Gut Health Facts Everyone Should Know (Part I)

by Anna Young https://wholesomebalancedwellness.com

Would you believe me if I told you that cultivating a healthy gut microbiome is one of the most important things you can do for your health? If that sounds a little far-fetched, or even if you are a little on the fence, I hope this post will help change your mind.

Our microbiome consists over about 100 trillion living microbes (bacteria, fungi, and viruses) which mainly live in our gut (i.e. the large intestine). These microbes have a symbiotic relationship with us; we could not exist without them and they without us. They help us to digest our food, crowd out harmful bacteria, maintain the integrity of our gut lining, help the body absorb nutrients, modulate genes, and neutralize cancer-causing compounds. Also, about 80% of our immune system is in our gut. Our microbes help to train our immune system to distinguish between friend and foe.

Dysbiosis is a term used when there is a microbial imbalance in the gut. This happens when the population of essential good bacteria are diminished and pathogenic (bad) bacteria, which are normally present in low amounts, flourish. Dysbiosis and damage to the microbiome has been found to be the root cause of many illnesses and diseases we see today.

Since being diagnosed with gut dysbiosis and a few conditions resulting from this imbalance such as candida overgrowth, gluten intolerance, and small intestine bacterial overgrowth, I have become really passionate about gut health. The way I feel now compared to pre-diagnosis is like night and day. To further educate myself I read The Microbiome Solution by Dr. Robynne Chutkan, a gastroenterologist and founder of the Digestive Center for Women.

Dr. Chutkan’s main argument in this book is that the “...overuse of antibiotics, chlorination of the water supply, processed foods full of chemicals and hormones, microbe-depleting pesticides, increasing rates of Cesarean sections…have ravaged our microbiome, diminishing the total number of organisms as well as the diversity of species.” This damage is a key, if not the main, contributing factor to the modern diseases in our society.

She states that “re-creating a balanced microbial habitat in our bodies might be the single most important step in improving our individual and collective health.” The book explains her whole plan to do this, which she calls the Live Dirty, Eat Clean lifestyle.

I would recommend this book to everyone, even if you are a healthy individual with a robust microbiome. I thought I was one of those individuals until a year ago after all... I could write pages upon pages about all of the tidbits of knowledge I gleaned from its pages, but I will stick to a few main topics she discusses - the birthing process, diet, antibiotics, depression, and disease. The first two I will write about in this post, the final three in my next post. All of the quotes in this post come directly from the book unless noted otherwise.

BIRTH

I will start this section by saying that I am not yet a mom, so I don’t have any personal experience with the birthing process (apart from when I came into the world via C-section all those years ago), but some of the facts she shared will definitely impact my future decisions when I chose to become a mother.

One in three births these days are Cesarean sections. Studies have shown that “babies born via C-section have higher rates of asthma, allergies, type 1 diabetes, and other autoimmune conditions.” They do not receive the beneficial bacteria that are the beginnings of their microbiome from their mothers when they pass through the birth canal and are typically exposed to antibiotics in the hospital at a very young age (more on antibiotics later).

Formula-fed babies also typically have higher rates of asthma, allergies, and autoimmune diseases than babies fed with breast milk. Did you know that a day’s worth of soy formula contains the estrogen equivalent of a few birth control pills? That is downright scary.

I know there are times when C-sections are medically necessary and when a mother cannot breast feed. I will never argue with a mother’s decision to choose what is best for her and her baby, but I thought this information was important to share.

DIET

“One of the most powerful tools in preventing and treating our modern plagues might be the food we eat.”

The Standard American Diet (referred to as SAD, which is so appropriate) high in sugar, bad fats, and artificial ingredients promotes growth of the bad type of bacteria in your gut. Candida overgrowth, something that I was diagnosed with this year and is not fun to treat (trust me on this one), is an example of a condition that commonly results from a diet high in sugar.

There are so many things wrong with our diets today, but one thing that really sets me off is that packaged foods are specifically designed by scientists in labs to keep you coming back for more. Just think, have you ever had just one Pringle or one Thin Mint cookie? Highly doubtful.

Dr. Chutkan states that “food cravings, anxiety, memory, mood, and how easily we lose or gain weight are just some of the traits that are heavily influenced by our gut bacteria.”

All of those things deserve a section of their own but I’m going to focus on food cravings. Once you get on the hamster wheel of eating poorly, our gut bacteria make it really hard to stop. We’ve all been there and can attest to this. Those sugar-loving microbes will make us crave more sweets and when you eat more, the sugar-loving microbes multiply.

Unfortunately, sugar is in pretty much everything we consume these days. Even in things you wouldn’t expect. I went on a little scavenger hunt at my grocery store to prove this and wrote about it.

So how do we change this pattern? Michael Pollan put it quite simply: “Eat real food, not too much, mostly plants.”

I’m going to leave it at that today before this post reaches essay length. Stay tuned for Part II, which will focus on overuse of antibiotics, the link between depression and gut health, and how gut health is influential in the development of disease. Until next time folks!

Gut Health Facts Everyone Should Know (Part II)

Happy 2018!! A tad bit late but it's still early in the year right? I hope you had an enjoyable holiday season, a happy new year, and are enjoying 2018 thus far. A new year is a great opportunity to set new goals, pursue new interests, and learn new things. In this post I aim to help you to learn more about digestive health so that your year is just a bit better and healthier.

This is Part II of Gut Health Facts Everyone Should Know, which is based off of the book The Microbiome Solution by Dr. Robynne Chutkan, a gastroenterologist and founder of the Digestive Center for Women. If you haven’t read Part I of the series yet, I strongly suggest you start therebefore reading this post! It provides the background and basis for what we’ll be discussing today.

Part I touches on the impact of birth and diet on the microbiome. Today’s post will focus on the use of antibiotics and how depression and disease can be linked to gut dysbiosis. As in my last post, all of the quotes in this post come directly from the book unless noted otherwise.

ANTIBIOTICS

Did you know we are one of two countries that allows for marketing of pharmaceutical drugs directly to consumers? Yep, us and New Zealand.

Instead of being taught nutrition and how to find the underlying cause for disease, we are sold on what medications will make us feel better. This creates a bias that has been perpetuated by the medical community. As a population, we are over-prescribed medications. Granted, I understand that sometimes they are necessary, but a lot of times they are not.

I heard a great analogy for this phenomenon once that has stuck with me. Imagine you have a rock in your shoe that is really bothering you. Would you take a pain pill to help ease the discomfort or would you take your shoe off and just remove the rock that’s causing the problem? Would you take a pill to deal with your symptoms or would you work to find the underlying cause for the issue that you are experiencing?

Many people depend on their doctors to tell them what’s best and when the doctor tells them to take a prescription they do it, no questions asked, because they trust that their doctor is doing what is best for them. But many times it is not what is best for them. Maybe the doctor wasn’t taught nutrition in med school, has a pharmaceutical sales rep who is really good at his job, or just has too many patients and not enough time to really invest in what’s needed to help all of them. It is up to us consumers to become educated so we can have knowledgeable conversations with our doctors.

