Gut Brain Reset

Your gut might be the missing piece behind the symptoms you keep trying to “fix” one at a time. We open a new three-part series with a big claim backed by modern research and real-world patterns we see every day: gut health can shape your mood, energy, immune system, hormones, brain function, and even long-term disease risk, often without obvious digestive complaints.

We walk through the gut-brain connection in plain language, from the enteric nervous system to the vagus nerve and the lightning-fast, two-way communication between stress and digestion. If you have ever felt butterflies before public speaking or had stress trigger reflux, nausea, bloating, or an urgent bathroom trip, you have felt the gut brain axis firsthand. We also dig into why focusing only on symptoms can lead to treating the wrong “organ,” especially when it comes to serotonin, dopamine, inflammation, and the stories we tell ourselves about cravings and willpower.

Then we zoom out to the immune system and the microbiome. A huge share of immune activity is connected to the gut, and inflammation plus dysbiosis can ripple into brain fog, fatigue, skin problems, autoimmune flare-ups, headaches, poor sleep, food sensitivities, and hormone imbalance. We close with five practical gut health habits you can start immediately: slow down while eating, increase whole foods, improve sleep, reduce ultra-processed foods, and manage chronic stress so your body can shift back into rest, digest, and heal.

If this helps you see your health differently, subscribe so you do not miss part two, share the episode with someone chasing chronic symptoms, and leave a review so more people can find the series.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Welcome back to Living a Full Life, where we help you optimize your health, your nervous system, your energy, and your life naturally. I'm Dr. Enrico Dolchkori. Thanks for joining us this week. We are going to do a three-part series now on something that may be affecting your mood, your energy, your immune system, your hormones, your brain function,

Why The Gut Runs The Show

SPEAKER_00 0:26

and even your long-term disease risk. It's your gut. And there's so much to talk about. We can't do this in one podcast. We've had some other podcasts on the gut, but we're going to go dive deep into this next three-part series. Don't miss out on this one. It's going to change a lot of your health outcomes and for many of you, a lot of your lives. If we truly get to the source of where a lot of these issues start, most people think the gut's job is just to simply digest food. Food goes in, nutrients come out. But the reality is your gut may be one of the most powerful control centers in the entire body. And what's fascinating is many people struggling with fatigue, anxiety, brain fog, inflammation, skin problems, autoimmune issues, hormone imbalances may never realize that the gut is involved. And that's because of the way we medically look at things. We go from the symptoms and work our way backwards. And unfortunately, when we do that, the gut is one of the last things we ever get to. So we look at hormones, we look at pathology, we look at the thyroid, we look at eczema, we screw, we treat the conditions, we put steroids on the skin, we inject corticosteroids into the body to reduce inflammation, but we don't look at the source. And that's what this is all starting from for this three-part series on the gut. Really, the gut-brain connection. I used to do workshops on this stuff, both in Canada and the United States, in person, webinars, the gut-brain connection, because it's so important to have a basis of this. So let's start with one of the biggest concepts in modern health science now. It's the gut and the brain and how they're connected. The brain and

The Gut Brain Two Way Highway

SPEAKER_00 2:12

gut are constantly communicating with each other. Just until 10 years ago, they finally calculated that the mesenteric system and its nervous and the neurons in there are more than the brain, than the central nervous system. So your mesenteric system has a larger neural connection than the brain. Surprised me. I went through pre-med, I went through chiropractic school, I went through neuroscience. We were all told that the master control system was the brain and has the most neurons in the entire body and the most cells. And here we are, science has changed. The mesenteric system is more large and more vast than the nerve than the brain. This is gonna rock your world a little bit. The brain and the gut are constantly communicating at the speed of light. Communication is bidirectional. We always thought that the brain was telling the body what to do, but it doesn't work that way. It's a two-way highway. Enteric nervous system, the vagus nerve, the gut influences the brain, the brain influences the gut. We start looking at all these systems and we take them all apart. And that's what medicine does. That's what the study of science does is we take things apart, try and understand each individual part, and put it back together and try and make sense of it. But we keep finding new parts. That's the beauty of science. We keep finding new parts and it keeps changing and challenging the way we think. But we've we've crossed the threshold into a new frontier, thinking, okay, hang on a second. Hang on a second. The dopamine, the serotonin, the the um the antidepressants, the medicines. Are we treating the wrong organ? And the answer is yes. Have you ever been nervous before public speaking and suddenly your stomach tightens, called butterflies, or had stress immediately trigger something like diarrhea, bloating, nausea, or reflux? Think about this for a second. That's the gut-brain connection happening in instantaneous time. You get the nauseousness, you get the butterflies in the stomach, you get the digestive response immediately to go to the bathroom. Your gut is almost working faster at the stress response than your brain, because your brain has a lot of other things it needs to control: blood pressure, vasodilation, vasoconstriction, breath rate, oxygen uptake, CO2 output. Like it's it's doing a lot of other master control systems. The gut's like, hey, this is where the sayings come from. They're hundreds of years and thousands of years old. Trust your gut. That gut instinct is a quick protection mechanism that we have. The gut has hundreds of millions of neurons in it. Researchers call it the second brain. And the gut produces and regulates many of the neurochemicals that the brain uses. It produces and regulates many of the neurochemicals your brain uses. Hang on a second. Doesn't the brain produce and regulate a lot of this stuff? Or brain tells glands to produce and regulate? What are you telling me, Dr. D? Well, let's stick around and find out. The body is not a separate system randomly functioning independently. Your brain and gut and immune system and hormones and nervous system are deeply interconnected, constantly communicating with one another and responding to what is needed in real time. And this is why the gut matters so much. This is where things get really interesting. The immune system. A huge portion of your immune activity is connected directly to your gut. Immune surveillance, inflammation, microbiome balance, neurotransmitters, and mood play

