Living A Full Life

Your Gut Is Talking to Your Brain and It Has a Lot to Say

• Full Life Chiropractic • Season 3 • Episode 24

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Your gut is constantly speaking to your brain—and it has far more to say than you might think. In this deep dive into the gut-brain connection, Dr. Enrico Dolcecore reveals the surprising science behind why your digestive system is often called your "second brain," and why this relationship matters profoundly for both mental and physical wellbeing.

Most people are shocked to discover that 90% of the communication between gut and brain travels from the gut upward, not the other way around. Through the vast highway known as the vagus nerve, your gut microbiome—those trillions of bacteria living in your digestive tract—produce neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine that directly impact your mood, cognition, and emotional regulation. In fact, a remarkable 95% of your body's serotonin is manufactured not in your brain, but in your gut.

When this communication system falls out of balance, the consequences can be far-reaching. Anxiety, depression, brain fog, chronic inflammation, autoimmune conditions, and even neurodegenerative diseases may all have roots in gut dysfunction. The good news? You can take specific steps to optimize this connection. Dr. Dolcecore outlines five evidence-based strategies: adopting a gut-friendly diet rich in fiber and fermented foods, managing stress effectively, incorporating prebiotics and probiotics strategically, engaging in regular physical activity, and prioritizing quality sleep. Even simple practices like taking a short walk after meals—common in many cultures worldwide—can have significant benefits.

For those experiencing persistent gut-brain issues, functional medicine approaches offer deeper insights through specialized testing that can map your unique gut landscape and guide targeted interventions. Whether you're dealing with mood disorders, digestive problems, or simply want to optimize your health, understanding and nurturing your gut-brain connection could be the missing piece in your wellness journey. Reach out to Full Life Chiropractic for personalized support in addressing root causes rather than just managing symptoms.

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Speaker 1:

Did you know that the gut is often called your second brain? Well, it's not just a catchy phrase. There's real science behind it. Today we're diving into the amazing gut-brain connection and what it means for your health. I'm Dr Enrico Dolcecori. Thanks for joining us on another episode of Living a Full Life. We've been slowly and unwillingly getting into this discussion about the gut and the brain and the microbiome and health and helping our kids, and it's just naturally spurring up questions about well, what is this gut thing? What is this gut brain connection? How does it work? And I've realized we've never really divvied into the science about how it actually works. So on today's episode we'll be exploring how the gut communicates with the brain, what happens when its connection goes array, and how you can keep both systems in tip-top shape for a healthier, happier life for you and your family and your children. The gut and the brain are connected via a vast network of nerves, hormones and chemical messengers, and they communicate constantly. The gut has its own nervous system, called the enteric system, actually the enteric nervous system, and this network is often referred to as the second brain. The mesenteric system is the connection between the gut and the brain. So the nervous system. The central nervous system is your actual brain that sits in your skull and the spinal cord. Those two together are considered your central nervous system. The enteric system is the neural plexus around the gut and the intestine and what that does is it communicates via the two nervous systems, via the mesenteric system, the middle ground of the enteric and the brain, and it's connected by the vagus nerve. We'll talk about the vagus nerve in detail and how it's the primary pathway for communication between the gut and the brain. It's actually responsible for carrying messages in both directions. That's interesting. We've always thought that the brain connects everything and tells the body what to do, but as science keeps moving forward, we realize that it's a two-way superhighway between many systems, not just the gut or the cardiovascular system. It's a two-way nervous system superhighway that no fiber optic cable or anything in the world has ever been created to match its speed, its precision and its integrity, and I don't think we're anywhere close. But this superhighway goes back and forth and the vagus nerve plays the relaying signals to the brain and it plays a vital role between the two. A lot of research recently, in the last 20 years, has shown that vagal stimulation and how we can actually affect the vagus nerve may help people in some ways from a whole bunch of things that we can go into, from cognition, mood and even inflammation. So the vagus nerve's primary pathway is to communicate. And did you know that 90% of the fibers in the vagus nerve send information from the gut to the brain, not the other way around? That's a major clue that the gut might have more power over our mental health than we ever thought. It's not an equal highway, it's a 16 lane highway to the brain and a two lane highway to the gut from the brain. Very interesting on how much information is relayed back by the enteric system.

