I really admire the tenacity of my guest of today’s episode of Period Story. I speak with Nora Cavani, a molecular biologist with a background in pharmaceutical engineering, an award winning gut health expert and founder and CEO of Alba Health, a company on a mission to prevent chronic diseases through gut health science.
In this episode, Nora shares:
- What happened to destroy the credibility of the PCOS diagnosis she received when she was a teenager
- How coming off the pill led to the biggest transformation of her life
- How getting told that she would need to use cortisone for the rest off her life to manage severe eczema led her to the extensive research that resulted in her becoming an expert in the gut microbiome
- How an anti-inflammatory diet and a focus on removing any gut microbiome disrupters transformed her gut health, virtually eliminated her eczema and led to regular periods
- The terrifying moment that led to an endometriosis diagnosis and what she thought when a doctor told her that nutrition had no impact on endometriosis
- What inflammation actually is and the three types
- Why our gut microbiome is so important, even as babies
- What led her to start Alba Health, a gut microbiome testing company for children from 0 – 18 years old
- And of course, the story of her first period
Nora says our gut microbiome is very important at any age, but even more important when you’re a child because this is when microbes seed the gut and form the gut microbiome. She says that what happens in these first years is critical because these microbes help train the immune system, form and educate our metabolism and they affect our brain and brain development.
Thank you, Nora!
Get in touch with Nora:
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SHOW TRANSCRIPT
Le’Nise Brothers: Thank you so much, Nora, for coming on the show today. I’m really excited to speak to you, to talk about your business, Alba Health. But first I want to take you all the way back and ask you the question that I start each episode off with, which is tell us the story of your first period.
Nora Cavani: Thanks so much for having me, Le’Nise. I’m really excited for this conversation. So my first period, I had my first period when I was 13 years old and I think it was a surprise. I didn’t really know what to expect and what it was about to be honest. I’m from a small town in Italy and I would say back then it wasn’t something you would talk a lot about, not as much as today. So I simply noticed that I was bleeding and I told my mom and she told me, oh, okay, so now it happened and she gave me a pad and she told me, okay, now this is going to happen every month. And so that was very brief and very concise, and that was it. And um, that’s how I was introduced to it.
And over the years, it actually for me didn’t really happen every month. I had very irregular periods at the beginning. For many years I even had, um, delayed periods, even almost a year. So it was something that was not super regular but back then I didn’t really talk much about it or there wasn’t a lot of conversation about it.
So it was a bit, of a taboo back then.
Le’Nise Brothers: Even with your friends, so at age 13, that’s kind of when a lot of girls, they start to menstruate. And after you had your first period, did you go and talk about it with your friends? Did the taboo extend to conversation among the friendship group?
Nora Cavani: I think we might have talked a little bit about it, but not that much I have to say.
Le’Nise Brothers: Right. Okay. So you’ve said you had irregular periods, and what was the point where you realised, oh, this is supposed to come every kind of 30 odd days or so and it’s not, and then from there, what did you then do about it?
Nora Cavani: I think initially I didn’t really talk about it with anybody. I just kept it for myself for some time. And I thought, okay, let’s see what happens. And then, so I didn’t do anything about it for a few years because I didn’t really know who to talk about it and what to do. And then over the years I started to understand, okay, this is not very normal because sometimes I didn’t have it for like six months.
And then I believe I went to a gynaecologist and I was told that I have PCOS and I was told take the pill. That seems to be the answer for a lot of things that women go through. Whether you don’t have your period, you have acne, you have period pain, whatever. It’s always take the pill. So that was my experience back then.
Le’Nise Brothers: When they diagnosed you with PCOS, did they do any testing? Did they do an ultrasound or was the diagnosis based on the irregular periods?
Nora Cavani: I’m pretty sure, yeah, they did ultrasounds, but there was nothing really visible back then. And I did hormone testing. There was nothing off. But it seems like PCOS is this umbrella term for whatever you’re going through that they don’t know what it is. I don’t know if that’s your experience as well.
Le’Nise Brothers: Absolutely. I interviewed someone last week and she had a very similar experience to where she got this diagnosis and then for her. It was this label that then just played on her mind.
And I just wonder the same for you, because my experience is that, when I work with women who have PCOS, they often get told that they have PCOS based on an ultrasound. But then we go in and we do more extensive testing and we find out, well actually this might not actually be PCOS.
You know, you can, there are a number of reasons why you might have irregular periods and what’s really interesting is to know that it’s very common, especially in the first three to four years of having a period for the periods to be irregular. My question back to you on this topic is, what was the result of having that label, that diagnosis of PCOS?
