The Food Medic - S6 E10: Gut health, mental health, and coping through music with Professor Green

Episode Date: September 8, 2021

Trigger warning: this conversation discusses suicide.Firmly established as one of the crossover superstars of British music, the Hackney born and raised rapper has released two Top 3 albums and amassed a career tally of over 2.5 million combined sales in the UK alone. He has completed five headline tours and performed on the main stages of countless festivals such as Glastonbury, V Festival and Wireless.Over the past couple of years Professor Green has presented five critically acclaimed BBC documentaries and his first documentary series for Channel 4 called “Working Class White Men” in 2018. He’s also published his autobiography 'Lucky' and continues his ongoing work as patron of anti-suicide charity CALM. He is also ambassador for: www.myonlinetherapy.com. He also founded the gut supplement company Agulp. This episode covers:- His long history of gut issues and how it led him to start Agulp. - Mental health and losing his dad to suicide - The gut-brain link - Protecting his mental health and identifying when to ask for help- How he got into music and how it is a form of therapy for him - Navigating life as a new dad - On being a foodie, his food delivery kits with Gizzi, and what he would have as a death row meal. If you loved this episode make sure to give it a review, rating (hopefully 5 stars) and share it with your friends and family. instagram/twitter/facebook: @thefoodmedicwww.thefoodmedic.co.u Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome back to season six of the Food Medic podcast. I'm your host as always, Dr. Hazel Wallace, medical doctor, nutritionist, author and founder of the Food Medic. I have said that so many times that I feel like I really need to jazz it up for the next season. So if you have any suggestions, please do send them in. So it's our final episode of the season, which is always very sad because one of the best bits of my job is getting to host this podcast and speak to incredible people all around the world about wide ranging topics. However, we are going out with a bang as I have an incredible guest, Stephen Manderson, better known as Professor Green joining me today for a very deep and insightful chat discussing everything from mental health to gut health to his death row meal to when

he started rapping, being a new dad. It's just a really great conversation and I personally loved listening to Stephen and just chatting with him. So I hope you do too. If you haven't heard of Professor Green, where have you been? Firmly established as one of the crossover superstars of British music, the Hackney-born and raised rapper has released two top three albums and amassed a career tally of over 2.5 million combined sales in the UK alone. He has completed five headline tours and performed on the main stages of countless festivals such as Glastonbury V Festival and Wireless. Over the past couple of years Pro Green has presented five critically acclaimed BBC

documentaries and his first documentary series for Channel 4 called Working Class White Men in 2018. He's also published his autobiography Lucky and continues his ongoing work as patron of the anti-suicide charity CAM. He's also an ambassador for myonlinetherapy.com and has also founded the supplement company Agulp. Before we get into the podcast I do want to share a trigger warning as this conversation discusses suicide, which may be upsetting for some. Without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, it is Stephen Manderson, Professor Green. I am very excited to be back working with French Bakery Paul again this year with a brand new menu. If you're returning to the office this month, make sure to pop into Paul and try out my hot

smoked salmon, avocado and grain salad, or my sweet potato, spiced chickpea and carrot salad as part of the Paul lunch meal deal. We've also brought back your favourite breakfast pots for those last minute breakfasts on the go. Find them in store through September and October. Thank you to Paul for sponsoring this episode of the Food Medic podcast. So I guess like the reason that I wanted to get you on the podcast and have a chat was I guess we we connected over a shared interest in gut health initially and also um house plants because I think you asked me for some advice to keep your plants alive yeah I saw a post that you put up and just realized how how healthy all of your house plants looked and um I've got a rubber plant that's still struggling it's still struggling it is still struggling it's not dead

yet and it seems to be growing from the top exponentially but it's just the bottom that I'm struggling with but yeah gut health definitely something that I am and I have a very keen interest in yeah and so we chatted briefly and I know you've spoken about it publicly but um do you mind kind of taking us back to your history with gut issues because they started from a very young age right yeah it's a long way back now because I'm on my way to 38 um but I was I guess I was born with gut issues um I was six weeks old when they discovered that I had um pyloric stenosis so I had to have an operation when I was really young. And then really some of my earliest memories.