Speaker 1:

Gut microbiome influence on the brain has been exhaustively expressed over not just these last few podcasts, but across science everywhere. Probiotics have been around for 40 years talking about how the biotics in the gut play a huge role, from putting it into your yogurt. Activa was sued for their false claims on how their probiotics in there, or just yogurt probiotics, can promote overall health and we noticed that it didn't really change anyone's health, but it wasn't a bad thing. I don't know if they deserve to be sued, but they were considered false claims. The bacteria in yogurt are great. They can help your gut, but they don't have any health properties to them. The trillions of bacteria in the gut can influence brain function. These bacteria release neurotransmitters like serotonin, dopamine and short-chain fatty acids, which play roles in mood regulation, anxiety and depression. Around 95% of the body's serotonin is produced in the gut. Yes, this stuff helps with your mood, sleep and even digestion is mostly made in your stomach.

Speaker 1:

The gut-brain axis is another part of this mesenteric system. The gut-brain axis concept is that it's bidirectional communication between the brain and the gut, affecting everything from digestion to emotional regulation. There's even studies across all aspects of health and science and medicine from enterology, cardiovascular science, brain science, neurology, neuroscience showing the connections between the enteric and brain health and how poor gut health, like dysbiosis or imbalanced gut bacteria, can contribute to anxiety, depression, even cognitive decline, as we see in some of the Alzheimer's patients and research study that's coming out there. When your gut is out of balance, you might feel more stressed, anxious or even foggy. This is because your gut is sending signals to your brain that affect your mood, emotions and mental clarity.

Speaker 1:

How many of you just get angry when you're hungry? That's a primal instinct and we know it lights up the midbrain from hunger pangs that make us go into sympathetic. So we run out there and hunt and get some food right. That's the primitive brain. And we hunt and we you know we're warriors and we walk all the way to the pantry or the fridge and we eat the beasts that we are right. So that's that's what we do and it's that hunger and we all have that and I use that example because I think we've all, we've all been there, probably recently me this morning and you get angry, you got to eat. It's a natural response. That is a natural response and a normal response for most people. To get anxious, to get depressed, to get other emotions, may not be natural for some people and that could be lead it led to a dysbiosis in the gut, triggering other neurotransmitters that signal other moods in our brain.

Speaker 1:

There's so much more to look forward to when science comes out from this, but all we can do now is really focus on gut health. With what we know and many Americans suffer from dysbiosis there's also physical health implications that can happen with this, like a dysfunctional gut-brain connection could contribute to chronic pain, inflammation, irritable bowel syndrome and even autoimmune disorders. So we get physical symptoms and pathologies and diseases from an imbalanced mesenteric system. Stress plays a huge role in this. Not only can that cause stress, but stress can also have its highway effect back to the gut. It can really affect the gut brain access. Chronic stress can worsen gut health and vice versa, chronic gut health can increase stress. So let's dive into how to maintain a healthy gut, and if you listen to the last few podcasts, we have some great tips on there.

Speaker 1:

But now that we got into the science of the enteric system, the mesenteric system and the gut brain access, now we can understand oh, hang on, there's a neural complexity in here and unless you're an electrical engineer, you may not be able to visualize how this works. If you like, electricity, frequency and static energy, and you understand those principles. That's how our nervous system works. It works on this high pitch and low pitch, frequency and electrical conductance, their actual energy between every message, and it's controlled homeostatically through tone. And I love to teach in our office the nervous system for all of its communication. Even the mesenteric system, the enteric system, are like guitar. If you play the guitar or any string instruments, I love this analogy of the guitar. String has to be tuned to a certain tensile strength. Once it's there, you can then do the A key, the D key, the E key. You can play those tones, those keys, and if they're not, if they're too loose or too tight, you'll decrease the pitch or increase the pitch and be out of tune.

Speaker 1:

And that's our battle through our whole lives is to maintain homeostasis within our central and peripheral nervous systems. How do we do that? We start with a gut-friendly diet. You are what you eat. Let food be thy medicine. Everything from thousands of years ago that have been written by Hippocrates, socrates, the philosophers, galileo we have them written over and over again through the history books. And what we want to do is eat more fiber-rich foods, fermented foods especially like sauerkraut, and add probiotics can help keep your gut microbiome diverse and healthy.

