Living A Full Life

Exploring the Gut-Brain Connection

• Full Life Chiropractic • Season 3 • Episode 7

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Unlock the secrets to a healthier life as Dr. Enrico Dolcecore uncovers the groundbreaking research on the gut-brain connection that could transform your understanding of health and well-being. Imagine your gut potentially having more neural activity than your brain—this episode challenges that very notion and questions long-held beliefs about the mind-body divide. Discover how your lifestyle and diet could be affecting not just your physical health but your mental state as well, with conditions like anxiety and depression possibly linked to the balance of your gut's microbiome.

Journey with us through the world of virtual functional medicine, where flexibility and accessibility meet personalized health care. We discuss how mindfulness practices and remote lab result analyses can lead to a more balanced and fulfilling life. Our collaboration with Full Life Chiropractor shows how integrating functional medicine into your everyday routine is not just a choice but a step toward a healthier, more mindful existence. Tune in to learn why seeking out the best practitioners could be your key to unlocking the full potential of your mind-body connection.

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Speaker 1:

Welcome everyone. I'm Dr Enrico Dolcecori and we're doing another Living a Full Life podcast this week. The Gut-Brain Connection Ever feel butterflies in your stomach before a big event? That's your gut-brain connection in action. It's an amazing coordination that the brain and the gut has, and what medicine has failed us on over the last 2000 years?

Speaker 1:

Since the ancient Greeks was dividing the mind and the body into two different things, we view our systems and our bodies as the mind and body, when really it's all body. It's all encompassing together, functioning together at every single time of our moment of our lives. The brain is part of our body. It's not a separate entity. I think we use mindfulness and physicalness as two different, distinct ways of living, but they're one in one and what that has done has created this partition in health of the mind over body or body over mind, whichever way you want to look at and thinking that our mind can control our body, when really it does not control our body at all. The central nervous system is the brain and spinal cord, but it's the master controller and relayer of all the body's information back and forth in a two-way street. So this is where the vagal nerve comes into the vagus nerve comes into play, and some other things that we're going to review on this podcast, is the connection between the gut and the brain and how they are actually.

Speaker 1:

One new research is showing that the mesenteric system, the mesenteric nervous system, is actually right, meaning that the gut neurons that have been measured so far we keep adding more and more and more. Where they have now surpassed the amount of neurons in the brain, they're finding that the mesenteric system actually has more neural activity than the brain itself. So does the mind truly have matter over the body? Does it truly have control over matter? Sorry, does the brain truly have control over matter? Is that what's happening? And I think science is going to show very soon that it does not. It actually plays a back and forth connection every single moment of our lives. So what is this connection? Well, the neural activity, yes, is higher in the mesenteric system than the brain. That's pretty amazing. So there's more going on and being downloaded and communicating in the gut in every moment of our day, from digestion, nutrition, absorption, and relaying that back to the brain saying, hey, we've got lots of sugar coming in, we've got lots of amino acids breaking down, we've got lots of protein to be synthesizing and the brain is just fortifying the systems in the body to do all that. So it just sits there and controls it through the endocrine system, neurotransmitters, and this goes back and forth trillions of times per minute. It's unbelievable the amount of communication that's there, faster than any fiber optic system we've ever developed on Earth, faster than the Internet, faster than anything that happens is within the human body. It's pretty amazing how that goes.

Speaker 1:

But there's a secondary communication that ends up happening, happening with the gut, and it's the microbiome. How other external organisms play a role in the communication efficiency of the gut is extraordinary. We have bacteria viruses. We still haven't even cracked the virus research yet to see how viruses in our gut are doing what they do and how they work and how the body responds to that. We haven't even got there yet.

Speaker 1:

We are looking at bacteria because we understand organisms, single cell and multi-cell organisms. We understand that because we've been doing a lot of microbiology on this for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. So we are starting to really think we know. But now we're starting to understand how these bacteria work, not just under a microscope by you know, seeing if they're gram positive or gram negative and doing our microbiology type stuff on it. But how do they work alive and thriving inside of us, inside of our gut, in a completely different ecosystem than underneath a microscope? How do they interchange with one another is remarkable, absolutely remarkable, and we're still learning on this.

Speaker 1:

But that's the communication based on what is happening with the microbiome in our gut and how our mesenteric system relays that information to the brain. And we've been thinking for all these years that the brain is the one that controls everything and understands everything. And now you've got this mesenteric system that's doing it all and the brain's just sitting there like, okay, I'll do what you say, tell me what to do and that's what we'll do. It's your gut driving the entire ship. It's amazing where we're going to go with this Pretty cool stuff.