And as an adult, I understand it to be a bit of a feedback loop and somewhat of a chicken and egg situation. But I would always go, man, I've got a tummy ache. And because I'd had that operation, it was always straight to the doctors. I'd have cameras down me up me ultrasounds everything you can imagine to look for some sort of like further defects or something that was wrong physically and ultimately nothing was found until much much much later on and so I was told that I had IBS from a really young age about five or six. Wow yeah that is a very young age for IBS yeah and I guess at that

age and also thinking back to I mean the fact there was a generation gap between my grandmother who brought me up and me it wasn't like anxiety wasn't spoken about so my tummy ache which I now look at as a knot in my stomach which I understand to be anxiety I never had the the language or the tools or the understanding to go hey I'm I'm anxious yeah 100% and I definitely want to touch on that like the kind of gut brain axis in a little bit but where where are you now in terms of your gut health and do you feel like you have a good understanding of how to stay on top of your symptoms? I do, yeah. I had a pretty problematic, actually the operation went really well, but this is a, excuse me if I'm segwaying, this might take a little while for me to get to the point, it often does take me a little while, but I started getting symptoms of like my lips were burning,

my tongue was burning, and and you know I was doing all the googling in the world and I'm sure you know and have encountered Dr Google in many patients it's the worst doctor in the world but I was like oh is it a b12 deficiency and that is actually something that I do suffer from um but I assume that it was you know stuff being acidic on the way in so like oh maybe I should stop drinking cider maybe I should ease up on the spicy food but because I didn't have heartburn or any of the obvious symptoms of a hiatus hernia it took a long time to get to a point where they diagnosed the fact that I had a hiatus hernia and along with that you'll probably know this better than me I had something with my duodenum okay I can't remember the proper name of I had gastritis i had stage two esophagitis

um stage three being irreversible um so it's quite severe and then trying to fit in an operation for a hiatus hernia amongst the schedule that i had at that time was quite difficult and there was probably a bit of avoidance on my behalf as well i ended up on you know prescribed medication for quite a while which had quite adverse side effects as well um imeprazole, lenzoprazole obviously the gaviscon wasn't prescribed you can buy that over the counter but that went on for about two years until I eventually got to a place where I couldn't function so I had to have the surgery I had the surgery the surgery went well this was in 2017 and I left, as they said I would, a day or two days afterwards. And then I remember I left in the afternoon, so I got home as evening,

slept, woke up the next morning, and I looked like I was pregnant with triplets, and the birth was about three or four weeks late. And I had my surgeon's number, and he said, if there's any difficulties or any questions, anything you have, just just text me afterwards and so I messaged him a picture going is this just gas and his response was get in a taxi immediately don't wait for an ambulance and it turned out I had distended so I had distension ileus collapsed lung pneumonia not bacterial but I think from the surgery they said where they had to move my stomach which had caused them to move my lung or something and so it was like going back to square one you know I was back where I was at when I was born and the options weren't that great it was have more surgery

which would have been a gastric bypass which I'd done some research into didn't sound too fun to be honest and also it was the fact that I was more likely to have the same complications, only they would have been more severe a second time around, especially with that type of surgery. Or just wait out and hope that things went back to normal. So that was where I started to dive down every rabbit hole I possibly could to look into ways that I could help better my situation myself. Yeah. And I guess that journey has brought you to start your own company around gut health and supplements right yeah so a gulp was was born of that really um I bumped into Kevin Godlington my now business partner and and fellow co-founder of a gulp and it started with us having a not much ever comes from drunken rants really everyone thinks they have great ideas

