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The gut’s link to Parkinson’s — and more takeaways from this week’s ‘Healthful’

▶ Watch Video: The Gut-Brain Secret: What Your Body Knows Before You Do

I’ve long been obsessed with the idea that there is an important connection between your gut and your brain, and now there’s science to confirm that nutrition can help treat many diseases.

Dr. Trisha Pasricha is a double board-certified internal medicine physician and gastroenterologist. She’s the head of the Gut-Brain Institute and an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School. And you may know her from The Washington Post, where she’s the “Ask a Doctor” columnist.

“I think the reframe that really helps is if you stop thinking about your gut as plumbing, you think about it as a brain,” Pasricha told me in the newest episode of “Healthful.”

We covered everything from what to do if you get a cyclospora infection to why eating fewer ultra-processed foods can prevent dementia. Here’s what I learned from our conversation — watch it on YouTube and listen wherever you get your podcasts: 

Constipation and REM sleep disorder could be early signs of Parkinson’s

Researchers have made significant progress in finding early symptoms of Parkinson’s disease that could show up decades before motor symptoms. Pasricha explained the “first-gut theory” of Parkinson’s disease, which is that experts believe some cases of Parkinson’s originate in the gut, not the brain. 

A hallmark of Parkinson’s, she explained, is a misfolded protein that destroys dopamine-producing neurons in the brain, leading to the tremors we associate with the disease. Studies have shown that this protein may start misfolding first in the gut before traveling to the brain. 

Pasricha said many of her Parkinson’s patients suffer from “debilitating GI symptoms” from constipation to nausea, which started years or decades before their tremors. She said she hopes that in 10-15 years, we’ll be able to diagnose prodromal Parkinson’s from the gut.

Another potential early sign of Parkinson’s: REM sleep disorder, where “your dreams are so vivid that you might start to move.”

GLP-1s may actually protect your gut

It may sound counterintuitive: You’ve heard about GLP-1 side effects like constipation, nausea and indigestion. But Pasricha says her lab showed that GLP-1 users are less likely to develop ulcers and are less likely to develop colorectal cancer, as well as a dozen other cancers.

Pasricha said researchers believe that GLP-1s reduce inflammation in the gut and throughout the body, hence the reduced risk of cancers. 

95% of Americans are not meeting their fiber goals

This number shocked me.

Fiber improves your heart health and brain health while reducing inflammation. But Pasricha says 95% of Americans aren’t meeting their fiber goals.

Women under 50 should aim for 25 grams of fiber per day, and women over 50 should get 21 grams of fiber per day. Meanwhile, men under 50 should aim for 38 grams and should get 30 grams per day over the age of 50.

Pasricha says she advises people not to take away or substitute something on their plate but instead to just add a high-fiber food to your plate. (She feeds her kids berries, nuts and Greek yogurt popsicles for breakfast.) And when you’re traveling, remember to pack a fiber supplement to keep your fiber intake high.

A woman is on trial for the murders of her 3 children. Her defense argues she may not be ‘criminally responsible’

