Cranberry Wellness Center Blog: Intestinal Health; ‘Gut-Brain Connection’

| October 24, 2016

Calvin 1Calvin Bickel, co-owner of Cranberry Wellness Center and God’s Little Garden, submitted the following article – Intestinal Health; “Gut-Brain Connection”

Hello everyone! The topic I will be discussing in this blog is because of our OPEN HOUSE this Wednesday. It will be from 12:00 to 4:00 p.m., and all are invited.

One of the speakers will be talking on the subject I am writing about, especially the supplements you can take to help it heal.

I could call this the Microbiome of the Body or Intestinal Health or even the “Gut-Brain Connection.” I will leave this to you to decide.

Have you ever had that Gut Feeling when making a decision, or maybe you have had Butterflies in your Stomach when nervous situation arises. Maybe you are getting these signals from an unexpected source, a Second Brain. Within the walls of the digestive system is a little brain that scientists call the Enteric Nervous System or ENS for short. The ENS is made of two thin layers of more then 100 million nerve cells lining your entire gastrointestinal tract. The main role of the ENS is controlling digestion, from swallowing to releasing enzymes that break down food, to the control of blood flow that helps with absorption of nutrients all the way to elimination. According to Jay Pasricha, M.D., director of the John Hopkins Center for Neurogastroenterology, “The Enteric Nervous System doesn’t seem capable of thought as we know it, but it communicates back and forth with our big brain – with profound results.”

The gut has a mind of its own, the ENS.

Researchers say this system sends and receives impulses, records experiences, and responds to emotions, just like the brain in our head. The same neurotransmitters that influence the brain influence the gut, so just as the brain can upset the gut, the gut can upset the brain. The guts brain is said to play a major role in our happiness or misery. Many gastrointestinal disorders such as colitis, irritable bowel, etc. originate from problems within the guts brain.

gut brain
The brain has 85 billion neurons, 100 neurotransmitters, and produces 50% of all dopamine and 5% of serotonin.

The gut has 500 million neurons, 40 neurotransmitters, and produces 50% of all dopamine and 95% of serotonin.

Because of these and more commonalities, it is possible that treatments that target the mind may unintentionally influence the gut.

Scientists were shocked to learn that about 90% of the fibers in the primary visceral nerve, the vagus, carry information from the gut to the brain – not the other way around. They said “Some of that info is decidedly unpleasant.” We are now faced with the possibility of both prevention and treatment of neurological/neuropsychiatric difficulties via proper gut health.

So, is it possible that by helping to restore the gut to its proper function, it may in turn help those with Autism, ADD, ADHD, Depression, Anxiety, and more?

All disease begins in the gut.

– Hippocrates

Hippocrates said this more than 2,000 years ago, but we’re only now coming to understand just how right he was. Research over the past two decades has revealed that gut health is critical to overall health, and that an unhealthy gut contributes to a wide range of diseases including diabetes, obesity, rheumatoid arthritis, autism spectrum disorder, depression, and chronic fatigue syndrome.

In fact, many researchers believe that supporting intestinal health and restoring the integrity of the gut barrier will be one of the most important goals of medicine in the 21st century.

There are two closely related variables that determine our gut health: the intestinal micro biota, or “gut flora,” and the gut barrier. Let’s discuss each of them in turn.

The gut flora: a healthy garden needs healthy soil

Our gut is home to approximately 100,000,000,000,000 (100 trillion) microorganisms. That’s such a big number our human brains can’t really comprehend it. One trillion dollar bills laid end-to-end would stretch from the earth to the sun – and back – with a lot of miles to spare. Do that 100 times and you start to get at least a vague idea of how much 100 trillion is.

The human gut contains 10 times more bacteria than all the human cells in the entire body with over 400 known diverse bacterial species. In fact, you could say that we’re more bacterial than we are human….Think about that one for a minute.

Unfortunately, several features of the modern lifestyle directly contribute to unhealthy gut flora:

– Antibiotics and other medications like birth control and NSAIDs
– Diets high in refined carbohydrates, sugar, and processed foods
– Diets low in fermentable fibers
– Dietary toxins like wheat and industrial seed oils that cause leaky gut
– Chronic stress
– Chronic infections

Antibiotics are particularly harmful to the gut flora. Recent studies have shown that antibiotic use causes a profound and rapid loss of diversity and a shift in the composition of the gut flora. This diversity is not recovered after antibiotic use without intervention.

Scientists also know that infants that aren’t breast-fed and are born to mothers with bad gut flora are more likely to develop unhealthy gut bacteria and that these early differences in gut flora may predict overweight, diabetes, eczema/psoriasis, depression, and other health problems in the future.

gut flora

The gut barrier: the gatekeeper that decide what gets in and what stays out

Have you ever considered the fact that the contents of the gut are technically outside the body?

The gut is a hollow tube that passes from the mouth to the anus. Anything that goes in the mouth and isn’t digested will pass right out the other end. This is, in fact, one of the most important functions of the gut: to prevent foreign substances from entering the body.

When the intestinal barrier becomes permeable (i.e. “leaky gut syndrome”), large protein molecules escape into the bloodstream. Since these proteins don’t belong outside of the gut, the body mounts an immune response and attacks them. Studies show that these attacks play a role in the development of autoimmune diseases.