One type of medication that really gets me fired up are acne medications, which are devastating to the microbiome. Dr. Chutkan states that “taking antibiotics for acne tends to be the most damaging factor because those drugs are so effective against gut bacteria and the treatment usually lasts months or even years.” I took acne medication for almost 15 years of my life. If I hadn’t, would I still be experiencing the gut dysbiosis I’m going through today? Hindsight is 20/20 but I’d like to think I wouldn’t.

There is also a “direct relationship between widespread use of antibiotics, especially in children, and skyrocketing rates of food allergies.” Antibiotics wipe out both the good and bad bacteria in our guts. Bad bacteria are actually a bit hardier than the good ones and are more likely to survive the antibiotic assault. They multiply to fill the gap created by the loss of good bacteria which, in time, leads to a decrease in diversity of gut bacteria, high levels of bad bacteria, and lower levels of good bacteria, which are three of the main causes of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD).

One last thing on antibiotics. It’s not just the ones you take directly that impact you. About 80% of all antibiotics sold in the United States are used in the livestock and poultry industry, either to enhance growth in healthy animals or to prevent infection because the animals are being raised in crowded, unsanitary conditions that increase the risk of illness. When you eat meat from animals raised in factory farms, you absorb all of the medications they were given in their lifetime. If you can, eat organic meat from humanely-raised animals. We use Butcher Box at our house, which will ship you a monthly supply of various cuts of pork, beef, and chicken from humanely-raised animals. I love it and the meat are some of the best cuts I’ve ever tasted.

You can also absorb trace amounts of medications through drinking tap water. If you can, use filtered water and please don’t flush your unused pills down the toilet.

DEPRESSION

Our mental health is profoundly impacted by our gut. Do you feel sick to your stomach before a big performance or speech? Do you stress eat or lose your appetite when you’re stressed? When you’re tired, do you crave sugar?

The enteric nervous system (ENS) is a branch of the nervous system located in the GI tract. It is commonly called the second brain. Your gut and brain are also directly connected by what is called the vagus nerve. They interact constantly and what happens in one directly impacts what happens in the other.

“Gut bacteria determine the availability of the precursor materials that your brain needs to make neurotransmitters” and are the main producers of serotonin, the body’s feel-good hormone. Up to 90% of our serotonin is made in our gut, so if you’ve got some gut dysbiosis going on, chances are you are struggling with mood issues as well. I personally notice a significant difference in my mood when I’m eating a clean diet and avoiding foods that I am sensitive to.

Depression is a symptom for many forms of dysbiosis, including yeast overgrowth (candida), small intestinal bacterial overgrowth (SIBO), and Celiac Disease.

DISEASE

Hippocrates is famous for quoting that “all disease begins in the gut.” More and more information is coming out these days from the naturopathic and functional medicine communities that is finding this indeed to be true.

Did you know that obesity can be predicted up to 90% just by examining someone’s gut bacteria?

“Many diseases that run in families that we thought were primarily genetic, such as heart disease and some forms of cancer, turn out to be hugely influenced by gut bacteria.” In fact, our microbiome “has one of the biggest impacts on our genes, turning them on and off and determining which ones are ultimately expressed as disease.”

The field of epigenetics studies the impact of our diet and lifestyle on our genes. What you eat, where you live, who you interact with, when you sleep, how you exercise, even aging – all of these can eventually cause chemical modifications around the genes that will turn those genes on or off over time. Healthier lifestyles can actually turn off genes that can lead to cancer and other deadly diseases.

It is not just us adults that need to be eating healthier. Researchers have found a connection between what you eat as a child and diseases and conditions you may develop as an adult. It is up to us to be good role models for our children.

“One of the most powerful tools in preventing and treating our modern plagues might be the food we eat, since that’s what determines which bacteria grow in our gut garden.” It comes down to this question - do you want your gut garden to be full of weeds and invasive species that grow unchecked and take over, or do you want your garden to be full of flowers and many different types of healthy plants?

It’s time to re-wild ourselves and work on growing a good gut garden. Who’s with me?

Hi there! My name is Anna and I am an accountant by day, holistic health coach, and doTERRA wellness advocate. I have a passion for natural wellness and helping people become their happiest, healthiest selves. There is no one-size-fits-all path to wellness, and I'm here to help you discover yours!

Gut Health Matters At Every Age

Pediatrician, Michelle Perro #511

By: DAVE ASPREY
July 24, 2018

Today’s Bulletproof Radio guest is Dr. Michelle Perro who is a 37-year veteran of pediatrics in acute care and integrative medicine, which means that she has truly been on the front line of caring for children.

Over the past couple of decades, she has personally witnessed the decline in kids’ health and also the increase in the environmental load our children are experiencing. In fact, this issue affected her so much that she wrote a book about it, What’s Making our Children Sick. In this podcast episode, we help you understand what’s going on inside the children of today and how we can potentially lower their environmental burden.

Dr. Perro is also the Executive Director of the non-profit website, gmoscience.org, which explores the links between genetically modified food, the pesticides that come with them, and how that impacts food, health and agriculture.

Enjoy the show!

Follow Along with the Transcript

Gut Health Matters At Every Age: Pediatrician, Michelle Perro #511

Links/Resources

Website: www.gmoscience.org
Michelle’s Book: What’s Making Our Children Sick?: How Industrial Food Is Causing an Epidemic of Chronic Illness, and What Parents (and Doctors) Can Do About It

Show Notes

The most common health denominators in today’s kids 00:07:21
How quickly do you “go to the gut” when assessing a child’s health? 00:14:14
The surprising number of people who aren’t functioning at the highest potential 00:16:07
One thing we can all do to live better 00:17:58
The current food movement 00:21:40
Until more the restaurants get on board with “Farm to Table” 00:23:11
How do you handle Cheat Days? 00:25:15
Being snobbish about what is in your supplements 00:27:31
Some animal meats concentrate glyphosate 00:28:52
What to do when your child wants cake? (*gasp*) 00:33:30
Why toxic mold is more of an issue now than in the past 00:40:12

Go check out “Headstrong” and “The Bulletproof Diet” on Amazon and leave a review!

If you like today’s episode, check us out on Apple Podcasts at Bulletproof.com/iTunes and leave us a 5-star, positive review.

ABOUT DAVE ASPREY

Dave Asprey is founder & CEO of Bulletproof, and creator of the widely-popular Bulletproof Coffee. He is a two-time New York Times bestselling author, host of the Webby award-winning podcast Bulletproof Radio, and has been featured on the Today show, Fox News, Nightline, Dr. Oz, and many more.

Does Your Gut Hold the Secret to Performance?

by David Ferry as reposted from www.outsideonline.com

The microbes in our digestive systems can affect everything from our mental health to our weight and vulnerability to disease. So why not athletic performance? New science is set to revolutionize the way we eat, train, and live.

It’s never an easy thing, convincing a person to give you their feces.

The instructions are simple enough: defecate, swipe the provided swab across a wad of used toilet paper (no need to be aggressive—so long as the tip is brown, you’ll have enough material for analysis), pop the newly defiled cotton bud into its test tube, and wash up.