Cravings Mood And Immune Signals

SPEAKER_00 6:14

a distinct and interrelationship. Serotonin, dopamine relationships, mood regulations. Most people think mental health exists only in the brain, but your gut chemistry influences how you feel emotionally. It's not a sweet tooth, it's not a craving. It's not, it's your gut screaming for what it needs. Or it's bad microbiome and the bad guys screaming for what they want. If you have small intestinal bacterial overgrowth called SIBO, all those partial bacteria that are overgrown in there that are not supposed to be there are sending signals that are being shout to the brain saying, we need more sugar, man. Go get that Snickers bar, go eat that ice cream, come on, we need it. It's the bad guys talking, and that's where we get these things from. You can eat the healthiest food in the world. But if your gut is dysfunctional, absorption becomes compromised. Talk to anyone with ulcerative colitis, diverticulitis, irritable bowel syndrome, these diagnoses that they've been given, and talk to them about eating healthy. They just look at you. They're like, listen, man, I've tried everything. It still hurts. I can't digest anything. It just hurts. I'm constantly inflamed. These are major conditions, right? So B vitamins, magnesium, amino acids, inflammation is impairing absorption. So we lose a lot of the vitamin uptake, a lot of the mineral uptake because of this. A healthy gut is the distinct correlation to a healthy life and health in general. This is why gut dysfunction can show up as many different symptoms that don't even seem digestive. Here are some symptoms that start in the gut. And this is where people are usually have big real realizations with their health. You can have brain fog, fatigue, anxiety, skin conditions, autoimmune issues, headaches, poor sleep, hormone imbalance, inflammation, food sensitivities. All of these things can show up, and they show up in different ways: eczema, skin irritations, uh psoriasis, autoimmune flare-ups, joint dysfunction, joint pain, joint irritation, inflammation, knee swelling, toe swelling, gout. Um we can be here all day talking about the symptoms. What we do specifically in our office, and this is what's triggered this podcast series, is because of how fast we can turn people's health around. I was like, listen, I'm gonna start screaming this from the mountaintop. And this is the mountaintop, my microphone. And I can share it and blast it, do all these things and great stuff with the podcast. In our office, and in many offices, but in our office, one thing we constantly see is people chasing symptoms for years without anyone looking deeper into gut function, inflammation, microbiome balance, or nervous system regulation. Why? It's not understood very well. We're still learning. I just told you, science just changed things in the last decade, telling us, hey, listen, there's more nerve communication in the mesenteric system in our gut than there is in our brain. Something, we miss something here. We've been treating dopamine, serotonin, antidepressants, uh, steroid inflammations, like we've been treating fires, but we're treating the wrong part of the system. We're treating the wrong part of the city. We keep thinking the downtown is the area we need to throw water on and keep controlled, because if the downtown goes down, the whole city collapses. But we ended up learning holy smoke, it's the rest of the city. If that goes down, the downtown doesn't matter. And the rest of the city is way bigger than the downtown. So we made the downtown nerve complex, the brain and the hub, the center be all of everything. And we forgot about the rest of the city. We're like, well, hang on, the rest of the city is bigger, it's more vast, it's got more things going on it. And if the downtown goes down, well, the rest of the suburbs can all keep this thing going. I don't know if you like that analogy. I don't know. But that's what's going on with all this. So lifestyle factors that are damaging our gut. I sound like a broken drum, but here's the list again: processed foods, stress, antibiotics, alcohol, poor sleep, chronic inflammation, environmental toxins. And I think I have podcasts on every single one of those things specifically. And if you follow