In fact, experts in mucosal biology like Alessio Fasano now believe leaky gut is a precondition to developing autoimmunity:

There is growing evidence that increased intestinal permeability plays a pathogenic role in various autoimmune diseases including [celiac disease] and [type 1 diabetes]. Therefore, we hypothesize that besides genetic and environmental factors, loss of intestinal barrier function is necessary to develop autoimmunity.

The phrase “leaky gut” used to be confined to the outer fringes of medicine, employed by alternative practitioners with letters like D.C., L.Ac and N.D. after their names. Conventional researchers and doctors originally scoffed at the idea that a leaky gut contributes to autoimmune problems, but now they’re eating their words. It has been repeatedly shown in several well-designed studies that the integrity of the intestinal barrier is a major factor in autoimmune disease.

This new theory holds that the intestinal barrier in large part determines whether we tolerate or react to toxic substances we ingest from the environment. The breach of the intestinal barrier (which is only possible with a “leaky gut”) by food toxins like gluten and chemicals like arsenic or BPA causes an immune response which affects not only the gut itself but also other organs and tissues. These include the skeletal system, the pancreas, the kidney, the liver, and the brain.

This is a crucial point to understand: you don’t have to have gut symptoms to have a leaky gut. Leaky gut can manifest as skin problems like eczema or psoriasis, heart failure, autoimmune conditions affecting the thyroid (Hashimoto’s) or joints (rheumatoid arthritis), mental illness, autism spectrum disorder, depression, and more.

Researchers have identified a protein called zonulin that increases intestinal permeability in humans and other animals. This led to a search of the medical literature for illnesses characterized by increased intestinal permeability (leaky gut). Imagine their surprise when the researchers found that many, if not most, autoimmune diseases – including celiac disease, type 1 diabetes, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis and inflammatory bowel disease – are characterized by abnormally high levels of zonulin and a leaky gut. In fact, researchers have found that they can induce type 1 diabetes almost immediately in animals by exposing them to zonulin. They develop a leaky gut, and begin producing antibodies to islet cells – which are responsible for making insulin.

The following is from an article on Babies and their flora or micro biome:

The study of babies and their specialized diet has yielded key insights into how the colonization of the gut unfolds and why it matters so much to our health. One of the earliest clues to the complexity of the microbiome came from an unexpected corner: the effort to solve a mystery about milk. For years, nutrition scientists were confounded by the presence in human breast milk of certain complex carbohydrates, called oligosaccharides, which the human infant lacks the enzymes necessary to digest. Evolutionary theory argues that every component of mother’s milk should have some value to the developing baby or natural selection would have long ago discarded it as a waste of the mother’s precious resources.

It turns out the oligosaccharides are there to nourish not the baby but one particular gut bacterium called Bifidobacterium infantis, which is uniquely well-suited to break down and make use of the specific oligosaccharides present in mother’s milk. When all goes well, the bifidobacteria proliferate and dominate, helping to keep the infant healthy by crowding out less savory microbial characters before they can become established and, perhaps most important, by nurturing the integrity of the epithelium — the lining of the intestines, which plays a critical role in protecting us from infection and inflammation.

“Mother’s milk, being the only mammalian food shaped by natural selection, is the Rosetta stone for all food,” says Bruce German, a food scientist at the University of California, Davis, who researches milk. “And what it’s telling us is that when natural selection creates a food, it is concerned not just with feeding the child but the child’s gut bugs, too.”

Where do these all-important bifidobacteria come from and what does it mean if, like me, you were never breast-fed? Mother’s milk is not, as once was thought, sterile: it is both a “prebiotic” — a food for microbes — and a “probiotic,” a population of beneficial microbes introduced into the body. Some of them may find their way from the mother’s colon to her milk ducts and from there into the baby’s gut with its first feeding. Because designers of infant formula did not, at least until recently, take account of these findings, including neither prebiotic oligosaccharides or probiotic bacteria in their formula, the guts of bottle-fed babies are not optimally colonized.

Most of the microbes that make up a baby’s gut community are acquired during birth — a microbially rich and messy process that exposes the baby to a whole suite of maternal microbes. Babies born by Caesarean, however, a comparatively sterile procedure, do not acquire their mother’s vaginal and intestinal microbes at birth. Their initial gut communities more closely resemble that of their mother’s (and father’s) skin, which is less than ideal and may account for higher rates of allergy, asthma and autoimmune problems in C-section babies: not having been seeded with the optimal assortment of microbes at birth, their immune systems may fail to develop properly.

In conclusion, of all of this – the Flora of our bodies is FAR more important than what most people realized. For years, natural practitioners have been telling people to optimize your gut health and now scientists are revealing the truth of these words. To help speed the recovery of intestinal flora, there are probiotics available, but not all probiotics are the same.

To learn more, come to our open house on Wednesday, October 26, 2016 from 12:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m.!

Calvin


Copyright © 2024 EYT Media Group, Inc. All rights reserved. Any copying, redistribution or retransmission of the contents of this service without the express written consent of EYT Media Group, Inc. is expressly prohibited.

Category: Blogs, Local News, News