Introducing Dr. Jeff Horacek, Guest Writer

For those of you who may not know, I have had digestive/gut and asthma issues for the last several years. Once I hit 50, things started changing with my health and I have struggled with it ever since. That is, until we moved to Washington State and I met Dr. Jeff Horacek at Healthy Connections in Hood River, OR.

Dr. Jeff is a functional medicine doc who specializes in how the microbiome of the gut effects your health. I met him at the Farm Stand in Hood River, Oregon when I was delivering bone broth, because he saw the bone broth logo on my truck. He told me that they prescribe bone broth for their patients and he wanted to connect. He invited me to do a bone broth tasting at their open house at Christmas, which I was pleased to do.

As I was doing the tasting at their open house, I happened to pass Dr. Jeff in the hallway. I don’t know what prompted me to ask, but I asked him what he thought about my chronic asthma. I mentioned that I had been seeing a naturopath in Portland and she had been unable to resolve the problem. What Jeff said to me next made so much sense. He said “Everything in your body is controlled by the gut and if you have any permeability in your gut lining, it could be effecting the lining in any other organs that also have linings, e.g., lungs, heart, brain.”

That made perfect sense to me, so I scheduled an appointment with him. He conducted various tests (stool and blood) and was able to determine that I had what is referred to as “leaky gut.” With 3 weeks of medical food and supplements my asthma symptoms were gone. He also used genetic data from my “23 and Me” report to tailor a program of healing. I had no idea that an imbalance in my gut was causing my asthma issues.

I was amazed at how many things are affected by imbalance in the gut and bacteria issues. I wish my mom would have known this when she was alive because she had similar lung issues (COPD).

I have become such a fan of Dr. Jeff and his wife, Heather Nielsen, Health and Wellness Coach, that I will be posting blogs and newsletters like the one below to help all of you. At this very challenging time, we need to pay particular attention to keeping our bodies strong to ward off disease.

So, I am happy to provide you with blogs and newsletters from Dr. Jeff Horacek with the hopes that this will help you, your family and friends. You can visit their Healthy Connections website here.