Nora Cavani: That’s a great question. I really thought oh, I have this condition and that I was somewhat wrong. I had this risk and this problem. So for a long time I just thought, okay, I have something that doesn’t work right.
But I also don’t have any proof of that because there was nothing that was identified as really the problem. And I didn’t really know what to do about it. The solution seemed to be, oh, just be on the pill. Then when I was in my twenties, when I was in university, I started to talk about this with my friends and I remember one time I told my flatmate, oh, I have PCOS.
And then she told me, oh, I also have PCOS. Pretty much everyone has PCOS. And I was like, really? What? What do you mean? Uh, it’s like, yeah, I have some irregular periods. I’ve had these tests, there isn’t really anything or, and others would say, oh, I have very painful periods. Um, so they told me I have PCOS.
So I really started to see the pattern here of, okay, so a lot of other women have a similar situation where they have something that is irregular somehow. They’re fine. They don’t have big symptoms and then they’re told they have PCOS and to be on the pill. So that destroyed a bit my credibility in into that diagnosis and I started thinking, okay, then.
It’s nothing or it’s normal in a way because so many other people have it. And I think that made me stop looking for a deeper root cause of what was really going on. And I started basically just taking the pill, masking the symptom. Now I have regular induced periods and it’s all good. So I forgot about it and I stopped looking into it.
Le’Nise Brothers: And how long were you on the pill?
Nora Cavani: More than 10 years.
Le’Nise Brothers: Okay. And what was the impetus that got you to come off the pill? Was it working with a doctor? Was it something that said to you, okay, I need to try something different?
Nora Cavani: And that’s the biggest transformation I had in my life.
When I was 27 years old, I started to have very, very severe eczema. So it’s an inflammatory condition of the skin. So imagine like rashes. I had them on my entire body and that’s when my body basically came to rock bottom because I was in pain 24/7. I couldn’t sleep. I was exhausted. I was scratching myself all the time.
I was literally bleeding. My skin was bleeding all day long. So that was really the time where I thought, okay, I’m sick now. I have a real disease and that now I realise that back then, that was the symptom I was seeing, but it was very likely a buildup of many other things that were happening in my body.
Maybe these irregular periods were also an early sign of that because they started already my teenage years. So irregular periods, I had a lot of UTIs. So urinary tract infections. I took a lot of antibiotics because of that. I had acne as well. I had this eczema and all of these things build up over time to a point where I really thought, I cannot live like this anymore.
And I went to so many specialists. They, what they tell you is, oh yeah, you have eczema, it’s a chronic disease. You just need to apply cortisone and it will get better. But you need to live like that for the rest of your life because it’s a chronic condition. So that was the moment where I thought, I cannot live like this.
I cannot continue to mask these symptoms and I cannot, I literally cannot live like this until I’m 60, 80, whatever, like I cannot have a life like this. I actually have a background in molecular biology and pharmaceutical engineering. So I come from science and I said, okay, now I’m going to try to understand this, where this comes from.
And I started to call scientists all around the world to read scientific publications. To read books, call the authors, and really trying to get to the bottom of this. And I identified that my diet and my lifestyle were very, very far from optimal. And I also identified that when I analysed my gut microbes.
So my gut microbiome, I had a lot of imbalances there. I had very reduced gut microbiome diversity. So I very, I had very few microbes and I had some patterns that are linked to inflammation. And I thought, wow, that’s interesting because eczema an inflammatory condition. It’s inflammation on the skin, so I have inflammation in my gut.
And then I did a blood test and I saw high systemic inflammation. So I started to connect the dots and say, okay, I have high inflammation inside of me. My gut microbiome, instead of supporting my body, it’s producing inflammation. I have high inflammation systemically in my blood, and then I have this inflammation on my skin, and then I have pimples, and that’s also inflammation on my skin.
So when I connected the dots, I was like, okay, now I need to try to fix my gut and my lifestyle and try to do everything I can to reduce this inflammation. And when I did that, my life changed completely because right now I haven’t had any rashes on my skin for two years, so I don’t have eczema at all.
All of those rashes that were covering my body disappeared. My acne went away. I will have maybe a pimple or two every once in a while, but completely different than before, and I no longer have that high systemic inflammation. I completely changed my gut microbiome. So that was so transformational for me that prompted me to really become an expert in gut microbiome and to start a company on it.
Le’Nise Brothers: I really am fascinated by your story because it not only tells us the importance of nutrition and lifestyle and the effects of what we put in our body, but it’s also, you know, when I did my, my nutrition training, one of the things that our lecturers always said to us, when in doubt, go to the gut.