Speaker 1:

So the role of the microbiome it influences directly mental health. I mean, if you get hungry, what ends up happening? You get angry. You almost need to stop and eat. If you haven't eaten for a while, you may fatigue, your blood sugar may go down. I mean you may actually stop moving because you need to eat. Right, you could possibly die if you don't eat long enough. So it definitely affects our brain and these imbalances when it happens in the microbiome, for whatever reason it is, lead to anxiety, depression and brain fog, is lead to anxiety, depression and brain fog, and we are seeing this more and more and more in societies across the world because of our sedentary lifestyle and the processed foods that we've made.

Speaker 1:

We need to understand that over the last 150 years we've taken farmers who, you know everyone owned a plot of land or worked on a plot of land, grew their own food, took the extra down the road to the market and exchanged with other farmers for certain things. If I grew a whole bunch of land, grew their own food, took the extra down the road to the market and exchanged with other farmers for certain things. If I grew a whole bunch of potatoes, had extra, I'd go down and whatever some carrots, I'd bring them down. And then the other guy that had more animals I'd be like, hey, you want a box of potatoes and some carrots and they'll put three chickens or whatever the fair exchange was at that time and that's what would happen. Or you go and buy and trade money for that stuff.

Speaker 1:

And that life changed with the industrial revolution. We've built mega cities, everyone's conglomerated in these concrete jungles and they live downtown, on Main Street and First Avenue, and they demand to have strawberries in January. They're like, oh, I got to go to the store and get some strawberries. How the heck are you going to eat strawberries in the middle of a metropolitan city like Los Angeles or Houston or New York or Miami and demand that you're going to eat strawberries? Well, the industrial revolution has done this.

Speaker 1:

Transportation has taken food from anywhere through distribution and brought them to city centers so we can live a city type life. It's pretty amazing what it's done, but it's also created a lot of problems because you put a lot of people densely in one area. They need to be fed and when they need to be fed, fresh food becomes very difficult to get to them in a timely manner. Case closed. That's the world we live in. So what do we do now? Oranges from Portugal or wherever they're growing in Spain get transported in containers and picked before they're 100% ripe and frozen for up to a year and a half chilled before you may actually eat that orange, wherever it's from. It's amazing.

Speaker 1:

Our distribution technology, our storage technologies and the things that we've created to mass feed 8 billion people on earth is crazy. It's amazing and you can have a strawberry pretty much anytime you want, just by going to a store. That's what we've created and unfortunately, because of that, it's changed our microbiome. We just don't get the fresh food. We don't get the fresh food and that's what ends up happening and that's why we anxiety's through the roof, depression's through the roof, brain fog is through the roof is because I believe we've completely altered in the last 10 generations maybe less the microbiome of humans through the process food and preservatives that we've created to help food stay, have a stable shelf life and get to use of it we can eat. So that's the big thing.

Speaker 1:

The mental effects. Research has shown that the gut health links to depression, anxiety and even memory. Whether it's an imbalance or a long-term imbalance. It can create wastes from overgrowth, like candida, strep, staph, whatever's overgrowing in the gut, and those byproducts can actually lead as almost like a toxin not a neurotoxin, but a toxin that goes into the body can lead to autoimmune disorders, memory fog, dementia. It can affect everything. It's absolutely crazy. We get physical symptoms, we get mental impact. Immediate responses are bloating, ibs, digestive issues, constipation. These are things that can start to develop over time because of a chronically inflamed gut, because of a dysbiosis in the microbiome. So even chronic stress in your life can harm your gut health and create a vicious cycle of poor gut health, poor growth, poor microbiome, more stress, and then your stress cycle can't be broken. You're stuck in this perpetual stress cycle. You become sympathetic driven and your cortisol starts to shoot up and then it affects sleep and then that cycle just gets vicious. That's the importance of our gut. It controls our entire gateway to health.

Speaker 1:

So first steps for gut microbiome. Whether you think you're healthy or you're not, we need to make sure we have a diet of prebiotic and probiotic foods like sauerkraut, fiber-rich foods, yogurts, whatever it may be, or just simply adding prebiotics and probiotics to our diet can help. We need to. You have to reduce inflammatory foods like sugar, alcohol and processed items. The last podcast we did was all about inflammation. Listen to that one after this one and you'll see why these two go hand in hand.

