Could the secret to better mental health and reducing your risk of heart disease and cancer lie in your gut? Recent research into the gut-brain connection suggests that it might.
Your brain supplies directions to all other parts of your body. However, it doesn’t operate in a vacuum. It also receives input from your various tissues and organs, and some of the strongest and most vital messages originate in your intestines.
Your intestines produce 95% of your body’s serotonin and various other neurotransmitters. Neurotransmitters affect hormone levels and how well your body adapts to different circumstances, including guiding your immune response. This influences how you respond to various invasive diseases and also how well you hold up under the daily onslaught of environmental toxins and stress.
Recent evidence suggests a stronger link between the gut-brain connection and various physical and mental disorders than previously thought. Here’s what you should know about the latest scientific insights.
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4 Ways the Gut-Brain Connection Affects Overall Health
Recent studies have cast new light on the gut-brain connection to overall health. Here’s how it relates to multiple issues that affect how you feel mentally and physically.
1. Chronic Inflammatory Diseases
Chronic inflammatory diseases come in various types but share a common link. They occur when your immune system goes awry and begins attacking your body’s tissues, mistaking them for invading organisms. As a result, your body constantly sends its reserves into action, damaging your health and leaving fewer resources for fighting off opportunistic infections or even daily life pressures.
The gut-brain connection influences at least some chronic inflammatory diseases. For example, researchers at the Mayo Clinic recently discovered an association between an abundance of a specific gut bacteria and the triggering of a hyperactive immune response that results in pain and damage to joint tissues. The presence of this organism causes an immune response before symptoms develop, suggesting a cause-and-effect relationship.
This discovery lends hope to rheumatoid arthritis patients, who often experience considerable suffering as their condition can strike at any age, even in children. It may also benefit others with diverse chronic inflammatory diseases. For example, researchers have long noted an association between inflammatory bowel disease and arthritis — it’s possible that someday, adjusting the microbiota, or colonies of intestinal bacteria, could bring relief for both conditions.
2. Cardiovascular Health
Researchers have long known that a diet high in fiber can benefit cardiovascular health, but until relatively recently, they attributed much of the benefit to lower cholesterol levels. While this may well contribute, science has recently discovered that it’s actually bacteria in the gut that consume the pesky waxy stuff clogging your arteries.
How does a high-fiber diet fit into this equation? The good bacteria in your gut feast on the stuff. Like any living organism, they need food to proliferate, and consuming the right amounts of the right type of fiber ensures that you have the colonies you need to break down cholesterol and eliminate it from your body before it can cause a heart attack or stroke.
3. Cancer
The Big C strikes fear in many people’s hearts for a good reason. It is the second-biggest killer worldwide, next to cardiovascular disease. While science still has much to learn about how the composition of your gut microbiome influences your risk, they no longer have much doubt that it can have a deciding influence.
For example, researchers recently uncovered a link between gut dysbiosis and glioblastoma brain tumors. Dysbiosis is a fancy word that means your “good” and “bad” intestinal bacteria are out of balance. Glioblastoma is a particularly aggressive form of brain cancer responsible for countless deaths, including Arizona Senator John McCain in 2018.
The link between dysbiosis and various other forms of cancer warrants further research. In the meantime, prevention is far better than a cure, and maintaining a healthy intestinal microbiome may lower your cancer risk.
4. Mental Health
Your gut also impacts your mental health. Serotonin isn’t the only neurotransmitter manufactured in your intestines. It also produces most of your GABA, which acts as your body’s natural Valium. Improving the nation’s collective gut microbiome could be one way to combat soaring anxiety rates. However, doing so would also have to entail considerable changes in the typical diet.
Improving mental health could also lower addiction rates and its associated societal problems. More than half of the people diagnosed with substance addiction have a co-occurring mental health disorder.
Which came first is often a chicken-and-egg question, but addressing the symptoms of one usually improves the other. For example, many people first turn to substances to cope with anxiety. Breaking free of the underlying panic could reduce the urge to turn to alcohol or drugs.
Strengthen Your Brain by Nurturing Your Gut: 5 Tips
Improving the health of your gut-brain connection offers an impressive host of benefits. How can you take advantage?
The following five tips can help you replenish your intestinal microbiome and keep it healthy. Use a journal to track your progress — it’s useful to review what helps you the most and to share with your doctor.
