Change Your Brain Every Day - Could the Bacteria in Your Gut Help To Balance Your Brain? Pt. 2 with Zoe Davis

Episode Date: June 26, 2018

It may make some squeamish, but there are 100 trillion bugs in your intestinal lining. 100 trillion! Believe it or not, these bacteria may actually be your brain’s best friends. In part 2 of a series with nutritional coach Zoe Davis, Dr. Daniel Amen and Zoe describe the important ways your gut interacts with your brain, how the vagus nerve just may be to blame for your anxiety and depression.

Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. I'm Dr. Daniel Amen. And I'm Tana Amen. Here we teach you how to win the fight for your brain to defeat anxiety, depression, memory loss, ADHD, and addictions. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is brought to you by Amen Clinics, where we've transformed lives for three decades using brain spec imaging to better target treatment and natural ways to heal the brain. For more information, visit amenclinics.com.

The Brain Warriors Way podcast is also brought to you by BrainMD, where we produce the highest quality nutraceutical products to support the health of your brain and body. For more information, visit brainmdhealth.com. Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. And stay tuned for a special code for a discount to Amen Clinics for a full evaluation, as well as any of our supplements at brainmdhealth.com. All right, welcome back. We are here with Zoe Davis, a therapist, nutritionist. She's really the coach at Amen Clinics. When I have a patient that I want to help them with their diet, I send them to Zoe. Zoe is also the coach on BrainFit Life, our online and mobile program.

You can learn about it at mybrainfitlife.com. So Zoe, you know, in your training as someone who's interested in mental health and nutrition, when did the gut become an obvious place for us to start working on? Yeah, that's a good question. For me personally, I think it's been a long time coming. I think I've talked about how I grew up in a very strict ballet school and I saw in my sort of later years how people's lack of eating enough nutrients because that was

strongly encouraged right and sort of the ballet world was contributing to depression anxiety and I didn't really think of it as a gut thing necessarily but I started thinking okay there's something to this nutrition and mental health, you know, connection. So certainly later I started to realize that there had been a lot of studies done actually back, you know, early into the early 1900s where people were looking at nutrients and their benefit to mental health issues, but it was sort of like thrown out and not strongly encouraged. So learning about the gut as a second brain has been, you know, probably in the last five to 10 years as it's really been understood and makes common sense, right? That we, what we take in and whether it's absorbed or utilized well, or whether we're not taking in enough really contributes to how our

brain is functioning, just like it contributes to how the rest of our body's functioning, right? So this is a powerful thing. I mean, we are made up of more bacteria, right? Than we are other human cells, right? So we've got trillions and trillions of bacteria in our gut and how they're impacting the way that we function, whether we're absorbing nutrients well, whether we're getting sick, whether we're staying well, whether our immune system's functioning, whether neurotransmitters are being utilized well and absorbed. It has everything to do with it, right? So it's just the second brain that we've got housed, you know, in our GI tract. And it's powerful when we start to look at that in terms of how it changes the way that our brain

functions. And it's a wonderful conversation to keep having because not a lot of people know about it. So not one lecture in medical school about the gut-brain connection for me, not one lecture in my residency, my psychiatric residency or my child and adolescent psychiatry fellowship, Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Fellowship, not one. And it's nuts when you think, as you said, you have a hundred trillion bugs in your intestinal tract where you only have 10 trillion cells in your whole body. So you have 10 times the number of bugs and they can be really good for you. So they can be really good for you so they can be really helpful or they can be really hurtful and if you don't feed the bugs right they won't

make neurotransmitters they won't make vitamins they won't digest your food they will cause this thing we call leaky gut where your gut lining becomes deteriorated and you start to absorb things you shouldn't absorb in your body. Yeah, you start to become almost allergic to yourself, right? I mean, I think that's the thing I remember a professor once said is try not to become allergic to yourself, right? I mean, I think that's the thing I remember a professor once said is try not to become allergic to yourself, right? It's like that idea of you start to react to things that maybe you could normally eat, but if your intestinal lining is permeable, you're going to have problems. Well, and I love that term. I'd never heard that before,

become allergic to yourself. So that's what MS is, that multiple sclerosis. It's what rheumatoid arthritis is. It's what lupus is. And a lot of rheumatologists or neurologists will try to drug the brain into submission without really going at what the root cause might be. And that is often gut health. And so as I talk about brain health, I always say brain health is three things. You've got to care about your brain, so fall in love with your brain. Avoid anything that hurts it and do things that help it. You just need to know the list. Well, gut health is sort of the same thing. You need to care about that tube

that's 30 feet long and you need to care about its health, its contents. And, you know, what are the things you can do for it that help it? And what are the things you should stop doing that hurt it? So we already began to talk about why you should love it and and people know intuitively um i remember i went i used to get butterflies before i would speak in front of an audience uh and why right i mean i'm anxious in my mind how does that affect my gut? Well, there's a big nerve called the vagus nerve that goes between your brain and your gut. And so it's sending signals you're unhappy, your gut will feel it. I remember when I went through a period of grief 13 years ago now, I lost somebody that I just dearly loved. My GI tract was upset for six months. It just wasn't working

