Dr. M’s Women and Children First Podcast #19 Repost
Alessio Fasano, MD - The Gut
Today’s guest is one of the people who fundamentally changed the way we think about the relationship between the gut, the immune system, and chronic disease.
Dr. Alessio Fasano is a pediatric gastroenterologist, professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, professor of nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, director of the Mucosal Immunology and Biology Research Center, and director of the Center for Celiac Research and Treatment at Massachusetts General Hospital.
His pioneering work helped transform our understanding of celiac disease and gluten-related disorders, but his influence extends far beyond gluten. His research into intestinal permeability, zonulin, mucosal immunity, and the microbiome has helped build a much larger model of disease—one in which our genes interact continuously with our environment, our intestinal barrier, our immune system, and the trillions of microorganisms that live with us.
He is the author of Gluten Freedom and Gut Feelings: The Microbiome and Our Health, a remarkable exploration of the microbial ecosystem within us and what it may teach us about inflammatory disease, autoimmunity, obesity, neurological disorders, and ultimately personalized medicine.
What I particularly appreciate about Dr. Fasano’s work is that it pushes us beyond the overly simple question of “What causes a disease?” toward a much more interesting one: Why does disease emerge in one genetically susceptible person but not another?
And increasingly, the answer seems to live at the intersection of genes, environment, barrier integrity, immune regulation, nutrition, and the microbiome.
So today we’re going to explore that intersection: how the microbiome develops, what disrupts it, why gluten became such an important window into understanding immune-mediated disease, what we really mean by intestinal permeability, and perhaps most importantly, what this science tells us about preventing disease before it ever takes hold.
Dr. M
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