When in doubt, check out what’s going on with the gut because we know that, you know, the gut is part of our immune system. It’s so important for our hormone health and when we see issues with our skin, one of the reasons is that can be an issue with the gut. I just want to go back to what you said about the pill.
So this part of this journey of changing your diet, changing your lifestyle. Was coming off of the pill a part of that journey as well?
Nora Cavani: Yes. I forgot to mention it. Sorry.
Le’Nise Brothers: It’s okay.
Nora Cavani: I went straight to the question. Uh, yes. So while I changed my diet I started to really try to eliminate all disruptors to the gut microbiome.
And we do know that pharmaceuticals disrupt the gut in to some extent. We know that not only antibiotics, but also for example, paracetamol, ibuprofen, other medication for acid reflux can disrupt the gut microbiome. And I thought, wow, I’ve been taking the pill for 10 years. Is that good for me?
Because I studied pharmaceutical engineering and I know that every time you take a drug, it always has side effects to some extent. So I started to look into that and I was like, okay what happens if I come out of that? So I stopped it. And what I saw is that at the beginning I had a bit of irregular periods, but then over time my periods became very regular, 30 days.
I had never had such regular periods before, and that was when I had changed my diet and my symptoms were already almost, uh, entirely gone. So I couldn’t help but, but thinking okay, so going back to an anti-inflammatory diet and to correct diet to a good gut microbiome to almost no eczema anymore, could that have an effect on my period regularity?
It makes sense. There are very good reasons to believe that.
Le’Nise Brothers: Absolutely. That’s basically one of the foundations of the work that I do, which is around supporting others who want to improve their menstrual health through nutrition, through lifestyle, through adding targeted supplements.
And I do see through this work just how these small changes can make such a huge difference. And I think what’s interesting is that people think that they need to do these huge overhauls of their diet, but there is also this idea that you need to build habits as well. And this is what’s going to make the changes last for a lifetime.
And you know, you now are eating this anti-inflammatory diet that is making a huge difference. If you hadn’t had any eczema symptoms for two years, apart from the odd pimple. I also want to ask about the endometriosis.
So before we started recording, you briefly mentioned that you also have endometriosis, which we know is a condition of inflammation. And this is also something that you’ve been able to address through nutrition. Can you say a little bit more about your endometriosis journey?
Nora Cavani: Definitely, this is something I found out about this year, so I have no symptoms.
I haven’t had symptoms. I haven’t had painful periods at all until this year. There was one day where I was very stressed because of other reasons, and I had an incredible pain in my abdomen. It was crazy. I had never experienced something like that. It was night, it was during the nighttime. I woke up in the middle of the night and I felt like my belly was exploding.
Really, I thought, now my belly’s going to blow up. I didn’t, I have no idea what that was, and it was so severe and so bad that I had to call an ambulance, and an ambulance came over to my place. I couldn’t open the door, so I had this super scary moment where the nurses and the doctors were on the phone with me and they were like, we’ll, need to break the door to break in, because I was screaming in pain and I couldn’t open the door.
So that was terrifying. I was able to open the door in the end. Uh, the doctors came in, they did a lot of different checks on me and they told me, you don’t have anything. You are perfectly healthy. There’s nothing to worry about. Just take a paracetamol and go to sleep. So that was a terrifying experience.
I was very, very worried. Because of that. It had never happened before. And they said, you know what, uh, you’re young, you’re very healthy. You take no medications. It’s probably just something that happened and I was like, Hmm, really? I don’t trust this. I, I’m not, I don’t know. I, I want to look further into this because this sounds a little bit suspicious.
So the first thing I did was to book an appointment to get an ultrasound because I really wanted to see if there was something, and then I also booked a full body MRI, because I like to go to the bottom of things like I, I do not trust by now when people tell you, oh, you’re fine. So I want to know, and what they saw with the ultrasound was that I had endometriosis, so I had ovarian cysts.
And quite large ones and then the MRI also saw different adhesions and quite extensive ones. Basically it could be considered stage four endometriosis, so that was a shocking thing to learn because I had no symptoms. I felt like I was very healthy at the healthiest state of my life, and I have a very balanced diet, and I felt like I reversed my symptoms.
Why do I have this? So the doctors told me that this likely started about five years ago. Interestingly, that was when I had severe eczema. And interestingly, endometriosis, as you said, it’s an inflammatory condition. And five years ago I had very high levels of inflammation in my body. So in my mind, and I talk to a lot of functional doctors about it, it’s very likely that this process started back then when I had this high inflammation eczema, acne.