when they're drunk and nothing much ever comes of them they're a bit like making friends on holiday yeah we should stay in touch with each other and you never do but this was the one that actually you know did turn into to something tangible um and we were basically just sat complaining about the laborious routines that we both went through every morning in order to try and take care of our and throughout the day and the evening to take care of not just our guts but also our mental health a lot of our conversation uh was around the link between the gut and the brain because and obviously there would have been a positive knock-on effect anyway because with my health improving obviously my mental health was better because I was happier and able to do more without being debilitated by my stomach issues but um I sort of noticed that the more I took care of my gut the more consistent my mood

was the better my sleep was the happier I was um as well as all the things that you would expect from taking care of your gut which is you know better digestion more consistency and movement I feel much less awkward about talking about that stuff now yeah 100% I mean you speak pretty openly about mental health and I know that you work really closely with the anti-suicide charity cam and myonlinetherapy.com where does this kind of passion stem from when it comes to mental health is it because of your own issues or is it just something that you feel needs to be spoken about it was something I sort of stumbled into and I think as the genre music that I I make rap especially at the time when I began talking about mental health

issues was not something that you would expect a rapper to talk about especially because of all the perceived bravado that comes with it albeit all my favorite rappers were always very open emotionally and put themselves in their music and spoke about what they experienced and their feelings but for me it was it was a bit of a slap in the face my introduction to mental health issues because when I was a kid there wasn't such thing as and obviously there was but to my knowledge and to most kid, there wasn't such thing as, and obviously there was, but to my knowledge and to most people, there wasn't such thing as mental health. It was, you know, mental was just a word you'd call someone.

Yeah. The phrase mental health wasn't something you heard in the way that people do now. My dad took his own life when I was 24, and that was a real, I mean, as you'd imagine, and not just because our relationship was fraught, I mean, you know, we could have had the best relationship and that would have been just as much, perhaps even more of the slap in the face that it was.

And that, that I guess made me take a long, hard look at myself in the beginning when I found out what he'd done. I went through a whole spectrum you know I was angry thought he was selfish which he definitely wasn't uh it's selfish to think that people who end up in a place where they're so desperate the only way out they see is such a finite decision but I wanted to in the beginning understand how it was that such a passive man could do something so violent especially the method in which he took his life he hung himself and I quite quickly came to the conclusion that I actually don't want to know how he was able to do that because the only way in which I would be able to truly understand

is if I was in the same situation myself which I never will be and I wrote a song about it which ended up being my first and today only number one I never expected a song about my dad's suicide to become a hit which was kind of bittersweet you know but it opened up a conversation because then when I went into you know I think the first interview I did was with Mr. Jam. And it was the first time that I think I'd ever spoken about it because of what the song was about. Yeah. Did you find that writing the song was therapeutic for you? Eventually, yeah. But it's a weird one because I have to perform it over and over and over. And I think the one thing I've learned from that as well as through therapy is that actually we quite often try and stifle things and push things back down when we feel them and shove them under the carpet

you know stiff British upper lip yeah and what I realized was the more I spoke about it the more I was able to engage in conversation around that without engaging emotionally not in like a sociopathic way but just in the more prominent those conversations were and those thoughts about what my dad did the easier it was to deal with him because I wasn't pushing them back down and you know mostly what happens is you try and push things back down and they end up coming at you sideways and hitting you when you least expect it so for me it was uh eventually it was yes it was cathartic initially it was it was quite painful because I didn't realize that when I wrote the song that I was going to have to talk about it so much um

and after having done that I was asked if I'd do a radio documentary with a psychologist, Dr. Aaron Ballack, and a suicide survivor, which I did, which then led on to me doing my first TV documentary, Suicide and Me, which actually was meant to be a broad or a broader look at male suicide, but ended up being about my own personal journey into looking into why my dad may have taken his own life, which was quite an awkward meeting halfway through shooting because I'd signed up for but I realized that me throwing my toys out the pram was part of you know me not wanting people to see me as vulnerable which is a huge part of the problem for men I think is having to be macho it's having to be the archetypal man I think applying behaviors to gender is a you know I mean it's easier said

