Getting to the guts of it with Sarah Di Lorenzo & Tobie Puttock
In this episode we spotlight gut health, and all the normal, and more unusual, health issues connected to our digestive systems. We speak to clinical nutritionist and the author of The Gut Repair Plan, Sarah Di Lorenzo, plus Melbourne chef and founder of Made by Tobie, a home delivery meal service, Tobie Puttock. About the episode – brought to you by Australian Seniors. Join James Valentine as he explores the incredible stories of Aussie characters, from the adventurous to the love-struck. Across 30 inspirational episodes, Life’s Booming explores life, health, love, travel, and everything in-between Our bodies surprise us in ways we never thought possible as we age, so in series five of the Life’s Booming podcast – Is This Normal? – we’re settling in for honest chats with famous guests and noted experts about the ways our bodies behave as they age, discussing the issues and awkward questions you may be too embarrassed to ask yourself. Sarah Di Lorenzo is a clinical nutritionist and author of four books, including her latest, The Gut Repair Plan. She is resident nutritionist for Sunrise and Weekend Sunrise, and is passionate about sharing information about a healthy diet and eating the right foods to help with sleep, stress, weight loss, immunity, and slowing down the ageing process. Chef Tobie Puttock began his career in Melbourne, before travelling and cooking around the world, including alongside good friend Jamie Oliver, who shared his passion for simply cooked food. His most recent focus is his own brand of frozen ready meals, Made by Tobie, with a focus on producing meals that aren’t harmful to us or the environment. If you have any thoughts or questions and want to share your story to Life’s Booming, send us a voice note - lifesbooming@seniors.com.au. Watch Life’s Booming on Youtube Listen to Life's Booming on Apple Podcasts Listen to Life's Booming on Spotify Listen to Life's Booming on Google Podcasts For more information visit seniors.com.au/podcast Produced by Medium Rare Content Agency, in conjunction with Ampel Sonic Experience Agency Transcript: James Valentine: Hello and welcome to Life's Booming Series 5 of this most excellent and award winning podcast. I'm James Valentine and in this series we're going to ask the question, is this normal? I mean, as we age, stuff happens to us. Our bodies change, things fall off, we get crook, stuff doesn't work as well as it used to. There's nothing we can do about it, we're getting older, we're ageing. But which bits are normal? Which bits do we have no control over? Which bits can we do something about? That's the kind of questions that we're going to be asking in this series, Is This Normal? of Life's Booming. Now, of course, if you enjoy this series, leave us a review. Tell all your families and friends about it. And we want to hear from you as well. You can contribute to this. If you've got questions about things in particular that you want to know, perhaps there's some particular wear and tear happening to you, let us know. We'd love to see if we can answer that question in the series. We're going to look at things like menopause, gut health, mental health, lots of other burning questions. So, think about those areas and if there's something in there that's specific to you that you'd like us to cover, let us know. On this episode, Getting to the guts of it, we spotlight gut health, the normal, and the more unusual health issues connected to our digestive systems. We speak to clinical nutritionist and the author of The Gut Repair Plan, Sarah Di Lorenzo, plus Melbourne chef and founder of Made by Tobie, a home delivery meal service, Tobie Puttock. Sarah Di Lorenzo: Hi, thank you so much for having me. James Valentine: Why are you a nutritionist? I can't even say it! Sarah Di Lorenzo: Nutritionist, a clinical nutritionist. Why? I started with my own gut health, really, was what drove me into becoming a clinical nutritionist. I just did really notice around the age of 15 that foods affected me differently. I noticed it with white bread in particular, and I would go home and say to my dad, who's a psychiatrist, a doctor, and I'd just say, I don't feel well when I eat that food. And he goes, oh yeah, yeah, we all feel like that from bread. It's probably a Greek thing, whatever. You'll be fine. Don't worry. And so I watched my dad always living his life bloated, and I was like, yeah, yeah, it's not great. And then when I was in Italy when I was 18 for a few months, it was the most incredible experience that I clearly just couldn't enjoy, because I had gut issues, I had non-coeliac gluten insensitivity, self diagnosed. And then I ended up after that, when I came back at that young age, I was doing my science degree at Sydney Uni, I came back and I was like, I need to work on my gut because my quality of life is not great. And so it dominated my life and I just couldn't enjoy my