That inflammation also started there and triggered endometriosis. It is also possible that because now I have this anti-inflammatory diet, I don’t have a lot of symptoms and I feel generally good.
Nora Cavani: The doctors also told me, okay, with these kind of lesions, I’m sure you feel so much pain. And I’m like, no, I don’t really have it.
I had it at one time. That happened to be a very stressful day as well, but otherwise. I’m, I’m quite good. So that’s how I’m trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together and that also prompted me to look even further into how the gut microbiome links to hormonal health and to endometriosis.
Le’Nise Brothers: Mm-hmm. I want to ask you about that in a second, but going back to what you said about the ovarian cyst, were they endometriomas?
Nora Cavani: Yes.
Le’Nise Brothers: Okay. So I just want to clarify for listeners, the ovarian cyst that Nora mentioned that are linked with endometriosis, they’re called endometriomas, and they’re also known as chocolate cysts because they can be quite large and filled with old, old blood.
So just making that clarification. So very different to the cyst that you can see with PCOS. And so now then going to the link that you mentioned between gut health and hormone health because you hosted a breakfast a month ago for your company, Alba Health, which specializes in children’s gut health.
And throughout their whole presentation I was thinking, okay, when is she going to bring out something for women’s hormone health? So let’s talk about the link between gut health and hormone health.
Nora Cavani: Yeah, so there are many things that we know about that link. There are also many things we don’t know because as you know, there’s a big gap in research when it comes to women’s health.
Le’Nise Brothers: Mm-hmm.
Nora Cavani: There are a lot of things that are not researched properly. Um, but what we do know is that women with endometriosis have a different gut microbiome. Very often they have reduced diversity, which is generally a bad thing and generally also linked to inflammation. So when you have less gut microbes, less different types, that’s called reduced diversity, and that is something that women with endometriosis often have.
They also often have some signatures that are linked to inflammation. So just to make it very simple, if you have gut microbiome imbalances, they can produce inflammation. Inflammation can trigger endometriosis. That is one thing. Then the second thing is that our gut microbes can also affect the metabolism of estrogen and how estrogen is removed from our body and endometriosis is a condition that is triggered by estrogen dominance. So when you have too much estrogen in your body, so once again, if the gut microbes regulate estrogen in our body or have an effect on estrogen in our body, if you have an imbalance in the gut microbiome, that can affect estrogen balance.
So, the gut microbes can affect our hormones directly. So that’s another mechanism of how they’re linked. There are also other mechanisms because the gut microbiome can also affect our brain and stress. Stress can have an effect on hormones. There’s also metabolism because the gut microbiome can affect, uh, body weight, can affect how we produce or extract energy from food.
That also has an effect on our hormones. And the gut microbiome can also affect nutrient absorption and digestion. That can also have a, an effect. Everything is linked, so it’s very complicated because everything is linked. We cannot just at one organ. But the, the easiest way to remember it is that the gut microbiome, if it’s imbalanced, it can affect inflammation.
And endometriosis is an inflammatory condition and it can affect estrogen levels, and estrogen levels are directly linked to endometriosis.
Le’Nise Brothers: And what’s also interesting is that when estrogen is imbalanced, I don’t really like the term estrogen dominance, which is used quite a lot in women’s health because there are times in our cycle where estrogen will be dominant.
And actually we want that. I prefer to talk about imbalanced estrogen in relation to progesterone. Maybe that’s me being pedantic. When estrogen is too high in relation to progesterone, that also creates more inflammation because too much estrogen can be inflammatory. So inflammation is a big word that we’ve been talking about a lot.
And just for listeners who are listening to this and they hear inflammation, can you just clarify for them what you mean when you say inflammation?
Nora Cavani: yeah, so inflammation is, actually a natural, phenomenon in our body. So in it can be completely normal and needed. So imagine when we have a little cut on our skin, right?
What happens is that that area can become inflamed, so it can become, uh, red, a bit swollen a bit warmer to the touch because the immune system is calling in all the cells that will help, first of all, fight off pathogens and bad bacteria so that you don’t get an infection, and it helps trigger the repair of that cut, right?
So inflammation is something that can be absolutely normal and needed in our body to repair something that is not working properly. So you have a little cut the immune system causing all the cells. There’s a repair and then it’s over. So this is called acute inflammation, so it’s inflammation that happens temporarily.
