Microbes, Mental Wellness & Mealtime | Lisa Kilgour | TEDxKelowna

I know we just met but I really have to come up and just lay something big and kind of personal on the table otherwise I don't know if you'll fully understand my perspective on things so is that okay can we start there so I'm a nutritionist but I don't really have any interest in food well I don't have any interest in the math of nutrition I don't want to know what you ate for dinner last night and I really don't want to tell you how many calories were in it I don't want to calculate how much protein that you need every day and you will never ever hear from me how much vitamin C is in an orange ever but I really love what I do I have the best job in the world and I have such a great job because I really love a good puzzle and our diet and what it does to the body when it's out of balance is an absolutely spectacular puzzle about seven years ago I started getting many clients with digestive issues and those of you who you're dealing with digestive issues will probably agree with me that digestion is an even better puzzle two people can come to me with exactly the same symptoms but what is going on and what they need to feel better will be completely different and that I just eat right up I love it a piece to the puzzle that I kept hearing from client after client was seemingly unrelated symptoms of that were from their brain they're feeling foggy they were having trouble concentrating and now they were dealing with depression anxiety mental health symptoms that they didn't have before I thought that was odd but then I looked backwards into my life and I realized that when I had digestive issues that was also the time that I felt foggy had trouble concentrating and was very depressed so then I thought did I just come across one of the most amazed and coincidences in the world or is there an actual connection so I dove into the research and what I found was a hundred percent yes there is absolutely a connection from these very seemingly unrelated body symptoms your gut and your brain and what connects these two is our microbes the bacteria that lives in our gut this inner ecosystem this amazing amount of bacteria actually outnumbers us cell-to-cell we are 90% bacteria what that means is that every cell that you have that's human you have nine cells of bacteria my favorite author Michael Pollan just calls us back to bacteria locomotion machines because that's really what we are we're much more that than we are human and this bacteria plays a big role in our overall health it is intrinsically intertwined in our immune system and the Sun helps our immune system decide when to react to and not to react it helps out our metabolism by deciding how much energy we're going to extract from the food that we eat and it's very much connected to our brain and the reason it's connected to our brain is that we actually have a large amount of brain cells of neurons living around it our gut this is called the enteric nervous system and many people refer to it as the second brain because it is so elaborate digestion is really tough we need a lot of energy and brain power to help us digest our food because it's so elaborate it uses the same neurons or brain chemicals that our brain uses and we actually make most of these neurons in our gut we make 90% of our serotonin our feel-good neurotransmitter and 50% of our dopamine a reward neurotransmitter here in our gut it's job here is to move food through our digestive system and for a long time we just thought that those neurotransmitters just stayed put today we don't know if they do they may or they may not but what we do know is when there's an imbalance and neurotransmitters in our brain that frequently means we have imbalance of neurotransmitters in our gut low levels of neurotransmitters in our brain is called depression low levels of neurotransmitters in our gut is called constipation and slow digestion a depressed gut an abundance of neurotransmitters in the brain is called anxiety and an abundance of neurotransmitters in the gut is create cramping pain and diarrhea frequently they go together when you have one you have the other I've only found one or two circumstances where they haven't mirrored each other it's really quite cool research Dovan and wanted to see how much a power does the bacteria have over the the production of these neurotransmitters so researchers took mice and they they kept them sterile they didn't allow any bacteria in their body and what they found was those sterile mice produce 60% less serotonin than their brothers next door that were full of bacteria what's really really cool is that when the bacteria was added back into those mice those serotonin levels went right back up to normal so that tells us two things it means that our bacteria communicates with our intestinal wall and helped ask for these neurotransmitters and if our neurotransmitters are low due to low amounts of bacteria well then we can fix that that's really cool but it doesn't end there the bacteria in our gut may actually play a role in our behavior a study out of Ohio State University looked at toddlers and what they found is those toddlers with the most diverse gut bacteria so this was a beautiful ecosystem like a rainforest with all these different strains and really lovely communities those toddlers had the highest number of behavior positive behavioral attributes like being sociable and being curious they also found certain strains of bacteria connected extraversion and boys and extraversion is being very outgoing I'm the opposite I'm an introvert and this study made me think wait a second how much of my introversion is me which I always just thought it was and how much of that is my bacteria talking and that we simply don't know yet the research is really really new we're just on the cutting edge of understanding how much of a role are bacteria plays in our overall life but what we do know is that diversity is what it really matters in our gut what we need is an incredibly beautiful ecosystem with many different types of strains and many different communities and this is where we get the best balance the American gut project has looked at stool samples from thousands of North Americans and thousands of people around the world can you imagine that job and people say that I like to talk about poop a lot like come on so what they found was those people with the most diverse diet had the most diverse got bacteria so this is something we can do we actually fully control the diet of our gut bacteria it lives in our digestive system if we don't eat a food it doesn't need it either but the bacteria in our gut sends signals to our brain and asks us what it wants so when you have an imbalance of certain bacterias you're going to be craving junk foods when when you have about different balance of bacteria you can start craving more vegetables