Still, even if the donations are for science, the gross-out factor means that people tend to make excuses. They’re too busy or too tired, or their sample was “off” that morning. No matter. For Embriette Hyde, a scientist at the University of California at San Diego, the value of a fecal sample is too high to let a little thing like squeamishness get in the way. That’s why she has a spiel she’s honed in weight rooms across the squintingly sunny campus. We all have these microorganisms living inside of us, she tells the collegiate tennis players and point guards. What would you do if you knew you could use them to your advantage, to help you perform or recover better? We hope it’s true, but we still need to do the research to find out—she pauses for effect—and you can help by giving us your poop. Hyde grins. “The word poop goes over well with them.”

Hyde manages the American Gut Project at the university’s Knight Lab, which is five years into a deeply ambitious effort to map the average American’s bacterial makeup—what scientists call the human microbiome. But her pet project is studying whether athletes have different, healthier microbiomes than everybody else. And the best way to find out what’s happening inside a person, it turns out, is to analyze what comes out. So far she’s tested upwards of 150 samples from professional and amateur athletes. But if there’s a specific superbiome for performance, it has remained elusive.

Hyde, who is as small and compact as you’d expect a weekend half-marathon addict to be, leads me by airtight chambers used to culture oxygen-phobic bacteria (most of your gut, I learn, is an anaerobic space), past pipetting lab techs and postdocs corralling data. Since it was founded by microbiologist Rob Knight in 2004, the lab has been responsible for some of the most exciting revelations in microbiome studies. Scientists here and elsewhere now believe that our personal microbial universes are intertwined with a host of conditions, including acne, allergies, obesity, anxiety, cardiovascular disease, irritable bowel syndrome, autoimmune disorders, and even cancer.

Only a decade or so into this young field, the connections can still astonish. The bacterial content of an autistic child’s gut looks significantly different from the general population’s. Bacteria found in multiple-sclerosis patients may contribute to sending the immune system into overdrive and causing the disease’s devastating symptoms. And as Rob Knight himself helped discover in 2013, you can make a sterile rat gain weight simply by giving it bacteria from an obese human’s microbiome.

“Everyone responds to diet in their own way,” Knight says, thanks in part to their bacterial makeup. “Some people gain twenty pounds; some people lose ten pounds.” His work, exciting as it is on its face, has also elucidated a fundamental aspect of the microbiome: the bacterial community inside us is always changing—and we can influence it, too. As Knight says, “There’s a lot of potential in terms of being able to, I don’t want to say diagnose, but classify people according to their current level of performance and—more excitingly—their potential for future performance.”

That’s why Hyde’s eyes light up as she opens freezer number seven and pulls out a small tray with 96 individual wells, each containing the raw genetic contents of various athletes’ bacteria. This clear liquid, extracted from feces, could be the key that will one day make us run longer, recover faster, and stay fitter.

To the uninitiated, the microbiome can be a difficult thing to come to terms with. In your colon, your mouth, your eyes, your skin, your genitalia, are trillions of microscopic bacteria. There are as many of these bugs—among them pill-shaped rods and spherical blobs so small that tens of millions of them are no larger than a grain of sand—as human cells. According to some metrics, in fact, you are as much host as human. Forty thousand different species of bacteria can call your gut home, along with smaller numbers of viruses and fungi. And on a genetic level, your microbial residents dwarf you. The human genome, the sum of all those snippets of DNA you get from your parents and pass along to your offspring, contains some 20,000 genes; your microbiome contains millions. To fully consider the microbiome, you first have to reconsider yourself.

It can be unnerving for a person raised with a healthy fear of pathogens to embrace the idea of a legion of foreigners inside us. But despite any experiences you may have had with members of the genus Salmonella, the vast majority of microbes that inhabit your body do you no harm. They’ve taken up residence for their own reasons—to eat mucus or feed off fiber or break down resistant starch (found in foods like lentils or cold potatoes that don’t break down in the small intestine). And humans and our bacteria, we go way back. Over the millennia, we have evolved together, our bodies offshoring jobs to our bugs, finding it easier for, say, Helicobacter pylori to help regulate hunger hormones than to do it all by ourselves.

“People call the microbiome the forgotten organ,” says Erica Sonnenburg, a microbiologist at Stanford University who has made big strides connecting the microbiome and the immune system. “These organisms aren’t reactive. They’re holding some of the reins themselves.” And their composition in your gut—which species are most prevalent at any given moment—is critical to daily function. “They affect how our bodies work,” says Jack Gilbert, director of the Microbiome Center at the University of Chicago. “Our immune systems, our hormone levels, our neurocognition, how we behave—things that you wouldn’t even consider. How much brown fat versus white fat you have in your body, your insulin levels, the functioning of your kidneys and liver…”

The more discoveries we make, the more we realize how little we know. Thus far the American Gut Project has found our digestive tracts to be so diverse in microbial content, and so unique to us and our individual lifestyles, that researchers really can’t yet say what a “normal” gut should look like—let alone an elite athlete’s gut.

What we do know: of those trillions of bacteria, a small core of species rule our ecosystems. The vast majority of people have guts dominated by two big phyla. Bacteroidetes break down complex indigestible plant matter into stuff our body needs, like nutrients or fatty acids; Firmicutes, the other big phylum, are even better at turning fibrous and starchy foods into beneficial things such as anti-inflammatory butyrates. Like greedy kids holding up the line at the buffet, these bugs’ dominance may keep other malicious bacteria from gaining a foothold in our guts. But despite the good flora in the phylum Firmicutes, some studies have shown that obese people are more likely to have guts dominated by these bacteria than by Bacteroidetes. Frustratingly, nobody is entirely sure why it plays out this way. Scientists still don’t have enough evidence to tell people how to eat for a “skinny” gut, but most told me that they personally eat a diet high in fiber—close to double the amount the average American eats—as well as loads of plants and grains.

But in their quest to figure out just what the hell a healthy gut looks like, researchers realized that most of their subjects looked a lot alike: middle-class, white, desk job. (In other words, people you can easily find walking around a university campus.) So they sought samples from other populations—Inuits, hunter-gatherer tribes in remote parts of East Africa and the Amazon, the young and the old.

It was almost inevitable that as researchers learned more about the gut and our health, they started to wonder what was going on inside the superhumans scoring goals on TV and breaking records in their sports.

One of the first scientists to really target the link between the microbiome and performance was Fergus Shanahan, director of an interdisciplinary group at Ireland’s University College Cork. Shanahan’s colleague Mick Molloy had been a team doctor for the national rugby team, and in 2011 Shanahan asked him, “What do you suppose the microbiome of a professional athlete looks like?” Molloy made some calls, and the team agreed to help the researchers find out. (“We had to sell it to them,” Molloy remembers. “But when we talked about possibly improving performance—well, you know, they’d eat cow dung to increase performance.”)

The men in green went on to lose the Rugby World Cup that year, but Shanahan’s research team won big. “We stayed with them for days on end. We photographed their food, and we got their stool samples,” he says. The scientists found that the players’ gut biomes boasted dramatic diversity—an African savanna compared with the frozen tundra of the couch-potato control group—with double the number of phyla represented. Firmicutes were higher than average, which made sense for men with a high body-mass index burning lots of energy; and the quantity of Akkermansia muciniphila (a bacterium often found in skinny folk but not obese people) was exceptional.