Speaker 1:

That means better communication with your brain. The more diverse your gut, the better the communication. It's the more communication. For those of you that have married and have been married for years, communication is key. The less communication you have, the more rocky, the more indifferent the relationship can be. The more communication you have, the more smooth. I'm not saying it's perfect, I'm saying the more smooth a relationship can be. And that's the same thing with the relationship between the gut and the brain, the more communication they can have. The more diverse of a microbiome you can have, the more communication in many more different languages can happen between the brain. The more languages that the brain understands and the more languages that the gut can speak, the better versed we are with communication. We'll understand and not misinterpret any signals neurotransmitters that go to the brain to dysregulate our mood and our behavior.

Speaker 1:

Stress management is the next on the list and these are in order from number one that we have to do is the diet. You can't do anything else without a proper diet If you're just eating malnutritious foods that have nothing to them. The thing about processed bread, processed meats, processed carbohydrates, boxed foods cans is it's lost its vital energy. It's lost its bacteria. It has to be sanitized to be shelf stable. There is nothing in it. So when we eat this stuff it's void of anything new to the gut, which is probably number one. Two, it feeds a lot of the bad guys in our gut too. They love those simple carbs and those starchy things that have low nutrition. They love eating those up. The good bacteria love, you know, protein, amino acids, fatty chains. They love eating that stuff up. So if we're not giving them those, we're not giving our body that stuff, we get into dysbiosis very quickly. So that's the diet the most important thing.

Speaker 1:

Number two is your stress management. You know we got to discuss some strategies on this, like meditation, mindfulness, exercise, quality sleep. It's so important for gut health. Stress is like a villain in this story. It disrupts gut function and creates a negative feedback loop. Reducing stress through activities like yoga, breathing exercises or even taking a walk can immediately benefit for your gut and your mood. So we got to manage stress, which is a sneaky way of me getting in some movement and relaxation.

Speaker 1:

Into here. Number four, and there's only five that we're going to go through. Number four into here. Number four, and there's only five that we're going to go through. Number four probiotics and prebiotics. We've got to be rotating through this through diet and supplements.

Speaker 1:

There's a difference between probiotics, which are live bacteria, and prebiotics, which are food for bacteria. I guess out of all the podcasts I've done, I've never really explained those two, and that was a great question that came up a couple weeks ago by a patient via email saying, hey, what's the difference between prebiotic and probiotic? And I answered it very quickly on email. I don't ever think I ever said this on the podcast. The prebiotics is the food for the biome bacteria in your gut. It's important. We want to feed them the good stuff so that the good bacteria proliferate and stay there and the bad bacteria stay at a low volume and they work together. So taking a prebiotic is great.

Speaker 1:

Usually, prebiotics come from the food that you eat. So if you have a well-balanced, high-fiber diet, that's your prebiotics. The probiotics are live gut bacteria that you have to introduce. Introduce and it's only going to come through fermented foods. It's the only way. Unless you like eating rotten apples and drinking spoiled milk, you're not going to get much. I highly recommend not doing that. You're not going to get it, so you're going to have to put in probiotics.

Speaker 1:

And number five is exercise. The connection between physical activity and gut health is overwhelming. Studies are showing that exercise can improve gut microbiome diversity in itself, the constant breaking down. And when you exercise you need to eat. And when you exercise you need to eat nutritious food. And when you exercise you need to eat more protein. It's just natural what you're going to crave when you exercise regularly. And exercise is 15 to 20 minutes, five days a week. That's the start of exercise. If you don't do that, you don't exercise. Anything more than that is more exercise, which is not a bad thing. It's a good thing.

Speaker 1:

So here's some gut brain trivia for you. Did you know that about 70% of your immune system is located in your gut? We already said 90% of the communications from the gut to the brain, 70% of your entire immune system, is regulated and controlled by your gut. That's why keeping your gut healthy isn't just good for your brain, it's good for your immune system. The immune system is a whole different podcast. It's not just your nervous system. Your immune system is not an organ, it's not just one thing. It communicates between the entire mesenteric system, which is the largest neural pathway in the human body. When you combine the brain and the enteric system, you now have the largest communication by far in the human body, and the immune system sits within that and other systems in the body as well, to control everything, even the circulatory system.

