Citizen Science and the Wisdom of Pain: Will Bulsiewicz, MD, on the Plant Yourself Podcast
Channel: Sick to Fit | Plant Yourself Podcast
Date: 2022-06-14

Will Bulsiewicz, MD, is back, with a cookbook that's actually a workbook on solving your gut health issues. 

The Fiber Fueled Cookbook isn't just a collection of great recipes - and it is a collection of great recipes. 

What makes it special is that the recipes are embedded in a step-wise, logical, flowchart protocol to help you get to the bottom of whatever dietary triggers are keeping you from a vibrant and pain-free life.

Based on his philosophy that restriction is rarely a useful tactic, and that the preferred move is to repopulate our gut microbiome so it can handle the widest possible variety of plant-based foods, Dr B shows readers how to assess their sensitivities to FODMAPS and histamines (totally new material to me, and I've been at this health thing for a while), and overcome them.

In our conversation, we talked about his GROWTH formula for healing gut issues: Genesis (find the root cause), Restrict (give the body a rest and test the Genesis hypothesis), Observe (validate or reject the hypothesis), Work it back it (reverse the restriction and move toward resilience), Train your gut (rebuild the gut microbiome from the ground up), and Holistic Healing (fire up all the jets of a healthy lifestyle).

We spoke of his move to the private sector, as US Medical Director of Zoe, a startup that's practicing citizen science to develop a global database of gut microbes (something like a Microbial Genome Project, if I'm understanding correctly). 

We also talked about how the complexity of health and microbiome research calls for a new hierarchy of evidence, with the randomized control trial dethroned from its privileged position in favor of new models that can deal with near-infinite complexity. 

And we talked about scientific humility, taking on a gastrointestinal profession that hasn't been trained to seek healing, above and beyond disease management through prescriptions and procedures. 

We marveled at the simplicity of the Fiber Fueled solution, given the complexity of the problem. And we talked about the dual nature of pain; as a signal that can help us heal, and as an experience to avoid at all costs.