Shanahan and his team inadvertently birthed a whole subfield of microbiome studies, and it has professional teams salivating. In the lead-up to the America’s Cup last summer, Scott Tindal, the nutritionist and physiotherapist for Oracle Team USA—the yacht-racing syndicate that represents the United States—was running the numbers on the crew’s health. Perhaps unsurprising for a team sponsored by a tech company that has made billions selling database software, Oracle Team USA prides itself on metrics. Sailors’ lives were being analyzed down to the hour, with nutrients tracked, heartbeats per minute monitored, and calories uploaded. But Tindal was obsessed with a more obscure data point, something the trainers called availability—the amount of time the crew was fit to train.

Studies have shown that elite athletes get sick more often than average healthy people. Marathoners, for instance, are two to six times more likely to come down with something after a race. Furthermore, research suggests that athletes who get sick within two months of a competition rarely match their training bests. “Being available to train and sail is a massive marker of their ability to perform,” Tindal says. From January to August 2016, he tracked 17 different infections among the crew, which led to 50 days of missed training and 40 days of lost sailing. It was a dispiriting total. “We were in the gym six days a week and on the water at least four days, and quite often five or six,” remembers Andrew Campbell, a sailor on Team USA. “There was an obvious correlation. You’d spend two cold weeks fully ripping into the training, and guys would get sick. You see the cause and effect.”

Then Tindal had a chance encounter with Erika Ebbel Angle, a Ph.D. biochemist and CEO of Ixcela, a startup that formulates supplements, including probiotics, based on your microbiome. “I was a bit skeptical,” Tindal says, but he was familiar with the growing research connecting the microbiome to the immune system. Resident bacteria, he knew, help the immune system measure its response to invading bugs. And probiotics—as much as the term has been commandeered by yogurt, juice, and granola companies—do indeed impact resident microbes. Although studies are mixed, a few have been shown to provide real benefits to the immune system.

Tindal decided to take a chance and signed Team USA up for Ixcela’s supplements and a regimen of foods designed to promote microbial diversity. (“Things like kefir, which the guys had most mornings,” he says, “and sauerkraut, which all of them definitely did not.”) After nine months, he ran the numbers. “We saw a 30 percent reduction in upper-respiratory incidents, a 47.5 percent reduction in sailing days lost, and a 54 percent reduction in full training days lost,” he says.

Many of the researchers I spoke with doubted the ability of any company to personalize probiotic regimens based on an at-home blood test. “I can’t do that here,” said Gilbert, of the University of Chicago’s Microbiome Center, adding, “There’s a lot of snake oil out there.” Ixcela, like many of the new microbiome companies, has not yet published peer-reviewed papers attesting to its products’ efficacy, though it does plan to publish a study about Team USA’s results. This doesn’t mean they don’t work. But it’s a common scenario in an exploding field where even seemingly simple things like proving causation versus correlation is still maddeningly hard.

And so we keep exploring. Change your diet and the bacterial population shifts; spend enough time in the dirt and your dominant bugs may switch. Remove a species and hopefully cure a disease. Add a new one and maybe improve your personal best. Is it really that easy?

That’s what Jonathan Scheiman wants to find out. For two weeks in 2015, he drove around Boston, chasing down runners who’d competed in the Boston Marathon to collect their fecal samples. “We want to understand what makes elite athletes elite—from a biological perspective—then extract that to benefit everyone. This isn’t just some scientists cooped up in a lab working on esoteric stuff. This has real-world applications,” he says, adding with a laugh, “I got my hands dirty for this project.”

Scheiman, a former Division I basketball player at St. John’s University in New York City, harbored dreams of going pro throughout his twenties. He couldn’t quite make it, though, so he settled for a Ph.D. in biomedical science from New York University and a life of research at the Wyss Institute at Harvard University. He’s now a postdoc working under George Church, one of the most famous geneticists alive. Church’s interests range from nanobots to bringing woolly mammoths back from extinction, but Scheiman’s focus is narrower. He’s built a veritable Augean stable at Harvard—he scooped up even more elite feces from Olympic hopefuls in the run-up to Rio—in search of a bug that will make people better athletes.

Early in his research, Scheiman discussed his work with someone affiliated with the NBA. “The first question he asked was, ‘Can we use genomics to predict the next Michael Jordan?’ My response was, ‘The better question is, can we extract Jordan’s biology and give it to other athletes to help make the next Michael Jordan?’ ”

He thinks he may have found just the microbe. In a meeting of the American Chemical Society in August, Scheiman told the world about a type of bacteria—one he wouldn’t name publicly—that he saw blooming in large numbers in marathoners shortly after they finished races. The bacteria accumulates in the bloodstream after strenuous exercise and appears to break down the metabolites associated with fatigue. The bug, which doesn’t show up at significant levels in sedentary subjects, almost appears to be a natural response to the buildup of lactic acid in our muscles during workouts—a recovery mechanism we may have outsourced to our microbiome millennia ago.

Scheiman’s bacteria, as one hypothesis goes, may have been cultivated by these elite runners over years of intense training. By producing punishing, thigh-burning quantities of lactic acid throughout their lives, the marathoners created an ideal environment for the bugs to thrive. Lactic acid became a plentiful food source, and the bacteria most capable of breaking it down flourished. In a sense, the marathoners may have earned their ability to recover quickly.

Scheiman has already isolated the bacteria and is developing a startup called Fitbiomics. If all goes well, he hopes to sell a fatigue-busting, endurance-boosting probiotic to the public within two years of completing his research.

Once you are awake to the bugs crawling around inside you, the drone of people trying to sell a cure for whatever ails your microbiome becomes a roaring din. Dr. Oz and his rotating cast of telegenic TV physicians promise the secret to weight loss through the latest “gut diet.” A company called Mother Dirt claims that its AO+ Mist can improve your skin and “restore the essential bacteria” that modern hygiene has removed from your face. In the snack aisle at a fancy grocery store in Venice Beach, California, a $4 bag of fermented Kraut Krisps promises “one billion probiotics” per serving. We have entered an era of what University of California at Davis researcher Jonathan Eisen calls microbiomania.

Many of these promises are empty. Researchers can’t say with any confidence that there’s a take-home test that’ll help improve your health. Hyde and her team at the American Gut Project will analyze your microbiome for about a hundred bucks, but she stresses that the test is not diagnostic. You can learn a little about yourself, but mostly you’ll be contributing to citizen science. There are many tests out there on the Web that promise to improve your gut, but like Ixcela, the advice they offer isn’t yet peer-reviewed.

Still, there are encouraging anecdotal results. In Australia, Nicholas West, a researcher at Queensland’s Griffith University, has been meticulously testing publicly available probiotics on national-team athletes, based on their personal microbiomes, to help ward off pre-competition illness. He’s had some success and says he’s now working to “get an athlete on the podium, in that number-one spot—and to make sure that person is Australian.”