than done and it would pretty much take I'm picking the fabrics of society to solve it but I think we've caused a lot of problems by applying such specific behaviors to genders yeah absolutely and different traits but I think we're definitely moving forward from that and having people like yourself on a huge platform chat about it when there's, I'm sure, a lot of young men listening who are still stuck feeling like it's a stigma to talk about how they're feeling or whether they're going through a tough time and unfortunately the last year has just shown the cracks in our health care system and the services we have available for mental health in particular so right now it's even more important yeah definitely I mean some people felt isolated prior to the last what is it now going on 18 months and I think everyone in some way shape or form has been affected by what's happened of course respective of any positives that may have come out of it for people personally I think it's been a terribly testing time of course and so what are some of the fundamental things that

you do now for your mental health first and and foremost is understanding myself, I guess, which is something that a lot of people avoid because, you know, it's not a pretty unpicking thing. I think you spend a long time learning things when you're a kid. You get to your 20s, you want to do everything you think makes you an adult. And then you get to a point, if you're lucky, of self-awareness where you realize that actually you have to unlearn quite a lot to move forward. And for me, you know, they were just behaviors and reactions. I was quite reactive, quite self-defensive, which I think is quite common in people that come from the background I do. And I wanted to change those things. You know, I didn't want my life to continue to be this perpetual cycle of the same things happening over and over. And in order for that to change,

it was me that had to change. You know, we always look at external things, and this is where projection comes in, you know, whether it's to blame certain things on something other than ourselves. But if you're the common denominator between this thing happening over and over, you have to kind of go, okay, well, maybe I'm the problem here. Even if it's down to a choice you're making in a situation

you're not extracting yourself from. And secondly, it's like noticing when I'm making bad decisions bad decisions tend to get bad decisions and it's just catching myself a bit earlier before I go too far down that path yeah I love that answer and it's very honest because I think often when I have these kind of interviews with people it's very easy to say things like exercise the dog and all of those things are so so so imperative they're so important and I think like listen some people obviously do need to be prescribed medication but I think you know the the best prescription for anyone that feels at all low is all of those things but it's also about delving into into you know oneself and understanding why it is when everything seems like it should be fine

that you still don't feel okay yeah absolutely and I think oftentimes that's best done with a therapist but if doing their own your own work as well is really important and yeah I completely agree with you I guess it's when it comes to therapy and self-care or whatever you want to call it when it comes to protecting your mental health it's such a personal thing there's never one thing that fits everyone or one thing that people find works for them but it sounds like you've come to a place where you can recognize what works for you and when you need to kind of catch yourself like you said yeah but i also think that there's something to be said for like we know how to build physical resilience and that's a healthy stress like stress is always this

there's so many negative connotations attached to the word stress it's always you know that was stressful i'm really stressed at the moment without people realizing you know and people who day in, day out will put themselves through a healthy amount of stress in order to improve their fitness without realizing that there are, you know, stress can be a positive thing at the right level. Stress becomes a problem mentally when it's chronic. You know, we shouldn't encounter stress in all of the ways that we do as consistently as we do throughout our day to day lives. And that's where it becomes a problem. And I think perception plays a part in that. You know, is it a problem or is it a challenge? But I think understanding that if you only use therapy at point of crisis, you're probably only going to solve problems as they occur whereas using therapy not being at point of crisis I think is the only way that you can develop tools to handle or better

handle stress and trauma and the only other way outside of that like the only way I learned resilience when I was growing up was through surviving things and that's an important quality to understand you have surviving things makes you powerful because as long as you're aware of it and understanding that you can survive those things and come out the other side you know resilience goes missing for the most part when people talk about mental health and openness and sensitivity you know all of those things are discussed but resilience seems to go missing and I think the only way really to understand your resilience and to improve it mentally is to use therapy when you're not at a point of crisis yeah I think that's

really powerful and I guess now like what's life like for you now you're your new dad first and foremost congratulations um there's not much sleep. I can only imagine. But has your career taken a bit of a direction, a change in direction? Has music taken a backseat or is this something that you're doing but keeping under wraps? Not at all. Music hasn't taken a backseat whatsoever. Quite the opposite. I've just been in a situation where, listen, there's nothing worse than a complaining artist. So I'm not even going to go down the road of complaining about the stuff I've had to deal with label-wise the last few years.

