hot girl with stomach issues

what is going on with gut health?

Welcome

Thank you for subscribing to my newsletter! Here you’ll find my thoughts on health + wellness topics and the latest in my life. This week’s issue is all about gut health, drinking, and… cats.

Health/Wellness

If you’ve been on Twitter or TikTok lately, you might’ve noticed the catch phrase “hot girl with stomach issues.” While it’s funny, it’s also indicative of a more serious problem. Most of us know someone who is dealing with gastrointestinal, or GI, problems (think IBS, indigestion, Crohn’s disease, etc.).

What is IBS exactly? IBS is an acronym for irritable bowel syndrome, and Mayo Clinic defines it as, “A common disorder that affects the large intestine. Signs and symptoms include cramping, abdominal pain, bloating, gas, and diarrhea or constipation, or both.” Basically, IBS is just a blanket term for something’s a bit off with your digestion and elimination.

Our parents’ generation never dealt with the rates of digestive problems we’re seeing now. Blue Cross and Blue Shields reports millennials are in worse health than Gen Xers at the same age, and one survey found that 61% of its nearly 72,000 participants had at least one GI symptom within the past week.

So what’s going on? Gut health can be negatively affected by most things in our lives — food we eat, our mental health (and vice versa), environmental pollutants, drug (pharmaceutical and recreational) and alcohol use, to name a few. Most of these factors have gotten worse due to social media and technology use, hustle culture, and drug overprescription, which could explain a lot about why we’re seeing such a decline in gut health. I want to talk about something that's much less discussed: worsening generational health.

Pottenger’s Cats

In 1932, Dr. Francis M. Pottenger began a 10-year cat study to observe the generational effects of diet. One group of cats was fed raw food and the other was fed cooked food. With each generation, the group of cats eating raw food maintained excellent health, while the other experienced declining health. The cats in the cooked food group experienced allergies, dental issues, miscarriages, trouble nursing, stillbirths, and mental disorders such as anxiety and emotional reactivity. What’s more, that group’s health became progressively worse with each generation — unhealthy cats were birthing unhealthier offspring. By the third generation, nearly 100% of the cooked food cats developed allergies and could no longer reproduce (sound familiar? More on this in an upcoming newsletter…).

Pottenger showed us how a cat’s diet and health affects its offspring. Obviously, humans aren’t cats. But, more contemporary research corroborates Pottenger’s peek into epigenetics. We often think of epigenetic changes in terms of serious diseases like cancer, but rarely do we look at how our heritable traits may be contributing to nonclinical or undiagnosable “hot girl” problems like stomach pain (of course, left untreated, digestive issues can lead to more critical health problems down the line).

The ability for us to easily and properly digest our food is largely determined by the health of our gut microbiome. Bacteria colonizes in our gut before birth and is transmitted from our mother. The state of our gut microbiome from the time we are born has lifelong effects, and all of this is determined before we are even aware of processed food or had a chance to breathe polluted air.

With the rise of industrialization and fast/processed foods, could generational human health be progressively weakening? This question reminds me of my mom telling me how she remembers women of her parents’ generation giving birth in rural Lebanon then washing up and immediately returning to work in the fields. If that isn’t a testament to the health of our ancestors and potential of human strength, I don’t know what is. At the same time as we are sicker than previous generations, humans are living longer on average than at any other point in history (thanks to advances in medicine and technology).

The good news is Pottenger also found that health could improve when switching the diet of the cooked food group to a raw diet, though minor health problems still persisted in the following generation. Similarly, the human body can undergo rapid change with proper diet— the gut microbiome is responsive to diet change within a number of hours. More importantly, epigenetic research robustly concludes that diet and lifestyle can turn genes on or off, or in this specific case, fix our gut health if we are suffering from IBS.

Our parents’ diet and lifestyle may affect our health at a cellular level, but our choices are probably larger determinants of our health outcomes. So, if you’re the proverbial hot girl with stomach problems, know there’s hope for you!

Business

Bella Hadid recently announced that she’s now the COO of Kin Euphorics, a nonalcoholic beverage brand. Two things to draw from this:

1. Influencer/model to entrepreneur pipeline is still alive and well— why market another company’s products when you can promote one that you own?

2. Nonalcoholic drinks are the future. I’m bullish on the nonalcoholic space because let’s face it— alcohol is a poison to the body and much like smoking cigarettes, getting drunk is becoming uncool, boomer behavior. The no-alc or low-alc space has grown 506% since 2015 according to Forbes, and Gen Zers are drinking 20% than Millennials, who drank less than previous generations.

Personal

For the first personal section of this newsletter, I want to address something I get all the time. When one of my friends finds out that I’m now a health coach and nutritionist, or when I tell someone new that I used to be a software engineer, I’m almost always met with wide-eyed surprise. “Wow, what a change!” It never really felt like an extreme change for me; oddly, it felt like a natural transition.

I think what tech and nutrition work have in common is that they are both tools. Before, I was writing code to automate processes and build apps which benefitted users and my companies’ bottom lines. Now I help people implement diet and lifestyle changes to reach personal goals like weight loss or increased energy. Reprogramming their bodies, if you will 😏. Most importantly, I truly feel like this is the most important work on the planet, so it would have been crazy for me not to change industries!

It’s been a wild ride leaving corporate and doing my own thing, and I’m excited to chronicle my experiences in upcoming newsletters.

Final thought… it’s persimmon season! Persimmons are one of my favorite fruits, despite multiple Hinge guys telling me that’s something I have in common with their grandmother. Usually I find that the first persimmons hit New York City in Korean bodegas before finding their way to larger grocery stores. Though I did just see them at (the legendary) East Village Organic yesterday.

Just as fleeting as persimmon season, it’s the end of the first newsletter! Thanks so much for reading, and I’ll see you in the next one :)