The Mayo Clinic recently invested in DayTwo, an Israeli startup cofounded by a computational biologist and marathon runner named Eran Segal that uses the microbiome to explore how foods affect different people’s blood-glucose levels. The research focuses on diabetics, but the Israeli national basketball team is already altering players’ diets based on DayTwo’s results, as is Omri Casspi, an Israeli member of the Golden State Warriors, in the hopes of crafting diets that keep athletes from crashing. “I used to do a lot of carbohydrate loading before runs, and I would still feel tired,” Segal says. Then he changed his diet based on his microbiome. Now, he tells me, “I can do a 20-mile run and be active hours later. And I ended up doing a sub-three-hour marathon.”

So where does it all lead? Last summer, during an interview with Bicycling, Lauren Petersen, a young researcher at the Maine-based Jackson Laboratory’s Connecticut branch, made explicit an idea that plenty of people had only whispered. “I think I can say with confidence,” the magazine quoted her saying, “that bacterial doping—call it poop doping, if you must—is coming soon.” Petersen, an enduro racer, has published papers on the microbiome of cyclists and is deeply interested in the role Prevotella plays in endurance athletes’ guts. The Bicycling story (“Is Poop Doping the Next Big Thing?”) ricocheted around the Internet and was picked up by publications as widely read as The Washington Post.

The backlash was overwhelming. The success of fecal transplants has, of course, thrilled researchers ever since 2013, when scientists proved that altering the gut biome could cure the deadly infection Clostridium difficile. But the idea of poop doping for athletic gain—even if Petersen wasn’t endorsing it—was too much. That’s because in addition to curing C. difficile, a transplant of someone else’s microbiome could result in a whole new set of problems. There are strong correlations between the bugs in your gut and a number of mental conditions, including depression and anxiety. (Clinical trials are investigating whether fecal transplants from healthy donors could help alleviate these conditions.) If a cyclist, seeking bacteria that could boost her body’s ability to, say, extract energy from carbohydrates, doped with the feces from a person suffering from severe depression, the doper could in theory become “infected.”

It’s a frightening prospect—but that doesn’t mean people won’t try. “Professional athletes will do anything to get a tiny margin of gain over competitors,” says Shanahan, the Irish researcher. At the Rio Games, the margin between gold and fifth place in the 200-meter men’s freestyle—from the top of the podium to nothing at all—was less than a second. Last year a runner came within a half-minute of achieving a sub-two-hour marathon. Shanahan doesn’t recommend poop doping, and there’s no evidence it would even work. But, he says, “We’re talking about something completely legal. It’s not so daft, really.”

Embriette Hyde was particularly horrified by the poop-doping story. But she gets why people are interested. The microbiome is a beguiling thing; we know just enough about it for our hopes to rise. That’s part of the reason why she is now leaving the American Gut Project to become a science writer—to help explain this stuff to a confused public.

So far it appears unlikely that there is a Unified Athlete’s Gut, some mystical bacterial composition that appears across pro surfers, mountaineers, and runners. Hyde is skeptical of any easy fix, any yogurt or bio-drink that will turn you into Michael Jordan. But that doesn’t make her collection of samples any less intoxicating.

David Ferry (@ferryin140) lives in San Francisco and writes for Outside, The Atlantic, Mother Jones, and WIRED.

Benefits of Water: Science Proved 5 Great Reasons to Stay Hydrated

https://www.lifehack.org/720901/benefits-of-water-great-reasons-to-stay-hydrated?ck_subscriber_id=168903804

by Luke George

I have a scientific background with a specific interest in water and hydration. Full Bio

You may already be aware that you should drink plenty of water each day but do you know why? Yes, it’s true that you cannot stay alive for very long without drinking water. But keeping well hydrated is also essential for general day-to-day health and well-being.

This article will give you scientific and academically based benefits of water. By the end of this article, you will learn great reasons to stay hydrated.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

The nutritional value of water

In terms of nutrition, plain water contains zero calories. This alone is a great reason to consume more of it.

Unlike almost every other consumable, water is not a source of carbohydrates, protein or fat.¹ Its only function is to hydrate you and you can drink plenty of it without worrying about any weight gain.

5 scientific benefits of water

Water has so many benefits for your health that it would be impossible to list all of them in this article. However, here are 5 solid scientifically and academically backed benefits that water has for your health and why you should always stay properly hydrated.

1. Drinking water keeps you at peak performance

Your physical performance can suffer if you don’t drink enough water. In fact, your physical performance can be severely impacted if you lose as little as 2% of water in your body. The result of this can be things like fatigue, loss of body temperature control, less motivation and performing exercise will feel a lot more difficult from a mental and physical perspective.

On the other hand, studies show that a good level of hydration not only prevents the above from happening, it may even reduce oxidative stress that comes with high intensity activities. This makes sense when you think about the fact that water makes up 80% of muscles.² So stay well hydrated to remain at peak physical condition.

2. Water is good for brain function

Your level of hydration has a big impact on your brain function. Studies show that even a modest level of dehydration of 1-2% (of reduced water in the body) can impair many brain functions.³This was highlighted in a study conducted with young women at the University of Connecticut. The research shows that women who had a fluid loss of 1.36% after exercise suffered from impaired concentration, poor mood and had many more headaches.⁴

A similar study involving young men also shows that a fluid loss of 1.59% increases feelings of fatigue, anxiety and reduces working memory.

3. Drinking water may help to prevent and treat headaches

This follows on from the previous point that shows how important water is to brain function. Dehydration is usually the root cause of migraines in many people. However, new studies show that drinking water can be an effective way of treating and even preventing headaches from happening in the first place.⁵

4. Water delivers nutrients to your body

Although pure water does not contain any nutrients itself, it can absorb some minerals and deliver it to your body.⁶ For instance, bottled mineral water can sometimes contain healthy minerals that your body needs like sodium, magnesium and calcium.

Just make sure you read the label to learn the exact mineral content of your bottled mineral water.

5. Water helps your body regulate temperature

Water is excellent at absorbing and transferring heat in your body. In fact, it is the primary way that the human body is able to regulate its temperature.

Water has a relatively high heat capacity and it means the water in every cell of your body can work as a shield against sudden temperature changes.⁷This is also the reason why professionals always recommend you drink plenty of water in hot climates or environments.

How much water to drink in a day?

Now that you understand why you should drink more water, the next question is how much? The Internet is full of bogus responses to this and the most common response is the un-scientific 8 cups a day rule.

However, most scientists and health professionals agree that it’s much better to drink according to your gender, weight, level of physical activity and climate. Read this article to know how much water you should be drinking each day: How Much Water Should You Drink Each Day (and How Much Is Too Much for You)

How to drink more water?

After working out how much water you should drink in a day, you might discover that you’re not drinking enough. If this is the case you will need to find new ways to drink more water each day. For instance, you can eat water-rich fruits like watermelons and make new hydration habits like drinking a cup of water before each meal.

If you need help to get you to drink more water, check out these articles:

You can even eat your water from these fruits:⁸

Conclusion

Water is essential to a properly functioning body. You should proactively try to keep yourself well hydrated.