And that’s absolutely needed. It’s positive, it’s a mechanism of our body to repair the problem now. So that’s not a problem. The problem is when we have a chronic inflammation and systemic inflammation, um, that means that that same process happens. In, uh, bigger areas of our body and for a long period of time and it doesn’t stop.
So that is problematic because it can trigger a number of symptoms, really, uh, that you might not link necessarily, uh, to the gut or, or to something that you find in our blood? Right. Um, so when you have systemic inflammation that’s been linked to digestive symptoms to skin symptoms, so eczema, acne, any sort of rash.
It can be linked to mental health issues as well. That seems to be actually triggered by inflammation in the body and even in the brain. Weight gain, for example, metabolic issues, diabetes, allergies. So pretty much every chronic condition seems to have the root in inflammation. And inflammation, so where, where does it come from? It can come from. Many different things. Today, our modern lifestyle, you could say, especially in industrialized western countries, can lead to inflammation imbalanced diets, exposure to toxins and to certain artificial compounds. Not exercising, stress, uh, not sleeping adequately.
All of these things can lead to inflammation. And the gut microbiome is something somewhat in between, right? Because if the gut microbiome is imbalanced it can produce inflammation. It can be like a factory of inflammation within you, and it’s something invisible. It’s something that up to now, people didn’t really have the instrument to understand, and when I started Alba Health, I really tried to create a company that would help people understand the gut microbiome and understand how to restore it and how to take care of it so it doesn’t become this machine of inflammation, but rather it’s a well-functioning organ that can help you.
Take care of your body and all of the physiological processes.
Le’Nise Brothers: Thank you so much for that explanation. I think it’s really important just to be able to make that delineation between chronic and acute and systemic inflammation because I think inflammation is a bit of a buzzword at the moment, and people I find they don’t really understand what it really means.
I want to just ask you a question about the diagnosis, so booking an ultrasound and then booking a full body MRI. That’s, you know, I know there’ll be listeners who think, oh my gosh, that’s a dream to be able to just do that. So there is a position of privilege that you are coming from and you are able to use that privilege to get a diagnosis relatively quickly ’cause in the UK for example, if you go via the NHS, it can take anywhere between seven to 10 years to get an endometriosis diagnosis, and I wonder if, my question really is from that diagnosis, is there a next step for you? Is there going to be excision surgery or is it going to be something that you continue to manage through nutrition and lifestyle?
Nora Cavani: Great question. So first of all, yeah, I want to talk a bit about what the doctors told me and what solutions they presented to me. The first thing actually that came to my mind was, oh, what is this going to mean for my fertility? Right? That was the first thing. Luckily, my situation, it seems like I have a lot of eggs that looks good and, I don’t have any lesions in the uterus. So the first good news I got is, look, you might be able to have a normal pregnancy and you have a lot of eggs and that’s not affected. So that was the first great news for me. It can vary very much. For other people that can be different lesions, they can be less, they can be more.
So it really depends case by case. What they told me was first of all, you should take an IUD, which is a device that releases hormones. The second one was, you need to be on the pill, a progesterone pill, because that will rebalance your hormones, so to speak. And I asked to them. Does my lifestyle and diet affect endometriosis at all?
And their answer was absolutely not. There is no link between nutrition and endometriosis and this makes me so angry. This makes me so angry. This makes me so angry because, and this, this is everything that is wrong with our system. I would absolutely accept if a doctor told me. I don’t know, or I would not need to look into it, or the official guidelines don’t allow me to tell you that a specific diet will be better for you or something like that.
That’s fine. But saying that there is no link between nutrition and endometriosis is, first of all, factually wrong. Factually wrong because there is no study that denied the link between the two. So you can’t say that at most you can say there aren’t enough studies that allow me to recommend a specific diet that I would understand, but saying that there is like factually there, no link between the two is a lie.
So that makes me very angry. I did meet one doctor that said, look, there are some studies that show that anti-inflammatory diets can reduce the symptoms. It’s not a cure, but it can lower the symptoms, and I think that’s a good representation. I think that’s fair to say. Uh, but another one, and it was in the number one hospital in Sweden, I’m based in Sweden.
She told me there is no link between nutrition and endometriosis. I found that really shocking.
Le’Nise Brothers: At that point in your journey, were you able to say, well, actually I don’t think that’s correct.
Nora Cavani: I said that. But I didn’t find a person that was receptive to this message. And this is the other thing, I find that there are doctors that are curious and they’re interested and they want to be updated and they want to understand it, the latest knowledge.
