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Let's Gut Real - Easy to Digest Nutrition Science

Making nutrition science accessible and easy-to-digest. Andrea Hardy, Canada’s Gut Health Dietitian, is on a mission to connect people to credible, up-to-date nutrition information about gut health and digestive disorders. Nutrition misinformation is rampant. If nutrition advice online scares you, it’s probably not true. Let’s Gut Real is all taking the fear out of nutrition messaging, cultivating critical thinking, and helping you understand nutrition science. Andrea talks with guests about digestive health, the gut microbiome, hot nutrition topics, and nutrition misinformation, sharing messages that are easy to consume and that inspire sustainable action. Andrea likes to say her goal is to get people to take nutrition a little less seriously – which may come as a surprise coming from a dietitian. Through humour, she injects fun into her science-based media messages. After all, poop jokes aren’t her favourite kinda jokes, but they are a solid #2.

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  2. New ways to diagnose bile acid diarrhea with Dr Robert Battat

New ways to diagnose bile acid diarrhea with Dr Robert Battat

Nov 3, 2020

Bile acid diarrhea is a common cause of diarrhea in patients with IBS and IBD. Currently, our diagnostic tools are unaccessible and often, therapeutic trials with bile acid sequestrants are used in the diagnosis. Dr Robert Battat shares his research with a new diagnostic marker, C4, in the diagnosis and management of B.A.D., leading to more targeted care for patients.

Robert J. Battat, M.D. is an expert in inflammatory bowel disease specializing in Crohn's Disease and Ulcerative Colitis. He is an Assistant Attending Physician at the New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medicine and the Jill Roberts Center for Inflammatory Bowel Disease.    

Dr. Battat obtained his medical degree and completed both his internal medicine residency training and clinical gastroenterology fellowship at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. He subsequently completed a clinical and research fellowship in inflammatory bowel disease at the University of California, San Diego and at Robarts Clinical Trials under Dr. William Sandborn and Dr. Brian Feagan.      

He has a major interest in personalized medicine in inflammatory bowel disease and has extensively published scientific articles on this topic. This includes the development of a serum tess to diagnose bile acid malabsorption -which leads well into our topic today!

Dr Battat and I discuss:

  • What is bile acid diarrhea? 
  • How does bile acid diarrhea develop?
  • How is it diagnosed? 
    • SEHCAT Test
    • Therapeutic trial
    • C4 Testing as a measurement for precursor to bile acids
  • Is it a common cause of unexplained diarrhea in your practice?
  • How is BAD managed? 
  • Do you often see an overlap between BAD and IBS? IBD & BAD? 
  • Where the research is going with BAD diagnosis and management and what can patients and health care providers expect?

You can read Dr. Battat's research here:

Battat, R., Duijvestein, M., Casteele, N. V., Singh, S., Dulai, P. S., Valasek, M. A., ... & Jain, A. (2019). Serum Concentrations of 7α-hydroxy-4-cholesten-3-one are Associated with Bile Acid Diarrhea in Patients with Crohn’s Disease. Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology, 17(13), 2722-2730.