But music has definitely not taken a backseat. And actually, in the time that I've been dealing with all of that stuff, I've been able to focus on other things such as a gulp, you know, and Giz and Greens, which has been great. Gizzy Erskine and myself are a business, which came out of lockdown. You know, I was stuck in Morocco and she was teaching me how to cook everyone's favorite fast foods over a really dodgy internet connection. We had an oven that had two temperatures, which were too hot and way too hot. You know, it's been great to use that time to focus on other stuff. But music has always been something that I've been working on in the background. And I'm quite looking forward to getting back to it if they ever let us open clubs again.

Of course. Can I circle back for a second, ask you how and when you got into music in the first place? Yeah, of course. It wasn't from my nan playing Jason Donovan. It was really, you know what it was i grew up in upper clapton in hackney and at that time like dj brocky was from clapton and jungle was what everyone or all the older kids were listening to they'd come into the estate and they're stolen mini metros you know playing jungle tapes or walking back in after illegal raves with their eyes looking a bit strange and me not really knowing what was going on but um you know so the first type of music I got into was jungle and then after that rap music I used to go um I was a

I played street hockey and ice hockey when I was a kid so I used to go to roller skating rinks and ice rinks a lot and I remember hearing Big Biggie's One More Chance remix with Faith Evans. And I didn't know who it was at the time. I was like, who is this? What is this? I have to find out what this is. And I did. And that began my journey into rap.

And Biggie is still my favorite rapper to this day. But it wasn't until I was 18. My mates had been making music from the age of like 12, 13. I was quite shy. I'm surprised by that. I don't know if i was shy or considered you know i would speak if i had something to say otherwise i'd stay sharp but then i got put on the spot they were all freestyling we were at my pal adam's house and i rapped a lyric and it was i don't remember what it was but it wasn't terrible because everyone was like what you can rap yeah what what

but um i just went red in the face and wanted to hide under the table. I would have hidden in my belly button if I could have. And then from that point I started, because I'd never been, I was quite academic, albeit I went from being offered a scholarship to St Paul's to ending up at a pupil referral unit within space of two years. I didn't really have any creative output. I didn't ever, you know, I didn't ever you know I was

never artistic in any way but then from that I started messing around with lyrics and I found that to be a form of expression which you asked about you know if writing that song was cathartic to be honest the whole beginning to write music was because for me that was a form of therapy and I guess it aligns with journaling which is a cornerstone of CBT for me when I started to write music I was writing down how I felt what I thought and my observations and so for me of course it was always without ever realizing a form of therapy yeah I guess like you said it's like journaling it's a form of reflection and really going deep yeah and you have something to look back on you know however you feel afterwards you know you can look back on stuff and I hear like I'm not a fan of listening to my old stuff but

occasionally something will come on shuffle normally at a really awkward moment but I'll hear myself say stuff and I'll be like whoa I thought that then but I wasn't putting it into practice and I think you know that's an example of and don't get me wrong there's the other side to it where I hear myself say stuff and I'm like oh yeah couldn't get away with that now that's growth isn't it and like you grew up you grew up in a public space where as you were growing I guess you were sharing how you felt at the time yeah and I think it's important to be like open to being you know to contradicting yourself and to being a hypocrite I don't think there's anything wrong in that it's weird you hear a lot of people say I'm never going to change and that to me sounds crazy you know I to contradicting yourself and to being a hypocrite. I don't think there's anything wrong in that. It's weird. You hear a lot of people say, I'm never going to change.

