Your Gut Bacteria
As recently showed on NOVA, researchers have also uncovered connections between intestinal bacteria and anxiety, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, ADD, autism, and Alzheimer’s disease, among others.
Analysis suggests this link is due to intestinal bacteria’s ability to make small molecules, called metabolites, that can reach the brain and impact how it works.
Many people do not exhibit gut symptoms, and if they do, they do not contribute the cause of their symptoms to gut health or lack of gut health. However, many people have an unhealthy ratio of good to bad bacteria living inside their gut, due to, an increased amount of processed foods, sugars, prescriptions and over the counter medications.
It is necessary to include a good broad-spectrum probiotic to aid in total health because of the immediate connection between the gut and the brain through a super highway called “The Gut Brain Axis.”
What is the Gut-Brain Axis?
Your gut uses the vagus nerve like a walkie-talkie to tell your brain how you’re feeling via electric impulses called “action potentials.” Your, gut feelings, are very real.
Events that the mind views as stressors causes the brain to send signals to the gut. This is why, when someone is nervous or anxious they can have an upset stomach. If you have an unhealthy gut, a symptom can also be anxiousness causing a cyclical effect.
You are probably aware that what you think about or focus on can stress you out at times. It is also probably no surprise that stress affects the body negatively. However, what you might not know is that your brain health and brain patterns have an impact on your gut health and vice versa.
There is a super-highway like signaling of messaging that happens via the gut-brain axis that influences gut health and brain health keeping them inter-connected.
Changes in a person’s mental state, like feeling scared or nervous, can lead to immediate problems in the gut. Do you remember ever having to do a big presentation or take a major test and experience heartburn or diarrhea as a result?
That’s the brain and the gut in communication along what it commonly referred to as “the gut brain superhighway.”
Events that the mind views as stressors causes the brain to send signals to the gut. That is why when someone is nervous or anxious they can have an upset stomach. If you have an unhealthy gut, a symptom can also be anxiousness causing a cyclical effect.
***Healthy Gut = Happy Mood
***95% of serotonin production begins in the gut
The Vagus nerve is the longest cranial nerve with the widest distribution of any nerve in the body and it connects the intestinal tract with the brain. 90% of all the signals passing along this nerve are traveling from the gut to the brain, not from the brain downward
In eastern medicine the gut has been the focus of health for thousands of years. In western medicine, they have begun to make the connection between the food we eat and our overall health.
Gut health directly influences mental clarity and the quality of the neurons in your brain are directly related to nutrition.
Among the many microbial communities colonizing the human body, the gut micro-biome is emerging as a major player influencing the health status of the host.
The composition of the gut micro-biome and their “gut health” is established early during gestation period and can undergo a myriad of changes throughout a lifetime.
Medical research has shown that “gut health” both good and bad is inherited from the mother and “gut health” can improve or deteriorate from generation to generation. Furthermore, children who are not born vaginally and bypass the birth canal via C-section or cesarean miss out on vital bacteria intended for initial development of a healthy gut biome; thus putting them at risk for developing poorer gut health.
The complex interaction between host physiology and the gut microbiome is a growing topic of research in neurological health. As featured on NOVA, the gut biome has a direct impact on brain health and neurological disorders.
Watch the episode here: What’s Living Inside You