There are others who come from a position of I’m the doctor and I know better, and you are just finding some information on TikTok and you don’t know. So there’s two kinds of doctors in my experience. I don’t know if you agree with that.
Le’Nise Brothers: A hundred percent. In my work as a practitioner, in this women’s health space, in my experience as a patient, but also in the conversations that I’ve had with hundreds and hundreds of women, it’s very similar.
You have doctors who would take a very patriarchal or matriarchal approach, as in I’m the doctor, don’t use Dr. Google or Dr. TikTok. And then there are others who will say, actually, I don’t know. You know, I’ve had a doctor who’s gone onto Google in front of me and said, let me just check this. And for me, I love that approach because it’s saying like, I understand that medicine, health science is still evolving. And what I learned in medical school however many years ago, even if they just graduated recently, it may have changed. So let me check that. And I think what’s really important is that you are the expert in your own body. And some doctors, they don’t accept that.
And I’m very much not. I’m, you know, some people can be very anti doctor because of these experiences. I’m not like that. But I do think that there’s work to do. Some doctors have work to do in this kind of space around bedside manner, as it were.
Nora Cavani: Yeah. Exactly. And I find, and I had the same exact experience with my eczema.
I spoke to so many dermatologists who told me straight to my face that there is no link between diet and the skin. And remember I wrote my master thesis in pharmaceutical engineering on the link between diet and eczema. So I did that comprehensive review of literature, and that was 10 years ago on how diet and lifestyle can affect eczema.
So there are strong studies and this connection is well documented. It’s absolutely true that it doesn’t transfer to the average GP and even to the average dermatologist. That’s completely understood. Uh, but just because a doctor is not well informed and not updated in their own field, it doesn’t mean that doesn’t exist.
I find it very, very worrying that doctors who are supposed to help us and help patients will not have the humbleness and, uh curiosity really to stay up to date. I understand that they’re busy and they have a lot and there’s a lot to catch up on and they cannot be experts in everything. But I think just the attitude of being open and listening to what a person is reporting and also their observations on their life.
I find it very worrying that some are not open to listen to that.
Le’Nise Brothers: Hmm, absolutely. I want to now talk more about your company, because what I really admire about you is this proactive approach. You took a really proactive approach to your endometriosis journey. You took a very proactive approach to your eczema journey.
Your eczema journey then led you to found a company, Alba Health, which specialises in gut microbiome testing and nutrition support for children age zero to 13. Can you talk a little bit about why you decided to focus on children’s gut health versus the idea that you could take your own experience and then translate it to a company that specialises in adult microbiome health.
Nora Cavani: Yes. And actually now we are also offering our test up to 18 years old. And for at the moment, we also offered for adults that are already our users. So I will tell you more about that. Just to bridge the transition of how I started the company and why we started to focus on kids. So I had my experience where I reversed my symptoms, however I am still a very sensitive person, so I still, I am prone to inflammation. I need to pay attention to what I eat, to how I live, and that has become my new lifestyle, right? So I started to ask myself, why am I so sensitive? Why is that, and why is it that today one person out of three has an allergic disease, so eczema, an allergic disease, allergies, and asthma.
Those three are the allergic diseases. So today, one person out of three has a condition like that and in the UK, 40% of kids have an allergy today, and this has increased rapidly in the past decade. In Sweden, where I’m based, it quadrupled in the past 50 years. So if, when I was a kid, I was the only one in my class that had an allergy.
Today we have 40% of kids that have an allergy. So it just started to it became a curiosity. You know, why is it that today people are so sensitive? To foods, to compounds, to whatever, like plants. It just came as a question, you know, why, why is that? And then the next question was like, can we stop this because I’m just tired of this model where you have a condition and you’re offered a quick fix for the symptom.
Basically, uh, something that, um, suppresses a symptom and masks the symptoms instead of like completely erasing your disease, that should be the dream, right? That’s, that should be what our society strives for. We should be able to erase and stop diseases, not just continue them and, and put a little, take a little pill and take the birth control pill and take the cream for eczema.
I just started to play with this thought. Could we stop and erase chronic diseases completely. So I started to look into this and really, I started to talk to scientists in the same way I did it to reverse my condition. I started to call scientists and try to understand when does this condition start?
When did it start for me that I became so sensitive to all of these different, uh, foods and, and compounds. You know, how does that even start? And what I found out was very, very interesting. So our gut microbiome is always very important at any age, but it’s even more important when you’re a child because when we are born, our gut is empty.
There’s no microbes there. And then over time, microbes start coming in and they start to almost like seed the gut and they start to grow and they form the gut microbiome. And that forms at the age of three to five years old. So from zero to three to five years old, microbes start coming in and they start to form this ecosystem.