Hydration is not the only benefit you will experience from maintaining a good level of daily water intake. Water can help you stay at a peak physical condition, maintain brain function, prevent headaches and regulate your body temperature.

Make sure you drink enough water each day to enjoy all the amazing health benefits that water has to offer.

REFERENCES

Featured photo credit: MrWaterGeek.comvia mrwatergeek.com

[1]
Beverage Impacts on Health and Nutrition: The Nutritional Value of Bottled Water

[2]
Sports Medicine: Hydration and Muscular Performance

[3]
US National Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health: Mild dehydration impairs cognitive performance and mood of men

[4]
US National Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health:: Dehydration Affects Mood In Healthy Young Women

[5]
US National Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health: Increased water intake to reduce headache: learning from a critical appraisal

[6]
Livestrong: Nutritional Value of Water

[7]
Sciencing: How Does Water Stabilize Temperature?

[8]
Skinny Ms: 21 Ways to Eat Your Water

How to Stop Eating Sugar

By David Leonhardt (reposted from nytimes.com)

If you’re like most Americans, you eat more sugar than is good for you. But it’s entirely possible to eat less sugar without sacrificing much — if any — of the pleasures of eating. Surprising as it may sound, many people who have cut back on sugar say they find their new eating habits more pleasurable than their old ones. This guide will walk you through why sugar matters, how you can make smart food choices to reduce sugar consumption, and how you can keep your life sweet, even without so many sweets.

The Added-Sugar Problem

Here's why you eat more sugar than you realize, and why it's a problem.

The first thing to know: Added sugars, of one kind or another, are almost everywhere in the modern diet. They’re in sandwich bread, chicken stock, pickles, salad dressing, crackers, yogurt and cereal, as well as in the obvious foods and drinks, like soda and desserts.

The biggest problem with added sweeteners is that they make it easy to overeat. They’re tasty and highly caloric but they often don’t make you feel full. Instead, they can trick you into wanting even more food. Because we’re surrounded by added sweeteners — in our kitchens, in restaurants, at schools and offices — most of us will eat too much of them unless we consciously set out to do otherwise.

HOW DID WE GET HERE?

It’s not an accident. The sugar industry has conducted an aggressive, decades-long campaign to blame the obesity epidemic on fats, not sugars. Fats, after all, seem as if they should cause obesity. Thanks partly to that campaign, sugar consumption soared in the United States even as people were trying to lose weight. But research increasingly indicates that an overabundance of simple carbohydrates, and sugar in particular, is the No. 1 problem in modern diets. Sugar is the driving force behind the diabetes and obesity epidemics. Fortunately, more people are realizing the harms of sugar and cutting back.

WHAT TO CUT

Health experts recommend that you focus on reducing added sweeteners — like granulated sugar, high fructose corn syrup, honey, maple syrup, stevia and molasses. You don’t need to worry so much about the sugars that are a natural part of fruit, vegetables and dairy products. Most people don’t overeat naturally occurring sugars, as Marion Nestle of New York University says. The fiber, vitamins and minerals that surround them fill you up.

A typical adult should not eat more than 50 grams (or about 12 teaspoons) of added sugars per day, and closer to 25 is healthier. The average American would need to reduce added-sweetener consumption by about 40 percent to get down to even the 50-gram threshold. Here’s how you can do it — without spending more money on food than you already do.

THE GAMEPLAN

Changing your diet is hard. If your strategy involves thinking about sugar all the time — whenever you’re shopping or eating — you’ll likely fail. You’ll also be miserable in the process. It’s much more effective to come up with a few simple rules and habits that then become second nature. (One strategy to consider: Eliminate all added sugars for one month, and then add back only the ones you miss. It’s easier than it sounds.)

Above all, most people’s goal should be to find a few simple, lasting ways to cut back on sugar. Once you’re done reading this guide, we suggest you choose two or three of our ideas and try them for a few weeks.

First Thing in the Morning

Remember, breakfast shouldn't taste like dessert.

Breakfast is the most dangerous meal of the day for sugar. Many breakfast foods that sound as if they’re healthy are in fact laden with sugar. In Chobani Strawberry Yogurt, for example, the second ingredient — ahead of strawberries! — is evaporated cane sugar. And many brands of granola have more sugar per serving than Froot Loops or Cocoa Puffs. In the United States, as the science writer Gary Taubes says, breakfasts have become “lower-fat versions of dessert.”

There are two main strategies to ensure that breakfast doesn’t become a morning dessert. The first is for people who can’t imagine moving away from a grain-based breakfast, like cereal or toast. If you fall into this category, you have to be quite careful, because processed grains are often packed with sugar.

A few grain-based breakfasts with no or very low sugar:

Cheerios. They’re quite low in sugar.
Plain oatmeal. Flavor it with fresh fruit and, if necessary, a small sprinkling of brown sugar.
Bread. A few breads have no sugar (like Ezekiel 4:9 Whole Grain). A longer list of brands have only one gram, or less, per slice (including Sara Lee Whole Wheat and Nature’s Own Whole Wheat). Authentic Middle Eastern breads, like pita and lavash, are particularly good options and a growing number of supermarkets sell them.
Homemade granola. You can also make your own granola and play around with the sugar amounts.

But there is also a more creative alternative. Move away from grain-based breakfasts. If you do that (as I have recently, after decades of eating cereal), avoiding added sugar is easy. My new breakfast routine actually feels more indulgent than my old one. Most days, I eat three or four of the following:

Scrambled or fried eggs
Fruit
Plain yogurt
A small piece of toast
A few nuts
A small portion of well-spiced vegetables, like spinach, carrots and sweet potatoes.

VEGGIES FOR BREAKFAST?

I realize the part about vegetables may sound weird. Maybe morning veggies aren’t for you. But maybe you’ll be surprised to discover they are, as I was. Remember: In much of the world, including large parts of Asia, breakfast is a savory meal, not a sweet one, just as lunch and dinner are. Vegetables aren’t a weird thing to eat for breakfast in China or India. For more breakfast ideas, check out breakfast recipes from Whole30 (a food program that eliminates much more than just sugar).

A final tip: Keep your juice portions small. Real juice doesn’t have added sweeteners. But fruit juice is one source of natural sugars that can be dangerous, because of how efficiently it delivers those sugars. You’re not eating the stomach-filling fiber of an orange when you drink a glass of orange juice. Keep your juice portions to no more than six ounces, and have only one per day.

From the Bottle and Can

Beverages are one of the biggest sources of added sugars in our diets.

Eliminate soda from your regular diet. Just get rid of it. If you must, drink diet soda. Ideally, though, you should get rid of diet soda, too.

That may sound extreme, but sweetened beverages are by far the biggest source of added sugar in the American diet — 47 percent, according to the federal government. Soda — along with sweetened sports drinks, energy drinks and iced teas — is essentially flavored, liquefied sugar that pumps calories into your body without filling you up. Among all foods and beverages, says Kelly Brownell, an obesity expert and dean of the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke, “the science is most robust and most convincing on the link between soft drinks and negative health outcomes.”

Get this: A single 16-ounce bottle of Coke has 52 grams of sugar. That’s more added sugar than most adults should consume in an entire day.

