The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - Moment 161: The Surprising Link Between Your Gut And Your Brain: Gary Brecka

Episode Date: May 10, 2024

In this moment, world-leading wellness expert Gary Brecka explains the fundamental relationship between our mental and our gut health. For years people have thought that their anxiety and depression are either all in their head or a product of their environment, however, Gary says the gut is the crucial hub for mental well-being. He believes that our gut functions like an assembly line. If anything disrupts its pace or workings, the wider factory of our body and mind is at risk. As a result, Gary believes that it’s crucial, before anything else, to find out how your gut is working to ensure optimal mental and physical health. Listen to the full episode here: Apple- https://g2ul0.app.link/hCYEqDGAsJb Spotify- https://g2ul0.app.link/gcrWn8IAsJb Watch the Episodes On Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/c/%20TheDiaryOfACEO/videos Gary Brecka: https://www.garybrecka.com

Quick one, just wanted to say a big thank you to three people very quickly. First people I want to say thank you to is all of you that listen to the show. Never in my wildest dreams is all I can say. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd start a podcast in my kitchen and that it would expand all over the world as it has done. And we've now opened our first studio in America, thanks to my very helpful team led by Jack on the production side of things. So thank you to Jack and the team for building out the new American studio.

And thirdly to Amazon Music who, when they heard that we were expanding to the United States, and I'd be recording a lot more over in the States, they put a massive billboard in Times Square for the show. So thank you so much, Amazon Music. Thank you to our team. And thank you to all of you that listened to this show. Let's continue. Majority of people that suffer from idiopathic anxiety or generalized anxiety, because of low serotonin, they also have gut issues. You show me a person that's truly depressed, and I'll show you somebody that's also suffering from severe gut issues, either gas or bloating or diarrhea, constipation, irritability, cramping, because the same neurotransmitters that affect

these emotional states also are responsible for the motility of the gut, the speed of the gut. This is the most overlooked thing in all of bariatric medicine because people that believe that they have all of these allergies, well, I'm allergic to wheat, soy, corn, dairy, blueberries, bananas, gluten.

Yes, sometimes those individual allergies do exist, but the majority of time, even if you talk to somebody who says, yeah, I get bloated or I deal with gas or cramping or diarrhea or constipation or irritability, I deal with all of these gut issues, irritable bowel syndrome, Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis,

all these names that we give to conditions of the gut. When you ask them, well, what are you allergic to? And they give you this laundry list of things. And then you ask them another question and say, well, if you're really allergic to corn, is there ever a time that you can eat corn and not have a reaction? The majority of time people will say yes.

Okay, well right there, you know you don't have an allergy. Allergies are not transient, allergies are consistent. Right, you don't wake up Monday morning and being allergic to milk, and then you're unallergic on Wednesday afternoon and then re-allergic on Saturday morning. But what happens when people have gut issues that they can't explain is they always correlate it to what they last ate. And it's hard to make this connection. They're like, well, wait a second, I ate the same thing Monday and I was fine. And I ate the identical food on Wednesday and I blew

up like a tick. So this is not an allergy. This has to do with the motility of the gut. So if you don't know what gene mutation you have that is causing a deficiency, then you don't know what to supplement with to restore gut motility. But once you do, the gut goes back to its normal pace. What's gut motility? It's the pace of the gut. So if you remember, Henry Ford was actually not made famous for the automobile. He was made famous for something called the assembly line. So the assembly line was just a glorified conveyor belt, right? And when you walked into his factory, they put a part on it on one end. And about every six feet, somebody stood and tinkered with that part.

So it went to me. I tinkered with it. It moved to the guy to my right. He did something to it, moved to the guy to his right. And by the time it reached the end of that conveyor belt, it's fully assembled. This is very analogous to how the human intestinal tract works. It's 30 feet long. It's a giant conveyor belt. You put parts on it at one end as they exit the stomach in a very acidic environment, and it moves slowly towards the rectum. And before it exits the rectum, it's in a relatively alkaline environment.