And then three to five years old, it becomes more stable and it becomes something that you keep for your life. So what happens in these first years is very, very important because these gut microbes help our body do a lot of things. One of them is that they help train the immune system. The second one is that they help form our metabolism and educate our metabolism, which is how we extract energy from food.
And also our weight, affect our weight set points. And then the third, they also affect our brain. We know a bit less about that. It’s more complex, but the, our gut microbes also affect our brain and brain development. One thing scientists found is that if you test the gut microbiome of a child early on, you can predict the risk of allergies, eczema, asthma, and obesity later in life.
So that I found really interesting because if you test the gut of a child early on, how can you predict their health later? It means that something already happens there. Then at that point, and the other thing I found interesting is that there are some gut bacteria in children that help train the immune system, but today, kids are losing them because of antibiotics, because of c-section, because of ultra processed food and because of the clean environments we, we live in. Um, so some studies show that 90% of babies in the US lack this gut bacteria that build up the immune system. That means a higher risk of allergies, of eczema, of asthma.
I thought this is a disaster because in essence, what’s happening to the planet where we’re losing biodiversity is also happening into baby’s gut right now. So I thought, okay, as we speak, there’s millions of babies being born with those imbalances, and they have a higher risk to have that disease that made me suffer so much. So I basically quit my job and said, I want to start a company to help parents know this and to tackle it right away and to stop it. Because that’s when you realistically can reduce the risk of all of these inflammatory diseases. Also endometriosis potentially, right? Because these gut bacterial reduce inflammation if you don’t stop them right there, then you have, you are prone to have higher inflammation that can also lead to endometriosis. So that really became my mission and I started Alba Health with that objective. I started with a professor who has over 800 publications in this. He’s one of the biggest professors in the world on this.
He has a big study in, in Finland, and we developed a gut microbiome test specifically for kids. We’re the only company doing this in, in Europe. And we test the gut microbiome of kids. We give parents a detailed report on what we found and what it’s linked to, and we give a plan on how to restore and take care of the gut microbiome through a consultation for half an hour with a nutritionist.
What we saw is that parents really learn so much about their kids get health, they know exactly what to do. And a lot of our users say that their kids stop having eczema and constipation. So we see huge results with those two conditions, which is great. Of course, they also say, I feel more confident about making food for my child, knowing everything about their health.
But those are very clear benefits. We see we have now thousands of customers and we have 4.9 out of five on Trustpilot, so it’s really a service that helps parents understand everything they need to know about their kids’ gut health in such an important timeframe.
Le’Nise Brothers: It’s so fascinating and everything that you were saying about the gut and the microbiome, I just find so interesting because it’s such a key part of our health and there’s still such a lack of understanding. I mean, in the UK we’re seeing more and more understanding. We’re seeing, you know, lots of studies. We’re seeing a lot more gut focused foods, even in supermarkets like Sainsbury’s and Tesco, and so it definitely seeping into the wider understanding. But for the average person who has kids, they have a busy lifestyle. What are those kind of simple tips that your nutritionist will give parents who use your tests and their issues come back?
What are the kind of simple tips you give them?
Nora Cavani: Our tips are all about food and probiotics. Those are the two things, right? We don’t prescribe pharmaceuticals, surgeries, or anything medical, right? Um, so those are the two things, and our approach is the following. Our first step is that we identify what is lacking and what is working well.
So that’s what we do with the test, right? The test is all about seeing, okay, these things are working well. These bacteria are missing or they are too low, then the second step is to think, okay, how can we restore it? And there’s two things that we do. One is that we supply and nurture what needs to be there.
And then the second one is to reduce the disruptors. So the first one is, for example, a child is lacking some specific bacteria. So the approach is if they’re not there at all, we need to introduce them somehow, for example, with probiotics. But also we need to take care of the diet because diet, food is the fertiliser for this bacteria.
So, if you just take a probiotic, but the diet is not adequate and it’s not supplying the fibre that microbes need, then it’s not going to work. So our approach is probiotics plus fibre. Sometimes probiotics are not needed because we don’t sell probiotics. We don’t make any money out of probiotics. Sometimes we say the truth to the parents, Hey, you don’t need to buy any probiotic you need because the strains are there, the bacteria are there.
We just need to enhance them, and that can be done through diet. So diet and probiotics are the most important ones. It’s important to say that for adults, probiotics will not really seed the gut because probiotics in adults go in and out. They can still support the gut, they can still be helpful, but a lot of people think, oh, if I take this probiotic, I’m going to have it in my gut.