As for diet soda, researchers aren’t yet sure whether they’re damaging or harmless. Some scientists think diet soda is perfectly fine. Others, like the Yale cardiologist Dr. Harlan Krumholz, think it may be damaging. Dr. Krumholz recently announced that after years of pounding diet sodas, he was giving them up. There is reason to believe, he wrote, that the artificial sweeteners they contain lead to “weight gain and metabolic abnormalities.”

THE SODA ALTERNATIVE

Many people who think they’re addicted to soda are attracted to either the caffeine or the carbonation in the drink. You can get caffeine from coffee and tea (lightly sweetened or unsweetened), and you can get carbonation from seltzer, flavored or otherwise.

For many people, the shift to seltzer, club soda or sparkling water is life changing. It turns hydration into a small treat that’s still calorie-free. Buy yourself a seltzer maker, as I have, and gorge on the stuff at home, while saving money. Or buy fizzy water in cans or bottles. Sales of carbonated water have more than doubled since 2010, with the brand LaCroix now offering more than 20 different flavors, all without added sugar.

If they’re not sweet enough for you, you can also add a dash of juice to plain seltzer. But many people find that they lose their taste for soda after giving it up. And many Americans are giving it up: Since the late 1990s, sales of full-calorie soda have fallen more than 25 percent.

Check Your Pantry

Check the labels of your pantry staples for some easy places to cut the sugar.

Food makers sneak sugar into more foods than you may realize. It’s in many brands of chicken stock, soup, salami, smoked salmon, tortillas and crackers. And most of these foods do not need sweeteners to taste good.

If you take a little time to look at labels — at the grocery store or online — you can quickly learn which staples have sugar and which don’t. Here’s a sampling of some quick switches you could make:

Tip: If you live near a Trader Joe’s, it provides a lot of good, affordable options. Many of its staples have little or no added sweeteners, including some of its house brand sandwich breads, tortillas and bacon.

Try it: When you go to the supermarket, compare various brands, and choose one with little added sugar. Do this once, and then it’s easy to make the no-sugar items your default. You no longer have to spend energy thinking about it.

Start with a product’s Nutrition Facts table. Some products now include a helpful line listing the amount of “added sugars,” in addition to the standard “sugars” line (which includes naturally occurring sugars). The Trump administration has made the “added sugars” line voluntary, however, so you may also need to look at the full ingredient list next to the Nutrition Facts table, to figure out whether a food has an added sweetener. Here’s a helpful list of the many sweetener names.

SNACKS

Snacks can all too easily turn into yet another dessert. Many granola bars and power bars are packed with added sugars. The same goes for canned and dried fruits. And don’t kid yourself about those flavored Starbucks drinks: They’re more like a milkshake than a cup of coffee.

What are better alternatives for snacking? Have some nuts, as Barack Obama famously does. Or popcorn. Or fresh fruit. Or canned fruit that doesn’t come soaked in thick syrup.

Several companies have also realized that more people are trying to reduce their sugar intake and have begun offering snack bars without added sweeteners. These options include Larabars and Rxbars.

The Sauce Risk

What's hiding in your ketchup? Sugar, most likely.

Other than breakfast, sauces and toppings are the biggest stealth sugar risk.

Two of the four biggest ingredients in Heinz Ketchup are sweeteners. The biggest ingredient in many barbecue sauces is high fructose corn syrup. Many pickles — especially those labelled “bread and butter” — are heavily sweetened. Not only does Ragu pasta sauce have added sugar but so does Newman’s Own Marinara. Even Grey Poupon Dijon Mustard has some added sugar.

It is easy enough to use sauces without sugar in most cases. These products are good examples of sauces that forgo the sugar:

Maille dijon mustard
Gulden’s spicy brown
French’s Yellow Mustard
Prego’s Marinara
Victoria pasta sauces
Vlasic Kosher Dill Pickles
Newman’s Own Classic Oil and Vinegar salad dressing

As for barbecue sauce: You’re probably won’t find a good one without sugar. And as a Texan by marriage, I’m not going to suggest you give up barbecue. But no one said that you have to eliminate all sugar from your diet. Cut back on it elsewhere, and you can enjoy your brisket, ribs or pulled pork, slathered in a delicious sauce, without feeling guilty.

MAKE YOUR OWN

Want to control what’s in your sauces? Make them yourself. You can quickly and cheaply make your own salad dressing with some combination of olive oil, an acid (like vinegar, lemon or lime), herbs, garlic and shallots. Here’s a great, and extremely simple, recipefrom my friend Sam Sifton.

While you’re at it, try making your own homemade marinara sauce, and impress your friends with ketchup cooked on your own stove.

Don’t Ruin it All at the End of a Meal

Dessert doesn't have to be any less sweet if you are cutting back on sugar.

Eating dessert is one of the great little joys of life, and we’re not going to tell you that you can’t have dessert. Have dessert! Just keep three rules in mind:

1. Portion size. Many standard American desserts have become grotesquely large. At Applebee’s, the country’s largest casual dining chain, a single piece of cheesecake has 1,000 calories (which is half the calories a typical adult should eat in an entire day) and a whopping 21 teaspoons of sugar. Imagine pouring 21 teaspoons of sugar into your mouth after a meal. At Starbucks, a piece of chocolate marble loaf has 490 calories and is also packed with 43 grams of sugar.

The desserts of yesteryear were not nearly so monstrous. Even if you’re not a fan of Oreos, which have been around since 1912, they’re illustrative. A single Oreo cookie — the regular kind, not “double stuff” or “mega stuff” — has only one teaspoon of sugar. You should think of two or three Oreos, or a different dessert of similar size, as a normal dessert. Anything larger is a big splurge, the sort of indulgence to reserve for special occasions.

2. Habits. I’ve gone through periods when I ate a bowl of ice cream every night. It’s not a great idea.

If you want to keep your sugar consumption under control, you can help yourself by getting out of the habit of having a full artificially sweetened dessert every night. There are other end-of-day rituals that can help you fill the void, like a cup of tea or...

3. Fruit. Fruit is really a miracle food. It’s sweet, delicious and full of nutrients and fiber. Yes, it’s possible to eat so much fruit that you end up getting too much sugar in your diet. But very few people have this problem. For people who want a sweet every day, fruit is the way to go.

Some tips on picking great fruits?

Eat it fresh. (Here’s a guide to seasonality.)
Experiment with new fruits (like pomelos and papaya).
Eat it dried (again, Trader Joe’s excels here).
Eat it jarred or canned in the winter. (Just avoid all the fruit that comes with extra sweeteners.)

The beauty of fruit helps to underscore the overriding point about sugar. It’s normal to have some sugar in your diet. The problem is all of the processed sugar that has snuck into the modern diet. It’s so prevalent that you need a strategy for avoiding it. Once you come up with a strategy, eating a healthy amount of sugar isn’t nearly as hard as it sometimes seems.

About the Author

David Leonhardt, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Op-Ed columnist for The Times, eats more sweets than he should but fewer than he once did.

The Six Human Hungers (Infographic)

Eric Edmeades - https://blog.mindvalley.com/human-hungers/

You’re constantly hungry but you don’t know why?

