At his first Thanksgiving dinner in the U.S., Diego Bohórquez was seated next to a woman who had undergone gastric bypass. Her personal story changed the course of his career. Within six months of surgery, she’d lost 40 percent of her bodyweight, and her diabetes eased enough to make insulin shots unnecessary. She also told Bohórquez that the sight of runny egg yolks made her nauseous, but after the procedure, she craved egg yolks and ate them regularly.
Bohórquez had come to the U.S. from the Amazon region of Ecuador to study nutrition, and she asked him how this could have happened. Bohórquez was so captivated by her experience that he decided to combine neuroscience and nutrition, and study how the gut could drive food choices. That pursuit is now connecting unexpected dots in our vast and surprisingly communal body-mind network.
