Gut Instincts: Decoding Digestive Dynamics

You’ve probably never thought about how important spit is…until you no longer have it. Imagine the feeling the morning after a few too many pints lasting for the rest of your life. This is exactly what those who go through radiotherapy for head and neck cancer face after their life-saving treatment, due to damage to their salivary glands. This talk will highlight how scientific research is trying to overcome this problem and regenerate injured salivary glands, by ultimately understanding what goes wrong!

Did you know that 1-2% of the cells in our body die every day? That’s more than 200,000,000,000 dead cells on a daily basis! Or what about that our bodies have more bacterial cells in them than human cells? There are roughly 38,000,000,000,000 bacteria in your body right now! Neither of these two things by themselves are cause for concern and yet, when things go wrong, they are intimately linked. Find out how cell death may be the key to gut health, but that the answer to food poisoning, Crohn’s Disease, and chemotherapy side effects isn’t necessarily another search for cellular immortality.