No, that’s not how it works. For babies and children, young children, that’s how it works for adults. It doesn’t work that way. So diet is far more important than probiotics. Then the second thing I told you was to reduce disruptors. So a lot of people today don’t realise that. They have things in their daily life that are disrupting the gut microbiome.
One of them is medications, so taking medications all the time. I know I have so many friends that take a paracetamol a lot of times, like even weekly, because of a headache, because of this, because of that. Those things can disrupt the gut microbiome. Antibiotics can disrupt the gut microbiome.
Living in too clean environments, using antimicrobials all the time can disrupt the gut microbiome, not sleeping adequately, for example, not exercising, not being in nature. There’s many things that can really disrupt the gut microbiome, ultra processed foods, for example, sugar. So we really work on, okay, what, what is this family’s lifestyle? We take a very long questionnaire where we collect everything. These are the disruptors; these are the things that progressively we need to swap out. We don’t need to necessarily cut out everything from the beginning, but what are good alternatives that could work? So our nutritionists are very skilled in helping parents with smart hacks.
Not so much are like, okay, now cut sugar, cut everything, cut, you know, cut all the things you like, but more like, okay, so. You like this and you eat it every week or every day. How about we swap it out for this other alternative that is similar, that cost about the same but has less of a disruptive effect on your gut microbiome.
And we see that with very simple changes and a probiotic, we see results even in a matter of weeks, even one week, two weeks, because in children everything is simpler in a way. And everything that they taking as food has a direct and big impact on their health. So we really see that, especially with kids.
Small changes go a very long way.
Le’Nise Brothers: I think that will be really encouraging to the parents listening. I know I’m listening and I’m thinking of the things that I try to do with my son who’s 12 and how I try to, to sneak things in and often the simplest things, they really just make the biggest difference, and you do see results with rather simple changes.
I want to ask you about what’s coming up next. Is there any markets you’re expanding to, any, anything else you’re planning and that you’ve got in the pipeline?
Nora Cavani: Now it’s a very exciting time because we’re growing a lot. We started out in Sweden, now we’re available in all of Europe and we’re growing a lot in the UK.
We see incredible interest. And we’re also really growing our webinars. So we do webinars and we do a lot of free education on the link between the gut and all of these different conditions in children and in adults. So if anyone is interested in this link and just in learning about this they can find us in our Instagram, alba health.co or our website.
And we do a lot of education there. Next things for us is we’re working on something very exciting, which is a way to continuously support families on recipes, on hacks over time on demand. So after we, we give our report and our tests and our consultation, we see that, that’s incredibly helpful. But we always look at things as, okay, how can we support the parents over time because most of our users email us afterwards and say, I want more recipes, I want more hacks, and I want to know more. So we’re working a lot on how can we help educate and take this for forward over time. So I can’t say much about our next product, but we’re working on that. How can we support over time and help parents learn more and more hacks. More and more fine tuning over time to improve their family health. That’s one of them. The second one, I can also say that we’re looking a lot into women’s health and into pregnancy, postpartum, even fertility and, um, everything that is around that area, uh, because of course a child’s health even starts with the parents’ health before, not only the mom, it’s not always just the mom that has all the responsibility, but it already starts in pregnancy. It already starts in the fertility time and in conception. We always think of how can we help next generation be healthier and not have this nasty chronic conditions. And the answer is always it all starts with the parents and it all starts with what’s happened before. So we’re focusing a lot on that and we’re looking a lot into that space as well.
Le’Nise Brothers: Fantastic. I’m really interested in what you have coming up next, and I can’t wait to see once you release it out there.
What’s the one thought you’d like to leave listeners with today?
Nora Cavani: If you are a parent, the one thought I would really love you to think about is your child’s gut microbiome is extremely important right now for their health here now, but also for their health, for life and later in life. And so it doesn’t need to be through Alba or anything.
But I hope I inspired you to think about that and to look into ways to improve your child’s gut health, because that’s extremely important for the health. If you’re not a parent, I hope I inspired you to look into how your gut health affects your health and wellbeing. It might be that you have symptoms.
It might be that you don’t have symptoms. It doesn’t matter because it’s important for all of us. Taking care of your gut microbiome and diet is extremely important for your lifelong wellbeing and health.
Le’Nise Brothers: Fantastic. Thank you so much for coming onto the show today. You shared so many incredible insights and thank you so much for sharing your story.
Nora Cavani: Thanks so much for having me, Le’Nise.