Speaker 1:

We need to make lifestyle changes too. We got to manage stress through mindfulness, mental therapy, whatever it may be. We have to manage stress because stress throws the gut off and if it becomes too static or too mobile it can create that dysbiosis. If we're having things like maybe a side effect of chronic diarrhea, chronic movement and we can't keep things down. It can lead to dehydration, it can kill off good bacteria in the gut. It can't let good bacteria proliferate and we're going to get malabsorption, malnutrition because we're not absorbing properly. We need to prioritize sleep and we're going to get malabsorption, malnutrition because we're not absorbing properly. We need to prioritize sleep and allow the gut to recover each and every night. We need to prioritize sleep, not just for the gut, but for every cell, tissue and organ in our body so that it can heal and regenerate. That's when healing happens is at night.

Speaker 1:

So some supplements to think about Probiotics and omega-3s are always the staples that I recommend. Then anything above and beyond and you move up the ladder. I would talk to a healthcare provider for this so that they can do the right testing whether it's blood work or stool testing or whatever it is to measure gut health and then give you customized dosages of exactly what you need to help proliferate a healthy microbiome. That's where we go here. Omega-3s are not going to do that. Probiotics are going to assist, but may not be specific enough for you. So we need to mention the importance of consulting someone for this functional health or a gut or an entereologist or an internal medicine doctor can really help you with this type of stuff.

Speaker 1:

So, for kids, what about helping our kids? We got to pack their lunches, first of all, with fermented food and fiber-rich snacks. We can't just sit here with fruit snacks and crackers and things that are not rich in fiber, because it's going to set them off to a bad start with their guts. You got to teach them about gut health in a fun and engaging way and how their guts play a major role in their mood, how they feel, how they sleep, how they learn, how they focus, and get them encouraged to eat healthy and based off of what you give them.

Speaker 1:

If we, you know, creating picky eaters is a parenting fault, you know, I get parents all the time we close the door, we talk I'm like, hey, diet's a major important in their success with all of this. And they're like, yeah, you know, I just can't get them away. All they like is whatever the snacks goldfish crackers, whatever the snacks goldfish crackers, uh, pop tarts. I'm like, okay, um, and whose fault is that? And they look at me like what are you talking about? Um, I'm like who taught, who bought them this the, the crackers who bought them, the goldfish who bought them. The pop pop tarts I haven't had. I've never seen pop tarts in the store. How the heck do you have pop tarts? Why is your kid eating pop tarts? And the parents kind of like you know they feel guilty in a moment.

Speaker 1:

I do it in a loving way, not like this, but they sit there like, yeah, you're right, if you never buy it and you never introduce it into your home, your kids will never know what this stuff is. I shouldn't say never. Eventually, you know, in the cafeteria at school they may see it, but You've got to protect them for as long as you possibly can. That's when we build. You build their guts before they even go to school. Before they're four years old, their guts are already built up. So setting this stuff up is on you as a parent. So share tips with your family. Share tips for meal prepping with one each other. So making leftovers on good meals. When we cook the meals during the week, we pack them up with healthy leftovers for lunches and maybe even dinner the next day.

Speaker 1:

And just practice mindfulness for our adults to just take a breather. You guys, you work so hard. You go 100 miles an hour every single day to stop and slow down or even come to a stop just for a few seconds and just practice some mindfulness. Just bring. That can even help you. Help, you'll notice it in the gut, in the breathing, in everything. A healthy gut is a foundation to a healthy mind. You have to do this. Reach out to us if you need help.

Speaker 1:

The beauty of functional medicine is it can almost be done virtually, and my wife is one of the best. She's helped our family, she's helped friends, she's helped our patients doing all this stuff. So if you reach out to Full Life Chiropractor, we can help you anywhere that you are at with virtual functional medicine. You just run your lab tests in the city that you're at or wherever you're at. You do them online, we get the results, you email them to us and we can help you. So that's the good thing about functional messaging you can find the best of the best anywhere and work with them, and I encourage you to do that. So subscribe, leave a review, share this podcast with anyone that you think needs to hear it, tune into our other podcasts and each and every week, we will be here for you, your health and your family Stay well, stay healthy and take care.

People on this episode

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Dr. Enrico Dolcecore

Host
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Dr. Christine Hafer

Co-host
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Dr. Crystal Corona

Co-host