Why Symptoms Hide The Source

SPEAKER_00 10:54

us, just go into the feed search bar and Spotify, YouTube, wherever, and just put in poor sleep or chronic inflammation because I put descriptions in all of the podcast subtitles so you can find them quite easily. So we have to have a connection here that I want you to walk away with from this podcast, is many people think their body is failing them. In reality, symptoms are often the body's warning signals that something deeper needs attention. It's warning signals that something deeper needs attention. The challenge today is we live in a world constantly damaging our gut, more so than ever before. Coffee with a bunch of stuff in it. We put stuff in it, we process it with chemicals, we caffeinate it, we decaffeinate it, we we do stuff to our food. Coffee a hundred years ago was just coffee being crushed and mixed with hot water. It's changed a lot now. So the ultra-processed foods that we eat, the eating too quickly, chronic sympathetic stress, constant stimulation, lack of recovery, pesticides, herbicides, low fiber diets. The nervous system is very delicate, but it's also very, very uh vast, very, very intuitive. Digestion is heavily dependent on the parasympathetic nervous system, the rest, the recovery, the healing side of the nervous system, the calm side of the nervous system. We need calm in order for that system to work optimally. And you cannot digest optimally when your body constantly feels stressed and stuck in survival mode. That's the two things that we're stuck in. An ultra-stressed environment that bombards us with physical, chemical, and emotional stresses, and then the stress that we live in that keeps us stuck in survival mode, which doesn't give our parasympathetic nervous system a chance to do its thing, rest, digest, and heal. And we need to force that balance back into our lives.

Five Habits To Start Today

SPEAKER_00 13:14

And the only way to do that is taking control of it. So here are some five gut health habits that if you start to implement immediately, simple habits that you implement immediately, will help gently move you in the right direction. Slow down while eating. We grab things on the go. We eat in our cars for Pete's sake before we can get to our next destination. Slow down. Gives the digestive system a little bit less stress. When a lot of food comes in quickly or a larger portion of food comes in all at the same time, it's harder on the digestive system to digest and it creates a stress response. Increase your whole foods. The vegetables and the fruits have disappeared from the American diet. They need to be in there. A piece of lettuce in your turkey, cheese, and sourdough sandwich is not what we're talking about. That piece of lettuce is negligible. It has nothing to do with anything. And that one slice of tomato that has nothing to do with what we're talking about. Should be eating at least a salad a day with four or five different vegetables in it to get our good servings in for the day and our fiber and our minerals that come in there. So we need to increase whole foods. Whole foods, meat, veggies, fruit. I say that meat, veggies, fruit, seeds, grain, whole foods, whole foods. Improve sleep. Reduce ultra-processed foods. So as we increase whole foods, we have to wipe out the ultra-processed stuff. If it comes in a box and you open the box, and then there's a bag, and you have to rip open the bag, and then the processed foods in there, the crunchy food or the bread or whatever it is, the wraps, that's gotta go. That if it's gotta be boxed and bagged and sealed and powdered and patted down and radiated and bleached and then sold to you, we probably shouldn't eat that. And then manage the chronic stress. The hardest part of it all. Manage the chronic stress, which is your day-to-day. You have to manage it. Keep it practical and keep it realistic. There's a lot on that one, and we're gonna keep tackling the gut brain barrier because I didn't want to do a one and a half hour podcast straight through. Or maybe we should next time. I don't know. Maybe we could do it. I you guys are so used to the 20-minute clips. In next week's episode, we're gonna go dive even deeper into how the gut dysfunction may contribute to symptoms all across the body, from inflammation to autoimmune conditions to skin problems, fatigue, brain fog, and hormone imbalances, and dive deeper into the specifics. If you've been struggling with chronic symptoms and feel

What Comes Next In The Series

SPEAKER_00 16:04

like nobody has looked at the bigger picture, that may be the missing piece. At our office, we use advanced testing, stool analysis, functional medicine strategies, nervous system-focused care, peptides, um, intravene, IVs. I mean, whatever. If we have to, if we have to pump you up full of vitamin C to help, I mean, we'll put in more than the allowable dose to help. You know, we'll do whatever it takes to find the care and help to identify the underlying dysfunction rather than simply covering up the symptoms. So tune in, make sure you do that. And uh, your body was designed to heal, adapt, and function well. When you give it the right environment, it will do it. Thanks for listening. Stay well, stay healthy. Tune in next week for the second part of this three part series on the gut brain connection.