Episode 18 of Robust Health Radio features MD, PhD candidate Lucy Mailing. Lucy is a fouth-year MD-PhD student in Nutritional Sciences at the University of Illonois and was recently named an Emerging Leader in Nutrition Science by the American Society for Nutrition. Her laboratory research focuses on understanding how diet and exercise can beneficially modulate the gut microbiome and gut barrier function in states of health and disease. Lucy has co-authored several seminal papers in exercise science that were featured in the New York Times.

Lucy is also a staff research associate for the Kresser Institute for Functional and Evolutionary Medicine and writes weekly on her blog at NGmedicine.com She takes an evidence-based, integrative approach to gut, skin and autoimmune conditions, and currently helps clients with Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis, SIBO, acid reflux, irritable bowel syndrome, psoriasis, eczema, and acne heal from the inside out. You can find out more about working with her on her website or subscribe to her weekly newsletter.

In this episode, Lucy and I discuss:

2:50 Eczema as part of the atopic march, and it’s relationship to the gut ecology

6:45 The type of exercise that has been shown to support your gut microbiome

8:00 Losing the forest for the trees, zooming on certain microbial strains, and the concept of microbial diversity

12:00 Mismatch between stool samples and what’s actually going on under the hood

15:00 Do probiotics colonize the gut? Permissive gut environments versus non permissive gut environments. Individuality in colonization permissiveness

18:40 Established outcomes using probiotic supplements, and what you might not know about lactobacillus rhamnosus GG in the context of IBD

22:45 Temporal relationship between abx use and probiotic use, and how probiotics effect microbiome around abx use

27:45 Why your own poop post antibiotic use might be practice in the near future

32:00 How this newer research is influencing Lucy’s practice

37:00 Lucy’s research directions as it relates to exercise.

Connecting with Lucy:

Lucy's website

The blog post regarding the articles talked about in the show

Lucy's new york times article