by doing a kind of gut cleanse or changes made based on a gut test.