life. And so that's what I started doing was working on my own gut and I'm 51. So that's like 30 years ago, more so 32 years ago, I started, I realised then, so I went through my own gut healing journey and have spent a lot of those younger years just looking at my own rest and retest, trying different foods, creating menus, creating diets, I just did it as a hobby and a passion. And then I went on to study nutritional medicine after that, when I realised that it was really my calling. I feel like I'm a healer. I do. I've healed myself and now I want to heal everyone else. James Valentine: Now, let's go to chef Tobie. Hello Tobie. Tobie Puttock: Hello, how are you today? James Valentine: Thank you so much for joining us. It's fantastic to get some time with you. This is something that's close to you. You think about the gut a lot. Tobie Puttock: My wife, when we first met, she was very controlled by her stomach issues. So obviously all tied in with the gut. She had food poisoning when she was younger so badly she was hospitalised for a few days – not from my cooking! I didn't know her at this stage, it was in the UK, and it really screwed her gut up. So I remember for the first about three or four years of our relationship, everything was dictated by that. And it was IBS basically. And I didn't really understand, I'd never met anyone with such an issue before. And, you know, we'd have dinner plans, we'd be all ready to go. And suddenly her stomach would start to feel uncomfortable and we'd have to cancel dinner. Our whole life revolved around the stomach issues and after being together a few years, I had the opportunity to write my first cookbook. We were living in the UK at the time, we came back to Australia and I met an amazing person named Dr Sue Shepherd. She goes under a different surname these days, but she is kind of a guru in the gut health space and she spent some time with my wife and basically together we adjusted her diet and she solved her own issues. So she no longer has IBS. James Valentine: That's great. And it's come on a lot, hasn't it? Our consciousness of the gut, eating for our gut biome, I would say it's a way of thinking about food that's come up about in the last decade or so. Tobie Puttock: Yeah, 100 per cent. Being in food for my career and my whole life revolves around food, I see things jumping in and out of fashion and gut health has been a huge fashionable topic for a long time, and now it seems to have mellowed out into actual just fact. People accept that your gut is super important and eating the right foods and gut health really can make a huge difference to your life. James Valentine: Yep. Well, let's plan a diet, a pantry for good gut health. What kind of dishes, what kind of ingredients do you focus on if you're thinking gut health? Tobie Puttock: Well, first of all, I try and eat as little processed foods as possible. So I also have quite an empty pantry at most times, but obviously fermented foods are fantastic, I do a lot of fermenting. After I jump off here, I will be going to make sauerkraut this morning, but things like kimchi, most fermented foods, are fantastic. And then there's going to be, if you do have things like IBS, there's going to be a lot of trigger foods that will be quite acidic as well. But yeah, definitely for me, we have a lot of sort of robust greens, lots of cavolo nero, Tuscan kale, brussels sprouts and all the good stuff there. James Valentine: Right. I like that description of robust greens. These are the tough ones. Tobie Puttock: All the brassicas. So we're steering, you know, I think things like cos lettuce are fantastic and they're sexy and rocket lettuce and all that kind of stuff. But I remember a few years ago, it was probably 2013, I made a big life change, I just got spat out of kitchens, I was probably quite unhealthy without realising it, I was just going through life as a lot of people did and I was insanely stressed. And I started doing a lot of yoga, and my wife, at the time, was seeing a personal trainer and trying to get shredded. And she was going to the personal trainer a couple of times a week, but coming home to eating my Italian food that I cook in restaurants, which I now wasn't cooking because I wasn't in restaurants. And she gave me a list, this amazing list of all the things we can have as much as we want of, things we should never have, and things we can have in moderation. And we started cooking from that list. And I should also pop in there that we tried to conceive and it didn't happen naturally. And they tried to tell us – well, they did tell us – that IVF would be the only way. And with a total diet overhaul cutting out all processed foods. And I don't want to say that kale saved our life or anything, but it kind of gave, you know, kind of did a little bit. I lost probably six kilos of body fat, my wife lost 10, and she wasn't big to begin with. We conceived naturally, and we kind of look at th