right. And I think so many people who go through grief, they experience gastric symptoms. Absolutely. Yeah. And I think it's a great messenger. I mean, it's a communication tool, like you were just talking about the vagus nerve. But are more in touch with and we can feel what's going on in our gut where we can't feel what's going on in our brain. If we're willing to listen to it, they've got all kinds of issues, constipation or IBS or, you know, just difficulty absorbing food or their upset stomach a lot. And yeah, as you pointed out, you get into what's going on psychologically, emotionally, and there's almost always a connection. And certainly, we see the benefit of addressing those two things in concert, right? And again, that speaks to sort of the nourishment overall. It's like, well, okay, yeah, someone's going through grief, or someone's got a lot of anxiety, it's going to impact the way that they're able to even take in food. Um, and certainly the

way that they're able to absorb it. And, and so looking at those two things together is always, I think more beneficial. And so few psychiatrists or therapists have any clue or any training on this, but if you're struggling from anxiety, depression, ADD, and addiction, it's so important to work on gut health. And so let's teach people how to do that. How do you take care of your gut? So what are the things to do and what are the things to not do? Right. So one of the key things to do is make sure that we're feeding the beneficial bacteria. Right. So one of the ways that we can do that through our food is through eating a fiber rich diet.

Right. We've got to get the prebiotics in the food for the beneficial bacteria. We've got to be eating high fiber. So, you know, the U.S. population in general is like we're getting half of what we need in terms of fiber. We really need, you know, 20, 30 grams a day or more like 10, 15, right? So we've got to feed the bacteria and keep the beneficial bacteria there to hold space so that we don't end up with the pathogenic bacteria taking over.

So that's number one. We've got to make sure we're not taking in pesticides and even artificial sweeteners like sucralose that can act almost like an antibiotic and kill off some of our beneficial bacteria. We've got to be abstaining from taking too many antibiotics, right? I mean, that's something in the medical field are just, you know, often doled out without a lot of thought as to the repercussions. And I'm constantly fascinated by how many people are on antibiotics. I had a patient recently who had been on antibiotics for 15 years, just every day, and had never

been told to take a probiotic, had not been told to incorporate probiotic-rich foods, had not been told to incorporate fiber-rich foods. So those sort of basic things really make an impact on what's able to thrive in our gut and what's able to thrive in our guts and what's able to, you know, keep from thriving. So prebiotics, which fiber rich food, probiotics, which yes, you can take supplements and BrainMD makes pro brain biotics. And we made that one specifically because there are a couple of studies showing that

it helps support your mood and decrease anxiety um probiotic foods um it's a little bit of a double-edged sword because people think they eating yogurt and so they get dan and yogurt off the grocery store shelf and it's loaded with artificial dyes and sugar. And it's like, no. I mean, we're sort of not a fan of dairy anyways. And if you're sensitive. But kimchi is loaded with healthy probiotics. I don't like kimchi. It's just not for me.

But I love sauerkraut. And sauerkraut is loaded with probiotics so feeding your gut healthy bacteria is so important for and then if you've had things that destroyed your gut um like antibiotics um like chronic stress so chronic stress as a young person. So I just saw someone yesterday who was molested physically, emotionally, sexually. It changed her gut health. And I just know that it decreases her guts ability

to produce serotonin. It makes it more likely she's gonna have leaky gut and so on. So taking care of the emotional trauma with treatments like emdr a specific psychotherapy for trauma can be really helpful but then you have to avoid things that hurt your gut and do things that help your gut and you mentioned probiotics the other thing i'm sorry you mentioned pesticides, of course. What do pesticides do?

They kill bugs. And so that's why eating organic is really important when you can. But the other thing people don't talk much about is alcohol. And my wife is a nurse. And why do nurses put alcohol on your skin before they give you a shot? To kill bacteria. To kill the bugs.

But yet we sort of have this idea that alcohol is a health food and that you should have two or three glasses of red wine a day and somehow that's good for you. It's like Seth's little forest fires in the gut bacteria. So i'm not a fan of it and a lot of people are almost shamed like if you don't drink you're not really a grown-up

and i'm like i'm just not a fan i mean if you have one or two glasses a week it's probably not a problem one or two glasses a day according to a probably not a problem. One or two glasses a day, according to a study from Johns Hopkins, you have a smaller brain. And I would just say when it comes to the brain size really does matter. It's the only organ in your body where size matters, but it, your brain counts. You don't want to be shrinking your brain. Yeah. And I think you, you know, you bring up a good point about sort of the, the habit of it, right? So that people are used to having alcohol with every social occasion, you know, just like they're used to having really, you know, junk food. I mean, there's that, that sort of habit of that,

you know, in, in so many of our, our, our lives. And I think questioning that and talking about how can you enjoy socializing without that or what else can you do that's health promoting, that's in, you know, we're still able to enjoy each other's company. I think that's, you know, it's inclusive, right? It's like you're addressing the fact that there's a social component to it, but you're also like addressing the fact that you don't want to be hurting yourself in order to have that. So in the going away party in the clinic that you told me about at the break,

I'm hoping they don't have candy and cake and sodas. No, it was all beautiful. It was all beautiful whole foods. It was great. Yeah. So why do we celebrate with foods that hurt us? Yeah. Yeah.

I think it's just because that's what we have been doing. And that is, we haven't thought of it as hurting us, right? We've thought of it as, oh, that's just the recipe I've always made. Or that's what my mom's always done. Or that's what my grandmother did or whatever. I don't think we stop to question it. And we don't stop to question what's the real meaning of the celebration

and why would that be taken away if we just transferred the types of foods we're eating or what we're drinking with it. It really doesn't change the content of the connection. But I think people think that it does somehow. I mean, Thanksgiving or birthdays at my house are, I mean, they're celebrations, but with things that serve us rather than things that hurt us. All right. When we come back, we are going to talk about what to do, what you can eat every day.

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