Mona SharmaCelebrity nutritionist and wellness advocate

Are Your Gut Bacteria Controlling Your Health? 😳 Dr. Colleen Cutcliffe Explains

5 Oct 2025 · 1 min

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In this interview, Dr. Colleen Cutcliffe emphasizes the critical connection between the gut microbiome and metabolic health. She notes that about 88% of Americans exhibit metabolic inflexibility, a condition linked to differences in gut bacterial composition between healthy individuals and those with metabolic syndrome. Dr. Cutcliffe describes fecal microbiome transplantation (FMT) – the transfer of stool from a healthy donor to a diabetic recipient – and cites early studies showing that this procedure can improve insulin sensitivity. She explains that the gut microbiome is responsible for metabolizing the majority of ingested food into molecules that influence the immune system and inflammatory responses, underscoring its central role in overall metabolic regulation.

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Look at your poop. Don't be embarrassed. Check it out. Yeah, teach your kids. 88% of Americans are metabolically inflexible. So what discoveries, what findings have you found in the lab that associate the gut microbiome and gut bacteria with this metabolic dysfunction? There are some differences between people who are healthy and people who have metabolic syndrome. And this is going to get a little bit gross, but there's a procedure called a fecal microbiome transplant, and it is exactly how it sounds. You literally give someone your shit. So you take stool from one person who's healthy and you put it into a person with diabetes. And some of these studies that were done, a few of them, they showed that when you did that, you could actually see better insulin sensitivity. And what we have discovered, let's fast forward 20 years of research, is that your gut microbiome is actually where you metabolize the vast majority of your food into all these molecules that are really important for your immune system, your inflammatory response.