So instead of having people standing along a conveyor belt, you have bacteria that are graded by pH. The sequence is very important. So imagine what would happen if Henry Ford walked into his factory one day and doubled the speed of the conveyor belt. The entire assembly line would break down. Not because there's anything wrong with the parts, the contents, not because there's anything wrong with the people that are working there, the bacteria, but because you change the speed. What if he went in there one day and reversed the conveyor belt? What if he just ran it in the opposite direction? It would screw the whole thing up, right? So by changing the pace of the gut, the speed of the gut, the conveyor belt, I've ruined this sequence of events. And I spend a lifetime trying to figure out what's wrong with the parts, what's wrong with the workers, what's wrong with the conveyor belt itself, nothing. It's how quickly

or slowly it's running because the motility, this peristaltic activity is affected. And once you supplement for this deficiency and you return that activity to normal, you find that all of a sudden these strange allergies eviscerate and all of this gas and bloating and diarrhea and constipation and irritability and all of this inability to equate things that I'm eating back to what is going on in my gut seem to go away. It's true with all kinds of conditions. We have subscribed in this world to the fact that we are so affected by disease and pathology. And once I get you to subscribe to the fact that you have a disease, I can get you to subscribe to a lifetime of medication. Serotonin, for example, 90% of it

resides in your gut. So if you don't have it here, you can't have it here. So depression rarely begins in the outside environment. It usually begins in the gut. Now it may be trauma that led to the deficiency, but the fix is not in a chemical or synthetic or pharmaceutical blocking the brain's capacity to uptake these neurotransmitters.

The fix is in restoring adequate levels to the body so we can naturopathically make its way back up the vagus nerve and arrive to the brain. Similar things are true with anxiety. I mean, if you actually have ever suffered from or know somebody who's suffered from anxiety, if you ask them three questions, you can find out very quickly

that their anxiety is not coming from a cluster of symptoms. It's not coming from their outside environment. It is coming from within them. It's coming from their physiology, right? I mean, if you know someone who's suffering from anxiety and you say, well, have you had anxiety on and off throughout your lifetime? The most of the time they'll say yes.

And then if you say, can you point to the specific trigger that causes it? Very often they'll say no. I mean, yes, I know some of my triggers, but I could be sitting in a podcast just like this in a very calm environment. There's no threats around. And all of a sudden I get overwhelmed by anxiety. I can be driving home from work on an otherwise innocuous day and I can be overwhelmed by

anxiety. Well, that is not coming from your outside environment, right? This is coming from a process called methylation and it is caused from excess catecholamines entering the brain and an inability to downregulate these. So the body's entering this mild fight or flight response without the presence of a fear. See, remember that as sophisticated as we like to think our brains are, it's really not. Our brain is very primal. You know what the brain cares about? The brain cares about survival. And so it doesn't care how fat or skinny you are,

how pretty or ugly you are. It doesn't care about your skin, your hair. It cares about survival. And so when we understand that the brain does not know the difference between perception and reality, we start to understand how it can play tricks on us. So I always use the example that, let's say you drove home tonight

and you got out of your car. When you got home, you got out of your car and somebody was standing in front of you with a knife. It's a very real threat, right? You'd have a fight or flight response. Your pupils would dilate, your heart rate would increase, your extremities would flood with blood, your hearing would get very acute,

your brain would flood with catecholamines, you are getting ready to fight or flight. But you could also be laying on the 30th floor of a condo building in bed and start thinking about getting eaten by a shark there is zero chance of a shark getting out of the ocean going up a 30th floor elevator right coming into your condo and biting you in that bed but you can have the exact same response if you're watching a movie or something exactly so one is entirely real one is entirely perceived the physiologic response is identical so now once we understand this now we begin to understand how i can feel the presence of

a fear which is what anxiety is it's a fear of something happening in the future usually is not going to happen usually hasn't happened in the past and is not likely to happen but it's it's this fear starts to build up. You start to get very anxious. It can actually change your heart rate to the point where you can panic attacks can land you in a hospital. Or it can be mild enough

that it just causes you anxiousness and mild anxiety. But there's no presence of a fear. And so you start trying to correlate it to your outside environment. It starts to drive you crazy because you go, well, I don't get it. I'm on vacation with my wife or my spouse and my kids. And I'm in a resort of a lifetime. I've been here a thousand times. I love this place. There's no reason I should feel like this. But all of a sudden

you have this feeling of anxiousness, anxiety. So these are lack of raw material in the human body. My mission is to try to help people by taking a genetic test once in their lifetime, find out where is methylation broken, and then stop supplementing just for the sake of supplementing and start supplementing for this deficiency so your body can thrive.