How being good to your gut could be the key to longevity.

What made you decide to become nutritionists?

As teenagers living in a small village in the north-east of Poland, close to the border with Belarus, we dreamed of?a better future for ourselves. After Joanna fell in love with a young Belgian man she met online, we both moved to Belgium in 1999 and?started to build a new life. We were very aware of how we needed to prove ourselves as immigrants, since there were a lot of Polish women who came to Belgium as cleaning ladies. The first thing we did was learn French and Dutch at Centrum voor Levende Talen, Leuven / CLT language centre where we had lots?of fun meeting many people from different cultures. And then of course we needed a degree. It made sense for us to study nutrition since we had finished agricultural high school in Poland where we were taught farming,?cooking and housekeeping.

And then you both graduated.

Yes, but I’m the only one who went on to practice nutrition. My sister started working as?a customer service representative?in the medical field, and eventually made it to the European Commission as administrative assistant. I stayed where I had worked as an intern: in a big industrial kitchen of a residential care center.

What was that like???

Well, to tell you the truth: it didn’t appeal to me. First of all, I didn’t enjoy telling elderly people what to eat. As a young girl, it just didn’t feel right. Secondly, I didn’t agree with the ‘shortcuts’ that were supposedly meant ‘for the good’ of our residents. Aside from plenty of bread and milk products, we gave our residents a lot of powdered foods and ready-made meals. We were told it was because old people have trouble chewing, but the reality of it was of course that it was cheaper and easier than ‘real’ food. Also, the more fresh products in your kitchen, the stricter the food safety standards. Eventually I quit that job and started working for Prof. Laevers , at the university of Leuven, where I learned a lot about HR.

Did your experience in the residential care center change your view on the importance of healthy nutrition???

Yes, somewhat. But it wasn’t until much later that I really started looking into how food impacts our overall health. By this time my sister and I both had two children, and we started experiencing similar symptoms: fatigue, poor focus, aches and pains.?Doctors couldn’t help us, so we were eventually diagnosed with fibromyalgia at the university hospital in Leuven.

What did it feel like to be diagnosed with a disease that is increasingly being viewed as autoimmune?

Well, fibromyalgia and CFS (chronic fatigue syndrome) are just clinical terms for energy disorders. The fact that we were having exactly the same symptoms at the same time in our lives, made us suspicious. Surely there must be more to this, we thought. Our parents (who were still living in Poland) had fallen severely ill, so we were driving back and forth to take care of them. On top of that, we were both working full-time and raising young kids. All the running around, without taking any time for ourselves, got the better of us. So Joanna decided that if doctors couldn’t help us, we would do it ourselves. We checked into a bed & breakfast in the Ardennes and started researching how we could improve the health of our bellies and intestines.

What did you find out?

We discovered the importance of the ecosystem in our digestive system, and the effect of fasting.?By cutting out breakfast, many microorganisms in our bellies became alive, so we immediately felt we had more energy throughout the day. But the real breakthrough came when we started reading the work of Professor Jeroen Raes from the Nederlands Moleculair Diagnostisch Laboratorium . He published the first scientific paper that established the connection between the composition of the gut microbiome?and symptoms of depression.

Was that your ‘tipping point’?

Yes, absolutely. Prof. Raes delivered conclusive proof that people who experience depression lack two bacterial strains, called Coprocoscus and Dialister, in their gut microbiota. The question (still) remains whether we become depressed because we lack these bacteria in our gut, or whether it’s depression that causes the absence of these strands. That’s still being researched, but the work of Prof. Raes and his team is a huge milestone in the advance of our understanding of the mind-gut connection. I also warmly recommend ‘Darm Mit Charme’ or?"Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body's Most Underrated Organ" by Giulia Enders, and the work of Dr. Raphael Kellman , MD, the author of ‘The Microbiome Breakthrough’ and ‘Microbiome Thyroid’.

It must have been very exciting to find out about these new developments at a time that you were looking for answers to improve your own health???

It wasn’t just a huge relief for us on a personal level, but being able to witness such a breakthrough in the world of health and nutrition was truly remarkable. Researching the mind-gut connection is very costly because it involves aerobic microbes. It really is because of the groundbreaking work of the likes of Prof. Raes and his team that we now have a more in-depth understanding of how our food does indeed impact our overall wellbeing.? It made such an impression on me that I decide to go back to school in 2015 and study health coaching. I loved how lifestyle had become so central to sustaining and preserving our health.

Which methods are used to assess the connection between the?gut?microbiome and the?brain??

DNA sequencing is a process whereby scientists use advanced sequencing techniques to identify and analyze the DNA of various microbial species present in the gut.?Metagenomics involves studying the collective genetic material of the microbial community in the gut, which provides insights into their functional potential and interactions. This requires very expensive devices.

How did this knowledge of the mind-gut connection impact you?as a nutritionist???

First of all, my sister and I came up with the concept of ‘microbiome friendly food’.? In order to be healthy, you literally need to feed the bacteria in your gut. It took us a while to understand, but once we did, it became the vision behind Klejman Fermentista . Living a healthy life involves cutting out sugar, being active, managing your stress levels by meditating, fasting and consuming healthy foods, which include fermented vegetables. The funny thing is that we used to eat them at least three times a week as we were growing up in Poland. It wasn’t until we got sick that we realized that we had cut them out from our diets when we moved to Belgium. There is a very interesting study about a higher prevalence of breast cancer among Polish women who immigrated to the US, as opposed to Polish women?who remained in Poland. The main hypothesis is that consumption of fermented cruciferous vegetables, a staple component of the traditional Polish diet, reduces the risk of breast cancer.??

https://maps.cancer.gov/overview/DCCPSGrants/abstract.jsp?applId=6653259&term=CA096436

Your products are now being sold in pharmacies across Belgium, how did that happen?

Thanks to Start it Start it Accelerate | @KBC , Belgium’s biggest startup accelerator,?I got to know many like-minded businesses. I used to think that as an entrepreneur you needed to sell huge volumes in order to be successful, but by being a part of an ecosystem of innovative starters, I?realized that there are many people out there who genuinely want to make a difference. The good thing about these people is that you don’t need to persuade them to change their lifestyles. Our business started expanding organically, alongside other starters who were marketing products made from spirulina, seaweed, or ketogenic products or stone age bread. That’s how we eventually got a call from a pharmacist who believed in the need to invest in preventative care and the healing properties of good food.

‘Pharmatricion’ is a trend we are looking into. Do you believe the average consumer will see food and nutrition as a means to stay healthy in the future???

Change is definitely in the air. Food is increasingly being seen as medicine. One of the pharmacies that sells our products is owned by Colruyt Group p, a Belgian retail group known for its supermarkets. With more than 33.000 employees, the group is making a very bold statement by offering an alternative approach to health. I’m also noticing more transparency in the media with regards to what is good for us. And finally, there is a lot of very interesting research coming from leading academic institutions. Aside from what we now know about depression, a small clinical trial recently found that fecal microbiota transplant, a procedure that works to replace a person’s gut bacteria with gut bacteria from a healthy donor, may help ease motor symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eclinm.2024.102563?

So with any luck, all of these new insights will result in a more sustainable understanding of what it entails to be healthy and empower customers to make smarter choices.??????