Speaker 1:

So sleep how does your gut affect sleep? Well, if it controls neurotransmitter disruption, it can control sleep, like melatonin. So we want to mention the role that gut plays in regulating sleep patterns due to its influence on neurotransmitters just like melatonin, serotonin, dopamine, all these things. Serotonin plays a big role in sleep. There you go. Those are the five things that we really need to work on to have a healthy gut-brain connection a gut-friendly diet, stress management pro, and a gut-friendly diet, stress management pro. And prebiotics, exercise and sleep. All right, there you go Jam-packed one.

Speaker 1:

I wanted to just give a podcast that was packed, entertaining, science-filled, neurologically filled. One question we get a lot is can know, can taking probiotic really improve my mood? The answer is yes. There's lots of research showing this. There's growing research that suggests probiotics can help improve symptoms from anxiety and depression for some people. It's never that simple for everyone, but for some people, just adding that into their diet has made an overwhelming change. So what I encourage everyone that's listening today to do is a couple things Add probiotic or fermented foods to your diet.

Speaker 1:

Take a 10-minute walk after meals or in the evening. Many cultures around the world do this and for us, we're in a multicultural country and if you just look outside your window in the evenings, no matter what neighborhood you're in, no matter what community you live in in North America, you'll see certain types and certain cultures going for their seven o'clock PM walk Usually Europeans, the Asian culture, indians, africans they do this. It's just part of their thing. It's a post digestive thing that they do and they actually have that concept of stress management post digestion and walking after a meal. Americans, I don't think that's in their routine. You shouldn't make it part of your routine. They're all Americans too. You know what I mean. But that's where we go, there and then try mindfulness or deep breathing and manage stress levels. There you go. How was that for a podcast? The gut-brain connection a little bit more delved into.

Speaker 1:

If you need any help with this, functional medicine is your way to go when it comes to gut-brain. Everyone else will waste your time. No shade thrown on these practitioners medical nurse practitioners, holistic nutritionists, nutritionists, dieticians they're following a pragmatic meal planning way of nutrition. Functional medicine someone well-versed in functional medicine, especially internal functional, internist and internal. Someone who's got their extra degree in this extra time. Whether they went to medical school osteopathic, chiropractic or not, not naturopathy they should have a designation afterwards for internal medicine or internal functional medicine. That's the people you want to look for and they will be loud and they will be proud because they want to help people and you luckily have access to this with Dr Heifer at Full Life Chiropractic, and all this stuff can be done virtually, because it's gut, it's exercise, it's supplementation, it can all be delivered to your home and you have to get out and sleep and walk and do all those simple things. So it's easily done.

Speaker 1:

But there's testing that can be done, like stool testing, gut testing and blood testing, and you may not need all of them that show everything that's going on. I just recently did a urine analysis, taking samples through five points of the day, in the middle of the night morning, two hours obviously, to show neurotransmitters Very, very informative, way above my head. You need someone like that that's trained in that to really help you move forward. So if you've been frustrated with healthcare, we're all frustrated with healthcare, but there are people out there that they don't have to write 20 books to grab your authority or your trust, but they're there for you to dive into this nitty gritty.

Speaker 1:

You cannot just, you know, cut out gluten and hope for the best, or cut out dairy and hope for the best. You need to get a map of the enteric system and you do that the best way. The best way is through a stool test, because that's the internal metrics of the gut. The gut is just the waste products that are processed out. That's all you have to work with and it can leave you tons of clues of what's happening on the inside. Then the next test is blood, but everything gets filtered by our gut connection to the circulatory system. Everything is broken down and only nutrition is absorbed and water is absorbed by the gut. That's it. Amino acids, carbohydrates, fatty chain fats that's all that gets pulled in. Vitamins, minerals those are the things that cross that barrier. The rest are all screened out.

Speaker 1:

So, checking stool first, then maybe following up with some type of blood test and then a urine analysis to match the neurotransmitter depletion or over activity that can really relate back to mood. You do this and you can reverse all your mood and behavior issues through repairing your gut. So if you need help, reach out info at fulllifetampacom Simple email saying hey, listen to a podcast, something you can do for your gut. So if you need help, reach out info at fulllifetampacom simple email saying hey, listen to a podcast, something you can do for my gut, and it automatically free consult just to see what's going on. Maybe it's not the best fit. We can start there and we can help you anywhere. You're listening to this podcast, which is very cool. Stay well, stay healthy. Thanks for tuning in and tune in next week, and I'll keep it entertaining, like we have been for two plus years.

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