New Normal Project: Dr Alan Desmond - Improving your gut health by eating more plants (NNP #51)

Dr Alan Desmond - Improving your gut health by eating more plants (NNP #51)

Apr 11, 2019

What are the 5 top evidence-based tips to maintain your gut health?

And which 3 questions should your doctor be asking you about your diet?

Dr Alan Desmond, a plant-based gastroenterologist from the UK, is fascinated with the diet that is most likely to improve the gut health of his patients, especially those with gastrointestinal problems like inflammatory bowel disease. And having reviewed the medical literature he has come to learn that the more plant foods and the more whole foods we eat the better our gut health will be, whether we have a gastroenterological problem or not.

So now not only does he eat a wholefood plant-based diet but he also recommends this to his patients and asks them 3 simple questions to help them improve their diets. You will hear these questions in this episode of the New Normal Project podcast.

Alan is originally from County Cork, Ireland and having completed his medical and specialty training in Cork, Dublin and Oxford is now a Consultant Gastroenterologist in Devon in the South-West of England, where he lives with his wife and children. Alan has gained substantial experience in diagnosing and treating patients with all sorts of digestive problems; including coeliac disease, diverticular disease, irritable bowel syndrome, Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis. He eats a varied, wholefood plant-based diet, enjoys his cooking and is active on Instagram (@devongutdoctor) where he posts photos of wholefood plant-based meals backed up by scientific evidence.

In this podcast, Alan also talks about:

How his journey to become a doctor started as an ill newborn
How he became hooked by the specialty of gastroenterology
The degree that a plant-based diet can reduce the risk of colon cancer
His long-standing interest in the microbiome (and what that is)
The diversity of plant foods increasing the diversity of the microbiome
What is harmful about overconsumption of processed foods
What a course of unnecessary antibiotics does to the gut
The difference between prebiotics and probiotics
The amount of nuts and legumes recently recommended by the EAT-Lancet commission
The Happy Gut course he developed with the Happy Pear
The benefits a plant-based diet has in inflammatory bowel disease
How some populations have very little of the diseases he treats
And the groundswell of plant-based eating he is observing

Alan recently spoke at the Nutrition in Healthcare Conference held in Melbourne. Thank you to Doctors For Nutrition for inviting him to the meeting so I could interview him. His talk about inflammatory bowel disease and his participation in the conference were hugely valuable.

I hope you learn a lot from listening to Dr Alan Desmond.

Live well, feel well, do well.

Andrew Davies

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Links to people, organisations & other resources mentioned:

Dr Alan Desmond

Dr Alan Desmond’s clinic website

Alan Desmond instagram: @devongutdoctor

DFN Nutrition in Healthcare Conference 2019

Doctors For Nutrition

Happy Pear

Happy Pear courses