it's really quite lovely that's what I've at least seen anecdotally with my clients what the American gut project did find was plant-based foods as king the more fruits and vegetables we have in our diet the more diverse our gut bacteria is so while I'm not a conventional nutritionist I am standing up here telling you to eat more fruits and vegetables but I'm not just wagging my finger and telling you to do so because we all know this but I see what you eat and I know we don't actually do this so what instead I want to share a few tricks some easy ways to create a more diverse diet real change actually happens with small itty-bitty little steps it doesn't happen by just tomorrow deciding I'm not going to eat any food I like anymore I'm just going to eat this plant stuff no that's not real instead what we need to do is make slow little changes the easiest way to incorporate more plant-based foods into your diet is simply shifting the way you look at each meal we tend to put protein as king and decide I'm going to have this protein for dinner I'm going to have fish or chicken or steak or beans and everything else is the support instead flip that around I'm going to have these vegetables for dinner everything else being at support that alone that simple shift in how you think can change your diet enormous Lee another thing you can do because we tend to get into really bad habits and eat the same foods over and over and over again in North America we have very low diversity in our gut bacteria because we have very low diversity in our diet so a simple way to combat that is once a year for about a month buy a different fruit or vegetable you've never bought before once a week that's it that's four that's four a year come on we can try for new things a year I've been doing this for four or five years and I find that to a year stick it doesn't seem like a lot but I've been doing it for four or five years so now I have ten fruits and vegetables that weren't in my diet five years ago this wasn't hard this was easy I don't even think about it it's just how it is it's really quite amazing the other food our gut bacteria just love is fermented foods and fermented foods is completely missing from our diet in North America these are fermented vegetables like sauerkraut or fermented soy like miso or fermented teas like kombucha these are getting more and more popular but these are still foods that are lacking in our diet and it's because we don't need them we don't need to ferment foods to keep them for a long time but our gut bacteria desperately needs them fermented foods is our gut bacteria 'he's absolute favorite food it's it feeds the best bacteria in our gut and creates beautiful balance they frequently contain bacteria and we'll see the gut with new bacterias but the coolest thing they do is those little bacterias that you add back into your gut educate your gut bacteria on how to digest so it actually reduces your in digestion symptoms because there's an education going on it's really quite neat but it doesn't end there there's one more thing that we can do with our diet to create balance in our neurotransmitters and according to the research of Carole Hart who in her book secrets of serotonin she has found that breakfast in particular is very important in shifting our neurotransmitters or finding balance in those neurotransmitters if you deal with low levels of neurotransmitters so that would be depression or constipation then having a very starchy breakfast can increase your serotonin levels by 10% the type of start to breakfast I'm talking about is full of fiber and nutrients things like potatoes or sweet potatoes root vegetables it could be steel-cut oatmeal or quinoa the key here is to have a starchy breakfast that is really well balanced with these nutrients and fiber those of you who are like me and are wired for depression know how lovely sweet foods are and how happy we feel when we eat them because they do the same thing those refined flours and the refined sugars will also bring our mood right back right up but it's not very stable and they'll just crash our mood later so we are just on this roller coaster when we have a breakfast that's full of fiber and nutrients that doesn't happen but if you're dealing with the other side if you if you frequently deal with anxiety so you're dealing with anxiety or diarrhea what we need to do is bring those neurotransmitters down a high protein breakfast can bring those neurotransmitters down by 35% if though you are dealing with depression and you're having a high protein breakfast which is what's in style right now we're all eating a high protein breakfast right now what that can do is bring your serotonin and dopamine levels down even further but then frequently what I see with my clients is it triggers crazy later in the day the body will try to balance itself out and it's going to do that when your willpower is at its lowest which is when evening and now instead of wanting something starchy and lovely you want candy or chocolate or something really really sweet so finding the breakfast that works best for you can make a big big difference and I invite you to make some experiments with your diet and and try different breakfasts and try different fruits and vegetables because the coolest thing about small easy dietary changes is your body will thank you by making you feel a little bit a little bit better and that makes these changes really really easy but by no means am I saying that simple dietary changes are the 100 percent solution for very complex issues like anxiety and depression but I have seen how powerful our diet can be at taking the edge off these conditions and making our day-to-day activities a little bit more doable I feel this is a really important part of self-care and self-care is an important part of connection because when we take care of ourselves and we feel good and we have energy then we have energy to reach out and help each other and connect with each other author shame researcher and very popular TED speaker brené Brown tells us that human beings are wired for connection and connection brings us joy and happiness but a very common symptom of anxiety and depression is disconnection connection brings us together and creates a strong community and this is how I want to ignite change in our community this is something we all can do understanding how food makes us feel and taking an active part in feeding and fueling ourselves better can create change in our culture it can it can be a catalyst for change by taking care of ourselves we can reach out and take care of each other better thank you you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 324,632

Rating: 4.859973 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Canada, Health, Mental health, Nutrition

Id: ghAmkVMYkPw

Length: 15min 38sec (938 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 02 2015