1. Eat More Probiotics and Fermented Foods
Your gut needs two things to stay healthy: probiotics and prebiotics. While prebiotic fibers feed the colonies of healthy bacteria in your gut, probiotic foods contain the bacteria themselves in varying amounts. Consuming more of these foods can help you replenish a stash laid partially barren by poor genetics, heavy alcohol consumption, antibiotic use, or stress.
Examples of probiotic-rich foods readily available on your grocer’s shelves include:
Some of these foods might seem a bit unusual. However, a nearly effortless way to get more probiotics in your diet is to enjoy a half-cup of organic kefir with breakfast. It comes in flavored versions that taste like a yogurt milkshake. You can also use plain Greek yogurt as an alternative to sour cream or as a salad dressing ingredient.
Fermented foods also contain probiotics. Sauerkraut and pickles are fairly well-known examples, but you can ferment nearly any vegetable. It takes a bit to get the knack, but more grocery stores outside of specialty health-food versions now offer prepackaged fermented foods — opt for them when available.
2. Eat More High-Fiber Plant-Based Whole Foods
There’s great news if you are a vegan. Combining whole grains with beans and lentils fulfills your amino acid requirements while doing something no meat can — providing a hefty dose of gut-friendly prebiotic fiber. Remember, that’s the stuff the healthy kinds of bacteria in your intestines love to eat.
You’ll find fiber in many plant-based foods. For example, the pectin in apples is a particular favorite of gut bacteria — maybe that’s the underlying reason why the saying “an apple a day keeps the doctor away” came to be. Whole grains, beans, and legumes are other good sources. Deep, leafy greens also nourish your intestinal bacteria colonies, helping the healthy varieties thrive and keeping the not-so-good ones in check.
3. Reduce Alcohol Consumption
Keeping the unhealthy bacteria in check matters — remember the link between one species and rheumatoid arthritis. Unfortunately, your healthy diet can’t keep up with excessive alcohol consumption. If you want to nurture your gut, cut back on the sauce.
Drinking large quantities of alcohol disrupts the balance of bacteria in your gut, causing the pathogenic type to proliferate at the expense of the healthy kinds, according to Cynthia Hsu, MD, PhD, an assistant professor of gastroenterology at the University of California San Diego. The more often and more heavily you drink, the more adverse the effects.
Unfortunately, sticking to kombucha when you want to imbibe won’t solve the problem. While most kombucha contains a trace amount of alcohol, thanks to the fermentation process, many “high octane” store versions include so much added alcohol that it destroys the beneficial bacteria and negates the positive effects.
4. Avoid Processed Foods
Today’s manufacturing techniques mean that processed foods often lack the nutritional value that makes the whole versions beneficial to health. For example, makers of all-purpose flour strip away the nutrient and fiber-dense bran and germ, leaving behind a substance that absorbs as quickly as sugar — and that’s before it gets a bleach bath.
The lack of fiber in such foods means that your healthy gut bacteria colonies go hungry. Furthermore, consuming too much sugar-like food can spur dysbiosis and allow the unhealthy versions to proliferate.
5. Talk to Your Doctor When Taking Antibiotics
You might sometimes need antibiotics to fight an infection — but you should know that they don’t only kill dangerous bacteria. They can also deplete the healthy kind in your gut. Therefore, talk to your doctor when they prescribe a course. They may recommend a supplemental probiotic to take adjacent to or after your treatment to help rebuild your microbiome.
The Gut-Brain Connection | In Conclusion
Scientists have only begun to unravel the mysteries of the gut-brain connection, but what they have discovered so far is exciting. Nurturing the healthy bacterial colonies in your gut may ease the symptoms of or even cure many diseases in the not-so-distant future.
In the meantime, you can begin reaping benefits by strengthening your gut-brain connection. By eating more probiotic and prebiotic-rich foods and avoiding unhealthy substances, you give your intestinal powerhouses the fuel they need to support your well-being.
For further related reading, check out these contemporary approaches to mental health and learn more about the connection between mental and physical health.
Plus, take a look at these delicious brain-boosting superfoods and these foods that enhance blood flow and circulation for better brain health. Finally, discover whether fermented foods can be considered superfoods.
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