Robert Whitfield MD explains how poor nutrient absorption damages the gut and brain, causing bloating, constipation, and pain. He stresses eating real food over processed options and actively managing GI health to improve surgical recovery, especially in his mostly female patient population.
The GI tract is intimately associated with your brain. And if you don't absorb nutrients, all sorts of bad things happen, not only in your GI tract, but with your brain. So let's just, for instance, say you have a lot of bloating, you have problems with constipation, you have abdominal pain. This represents maybe I have over 9,000 female clients. Probably 80% of them have some of that going on at any given time. So then we discussed if they are trying to follow a diet, are they taking supplements? Do they have to take things to help them move their bowels? It doesn't sound like a very glamorous thing to discuss, but in fact, it's extremely important. Every time you do one of these cases, whether or not their GI tract functions dictates a lot of their recovery process and their surgical outcomes. Because the fuel to recover is the food you put in your mouth. And if you don't eat real food, if you're constantly shopping in the aisles of the store versus the edges of the store, you're going to do poorly. And I micromanage my patients so they have the best possible recovery process.