And that to me sounds crazy. You know, I don't want to be bound by what I felt my identity had to be because of where I came from. Yeah, I completely agree with that. That story is amazing though. I guess like where you are now, like you mentioned all the other things that you're doing. You mentioned your kind of foodie projects with Gizzy.

And prior to lockdown, did you guys have a pop-up as well? It was post the first lockdown. I managed to get back from Morocco by way of Amsterdam, having been repatriated by the Dutch. It was an absolute palaver. And then, so we had been doing Giz and greens monday night fakeaways every monday and we had the opportunity to to open a pizza pop-up so we developed a menu and i was quite apprehensive it was a large space which actually ended up working in our favor because we didn't

have to change anything to socially distance people were socially distanced by way of how the restaurant was laid out we did it at Paso in Old Street and you know we opened the pop-up for initially a month it ended up being three months and we pulled the plug on it luckily just before we went into what I guess was a second lockdown but it was crazy we done like 28,000 pieces or something it was it was crazy how well it was it was received and we've since gone on to open two and about to we're about to open our third um delivery kitchen we do east London west London and soon to be south west London so does this come as is it like a meal delivery kit

where you make it at home we do both so we do you can order the pizza kits to make the pizzas yourself or you can you know order in pizzas that come ready made and ready to eat normally on a hangover yeah no I think I mean it all looks incredible are you a big foodie like do you cook a lot at home or is this Gizzy's influence and you're just you know excited by the partnership no I've always I've always loved food um I grew up on a pretty beige diet I I mean, my interest in gut health is hilarious when you think I was brought up on a lot of Iceland, three for two, you know, oven chips and beans were a staple. But I was lucky where I grew up was incredibly diverse

culturally. So when I went to friends' houses, I was way too polite to say no. And the first thing that growing up in like a working class community that you're offered when you get to someone's house is normally a plate of food. So that opened up a whole world to me as far as food yeah it's always been something that I've I've loved and enjoyed and it's something that Gizzy and I definitely bonded over what would be your death row meal roast dinner really yeah that's I don't even have to think about that it would 100% be a roast dinner. I find that so funny. So many British people say that. I'm like, it wouldn't, I think a pizza would be mine.

Really? Yeah, like a really, really good pizza. What defines a good pizza in your books? The crust and the tomato base is like the most important bit, I think. Do you like a good sourdough base, to be honest? We love our pizza. It's actually, yeah, because it, yeah, you like a good sourdough base to be honest we love our pizza it's actually yeah because it yeah it's not fake sourdough there's no uh it's not a sped up process which does make things quite difficult love a sourdough amazing well thank you so much for

giving me your time it's been a pleasure and for opening up and being so honest about your past and the things that you've been through. Thank you for having me. Okay team, that was Stephen. I am really keen for your feedback on this episode because I don't know about you but I have connected with Stephen a couple of times on social media. Obviously we were chatting about how he asked me for some plant advice but I found this conversation so insightful and I am very grateful that Stephen was so open and vulnerable and shared so much with us because I think those conversations are so important and I hope that it's helped some people yeah so thank you Stephen for an incredible season finale so yeah that wraps up season six how was it for you because it was good for me I have to say I really

really enjoyed recording this season and I know I say that every time but I don't know there was something about the season that just felt like every episode was getting better and better. But for now, we are taking a little break. I don't need to worry though, because it won't be long before we are back with new episodes. I can never stay away too long. In the meantime, make sure you do listen back through the seasons, because I know a few of you are new around here and there are some great episodes to catch up on. Also, if you're enjoying the topics discussed on the podcast, you can hear more from us over on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook,

under the handle The Food Medic or head over to the website thefoodmedic.co.uk. If you did love this episode and if you are enjoying the podcast, I would love it if you give us a review, a rating, hopefully five stars and share it with your friends and family. That's all for me. It's been a pleasure being your host again and I can't wait to connect with you next time. Take care.