By CNN
(CNN) — When Patrick Clancy left his Duxbury, Massachusetts, home on January 24, 2023, he had no way of knowing a quick errand to grab takeout and medicine for his daughter would forever change his life.When he returned to the colonial on Summer Street he shared with his wife, Lindsay, and their three children, he found the house unusually quiet, he would later tell police.Searching for his family, Patrick tried his bedroom, but the door was locked, he would say. When he finally got in, he saw blood in the room and the second-story window open.He ran outside, where he found Lindsay lying on the ground beneath the window. She had injuries on her wrists and neck.Frantic, he dialed 911.“What did you do?” Patrick asked his wife, a Plymouth County assistant district attorney would later recount the recorded call.Tried to kill herself, Lindsay told him.“Where are the kids?” Patrick asked.“In the basement,” she responded.Moments later, Patrick Clancy could “be heard screaming in agony and shock as he found his children,” the prosecutor, Jennifer Sprague, would say.Officers found Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and 8-month-old Callan unconscious. It was obvious each had been strangled, the officers later testified in sworn affidavits.The children were taken to area hospitals, where they were all eventually pronounced dead.Lindsay Clancy, who was paralyzed by the injuries from her suicide attempt, was charged with three counts of murder and strangulation in her children’s deaths.Her trial began Monday.Clancy, a former labor-and-delivery nurse at a nationally recognized hospital in Boston, has pleaded not guilty. She is being held at the public Tewksbury Hospital in Massachusetts.While she did kill her children, she shouldn’t be found guilty of murder, her lawyer, Kevin Reddington said.To reach a murder conviction in this case, the jury would need to decide that the suspect acted with deliberate premeditation and/or extreme atrocity or cruelty.And while there is precedent for the defense to argue Clancy is not criminally responsible for her children’s deaths, experts tell CNN her attorney could be facing an uphill battle.911 call and expert testimony could be keyClancy, 35, had long struggled with depression, even going so far as to voluntarily commit herself to a local psychiatric hospital less than a month before her children’s deaths, Reddington has said. Clancy’s doctors took her on and off medications to treat the depression, which her attorney has said worsened her symptoms.“Our society fails miserably in treating women with postpartum depression or even postpartum psychosis,” Reddington said at a 2023 arraignment hearing. “This is a situation that clearly was a product of mental illness.”Throughout pretrial hearings, Reddington has signaled he plans to argue Clancy should not be held “criminally responsible” for the deaths of her children because she was suffering from extreme mental health distress.Reddington and the commonwealth’s prosecutors sparred in June over what expert evidence would be admissible if he were to pursue that defense, commonly called an “insanity plea.”Jurors should “hear why Patrick Clancy and his wife Lindsay would go to consult with doctors because of depression, because of the life that she was living, which was one of horrific misery because of medications,” Reddington argued during a June hearing.Prosecutors pushed back and suggested they may be prepared to offer their own experts to testify to the question of criminal responsibility.Ahead of the trial, the commonwealth also filed a motion to admit audio recordings of the 911 call Patrick Clancy made after returning home and discovering his family. Prosecutors claim Clancy’s descriptions of how he found his children and the methods Lindsay used to strangle them is evidence of “deliberate premeditation, extreme atrocity or cruelty, and the state of mind of the defendant.”State Judge William F. Sullivan ruled jurors will hear the 911 call and tour the Clancys’ former home, CNN affiliate WCVB reported.CNN has reached out to Reddington and the commonwealth’s prosecutors for comment.Should jurors find Clancy cannot be held criminally responsible for the deaths of her children, the court would likely begin the legal process to have her committed to a state psychiatric hospital.“I think there’s an ongoing kind of perception that insanity pleas are kind of a get-out-of-jail-free card that attorneys throw on the table,” said Joni Johnston, an investigator and forensic psychiatrist who conducts psychological evaluations of criminal offenders.“It’s a pretty rare defense to use – and an even rarer one to be successful.”An ‘upstream’ defense strategyMost people diagnosed with a mental illness like bipolar disorder or schizophrenia will not commit a violent crime, which means attorneys who mount an insanity defense by blaming conditions like postpartum psychosis are often “swimming upstream,” Johnston said.“You’re having to basically convince the jury that you were so impaired and that your thinking was so distorted that you really couldn’t appreciate that what you were doing was wrong – even if you knew factually that murder was wrong – and that’s very, very hard,” she said.In January, both Patrick and Lindsay Clancy filed separate lawsuits against the medical providers who oversaw her mental health treatment in the months leading up to the killings.Lindsay Clancy’s personal injury lawsuit alleges her mental health began deteriorating rapidly after the birth of her third child, leading her to seek psychiatric help – including at an outpatient treatment facility – for prolonged insomnia and depression.But her healthcare providers failed to properly diagnose and treat her condition, the lawsuit alleges. Instead, she was placed on and off numerous psychiatric drugs over the course of four months, according to the lawsuit. As a result, she “now faces a lifetime of physical disability, psychological trauma, and the unbearable grief of waking up every day knowing she killed her children – all of which could have been prevented had Defendants provided competent medical care.”All the providers declined to speak with CNN about ongoing litigation.During jury selection ahead of the trial, Reddington told the court Patrick and Lindsay Clancy have divorced, and Patrick has since remarried. But Patrick appeared to share a similar perspective to the one put forward by his ex-wife’s attorney and the lawsuit.“I wasn’t married to a monster,” he said in a 2024 interview after the deaths of his children. “I was married to someone who got sick.”The-CNN-Wire™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.
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