We all know what it’s like to feel hungry — but according to WildFit Founder Eric Edmeades, not all hunger is created equal.

Check out this beautiful infographic below to learn about what may be really triggering your cravings when you feel “hungry.”

If you’re starting to question your hunger, you should also start questioning thedangerous ideas we have around our health diet medicine, and food.

Your Guide on How to Improve Brain Health

Your Guide on How to Improve Brain Health: Are you taking your brain health for granted? Most people are. Dr. Steven Gundry shares the best foods and supplements to improve your brain health.

So often, you’re told to keep your heart healthy, your liver clean, and your cholesterol low. And yes, you want to do all of those things. Your body won’t take care of itself, after all. But are you taking your brain health for granted?

Your brain is essentially your body’s computer. And just as a computer can’t work properly without a supply of electricity, your brain needs certain nutrients to keep running smoothly.

But what foods and supplements do you need in order to help boost you to an optimum brain-body connection?

Well, while people usually have no trouble associating how nutritional deficiencies tie into physical illness, they don’t always see the connection between diet and the brain.¹

So, in order to understand what your brain needs most, you need to know a little bit more about what makes it tick – and how it all works.

HOW YOUR BRAIN WORKS

Put simply, your brain processes the information it gets from your senses and sends messages back to your body. That’s how it gets you to respond to certain internal and external stimuli.

However, your brain can do more than just direct your animalistic impulses in response to your environment. Because you’re a person, you can also think complex thoughts and feel emotion – all of this adds up to make human beings uniquely intelligent.

Now, if you clench your fists tight and press your hands together, you’ll get an idea of the size of your brain.² And your brain is made up of around 100 billion nerve cells.³

One of the largest components of your brain is a substance known as DHA, or docosahexaenoic acid. Basically, it’s a form of omega-3 fatty acid. And it turns out, DHA is necessary for the growth, functional development, and maintenance of your brain.⁴

If you can get DHA in your diet, you’ll likely help improve your ability to learn. On the flip side, if you’re unable to supply your brain with enough DHA, you might experience difficulty learning. You see, your brain likes DHA better than the other omega-3s.

So, it’s important you find DHA where you can, since your body doesn’t make it on its own.⁵

In order to get more DHA-rich omega-3 oil in your system, you can either feast on marine algae or up your intake of wild-caught fish – especially coldwater fish.⁶That’s tip number one, but there’s more to learn about how food can affect your brain …

CAN FOOD AFFECT MOOD, STRESS, AND ANXIETY?

In a word – yes. Unfortunately, you or someone you know has probably experienced the effects of stress, anxiety, and depression. And these aren’t just different words for the same thing. To be clear …

Depression is a kind of lethargy and sadness. And it’s a pretty regular occurrence. In fact, psychiatrists refer to depression as psychiatry’s “common cold.”⁷ So dealing with occasional feelings of depression isn’t anything to be ashamed of – on the contrary, it’s normal. But if you find your feelings of depression overwhelming, please consult a medical professional.

Anxiety is a combination of fear and general nervousness. Stress can be brought about by feeling overwhelmed by work or emotional factors. And believe it or not, stress can be more powerful than diet in its effects on your cholesterol.⁸

Also, according to large population-based surveys, nearly 34 percent of people are affected by anxiety disorders at some point in their life.⁹ That’s a pretty significant number, so if you’re experiencing either stress, anxiety, or depression, know you’re not alone.

Just remember – if you’re ever dealing with feelings of depression or anxiety that feel too difficult to overcome, please consult a medical professional immediately. And if you need someone to talk to right away, please call 1-800-273-8255.

WHAT ARE SOME OF THE CAUSES OF DEPRESSION AND ANXIETY?

Well, there are a lot of theories about how rapidly our diets are changing and how technology is affecting our mood. You see, before the food business was industrialized, the things that made it onto your dinner table were home-grown, and it was easier to get all of the essential nutrients you needed from your diet.

But recently, soils have become weaker, and foods have been over-farmed and over-processed. Therefore, the natural supply of nutrients that can help feed your brain (like zinc) is shrinking.¹⁰ Not only that, but toxic pesticides are everywhere and can also strip nutrients in produce.¹¹

It’s a big change. The modern diet consists of too many processed foods. As a result, your digestive system might struggle to provide you with what you need for adequate brain health. With all of the recent changes to our diet, it’s no wonder instances of anxiety and depression are on the rise.

Of course, another big factor in several cases of depression can be a lack of active serotonin.¹²

WHAT’S SEROTONIN GOT TO DO WITH IT?

Well, serotonin actually affects more of your body than you may know. It impacts your emotional experience, and even your motor skills. It’s basically a natural mood stabilizer that helps you eat, digest, and sleep.^13,14

You see, your nerve cells make serotonin so they can send signals to one another. While it’s mostly found in your digestive system, it can also be found in your blood and central nervous system.

To up your serotonin levels, you’ll want to boost your tryptophan intake. That’s because serotonin is actually made of tryptophan. It’s an essential amino acid that you can only get through food.

A FEW GREAT SOURCES OF TRYPTOPHAN ARE –

Walnuts, pecans, and pistachios
76 percent dark chocolate
Goat cheese, buffalo mozzarella
Grass-fed beef and lamb

And of course, you’ve probably heard about the tryptophan in turkey – so enjoy a pasture raised, heirloom, or kosher bird this time of year.

Natural Ways to Improve Brain Health

If you’re looking for more ways to boost your brain health, here are a few other ways to nourish your brain.

OMEGA-3 FISH OIL

Omega-3 fish oil is pretty much famous for its multiple benefits, like helping to keep your heart healthy, keeping your immune system up to par, and even calming inflammatory conditions.¹⁵ Also, there are several studies that show omega-3 fatty acids are quite effective in the fight against major depression disorders.¹⁶ So, for a healthier body and an at-ease mind, increase your omega-3 fish oil intake.

PHOSPHATIDYLCHOLINE

It’s not easy to pronounce, but phosphatidylcholine is a pretty sizeable part of lecithin (not to be confused with lectin). In fact, it’s necessary in order to make acetylcholine (a pretty hefty neurotransmitter in your central nervous system). Phosphatidylcholine may benefit those dealing with depression and anxiety by helping to improve mood, sharpen brain energy, and even boost short-term memory.¹⁷

SAME (S-ADENOSYLMETHIONINE)

As mentioned above, SAMe can be used to help decrease the symptoms of depression. In fact, there have been least 40 studies in regards to the use of SAMe as an effective tool in the fight against depression, and many of them have shown proof of beneficial effects.¹⁸ So, SAMe supplements might be helpful if you’re facing mood issues.

A CLOSING THOUGHT

There are several ways to try and help your brain stay healthy. Of course, if you seem to be experiencing any symptoms related to depression or anxiety, or if you’re simply feeling overwhelmed by the stress every day – there are people you can talk to. First, communicate with your doctor.

Once you’re under the care of a healthcare professional, you can work with them to find a supplemental regimen that might work for you. In the meantime, try to eat foods rich in omega-3 fish oils and tryptophan.