Why Your Gut Is Your Second Brain | Emeran Mayer on Health Theory

the brain sends signals to the gut microbes changes their behavior their function and then these metabolites you know that that we know they probably go back to the brain and reinforce it and create this this vicious cycle of brain gut microbial interactions that I presenting underlies chronic depression everybody welcome to health theory you're here because you believe that human potential is nearly limitless but you know that your ability to actually actuate your potential is at least partially based on your physical body as such both of us are here to learn and my obsession is with helping people optimize their minds and my goal with this show is to introduce you to the people and ideas that will help you do just that I'm Tom Billie co-founder of quest nutrition and impact theory and today we're joined by dr. Emma and Mayer he's a UCLA professor brain gut microbiome expert gastroenterologist neuroscientist and Amazon best-selling author of the mind gut connection in my quest to solve my wife's digestive issues I came across his book and I was totally blown away and wanted to bring him on to see what more I could learn so without further ado dr. Emerich Mayer thank you so much for joining us okay nice to - absolute pleasure to have you here as I was telling you off camera sincerely my journey to help my wife get into a better place has been massively impacted by your book which i think is really incredible and by way of primer for people how exactly does the gut influence our overall well-being well I mean writing this book has been a new experience for me I've been a scientist on studying the communication between the brain and the gut for most of my career the concept is that multiple parts of our body interact with each other in the brain sits over them like this supercomputer that makes sure the interactions are okay and if everything works in harmony we also feel good as a as a by-product so you're not you know evolution didn't really select that we feel good it's but evolution selected all our systems so they work perfectly and when they work perfectly you know we have a sense of well-being so my wife Lisa just about got almost two and a half years ago now started saying I don't feel well and then started vomiting like really badly and so we thought she had the stomach flu and couldn't eat when she first had everything upset her stomach and by stomach I mean gut and then in trying to like figure this all out we realized that she had lost diversity in her microbiome and so okay how do we rebuild from that and a very long process we tried a lot of things but the one that like when we when we were advised to do it just did not seem possible that it could be useful and then I've heard you talk a lot about it was she was advised not to eat if she was stressed and to do like almost a meditative eating to breathe in a meditative fashion while she ate why on earth would that matter well I mean the answer that is actually fairly simple so when you imagine that the brain and the gut are connected and have always been connected you know millions of years in evolution this has always been a tight-knit unit that if an organism is if a person is stressed it will send down signals to the gut it will change a lot of things so this so called autonomic nervous system can change the transit time the peristaltic activity in different parts of the GI tract in different ways so it's stress will slow down the stomach but speed up the intestine severe stress can lead to this very powerful contractions secretion of fluid secretion of it's called antimicrobial peptides mucus so you have to imagine that when you stressed your gut is different completely different from when you're not stressed so when you're when you're relaxed so this is not only the effects the gut but it also affects the microbes because it's their home so at that environment that they live in and they thrive on if that all sudden is changed or is chronically changed in this way the main problem I mean if you stress No for five minutes because you were almost hit by a car you know that that's not a big deal really it's in terms of that balance but if you're chronically stressed you have a chronically altered composition of you got so now when you eat something it it doesn't feel right you get symptoms you get bloating get cramps it triggers these reflexes in the gut - you know - for things to move through faster could result in diarrhea and one thing you've likened it to which I thought was really helpful for somebody that's just sort of starting to wrap their head around this is you said we have facial expressions when we're angry when we're scared and if you think of those states as being something internal that's now represented by the muscles in the face those same internal states can be represented in a similar fashion by the gut and that if you get them in a state that is their version of the angry face or the scared face or whatever that they're actually like you just said they're producing different metabolites and things like that which can have a pretty profound effect and that that image for me of thinking of my gut States as being as reactive as my facial reactions and are they is reactive like that as fast as the face can respond in my poo Coulson mentioned this these observations by by physicians in during war times you know when they had somebody had like a fistula there's something they could actually see their intestines moving and blood flow so they noticed when somebody walked in and that that's wounded soldier got upset instantaneously saw changes in the contraction and in the blood flow so this but what I said earlier you know if you if that happens every once in a while it's very not such a big deal if if it happens chronically it will rearrange the whole habitat an ecological system in in in in your gut and so you know before I always know that negative emotions are never good for anything really so the Buddhist principle is that there's no good bad emotion and so they but they clearly affect your health I mean it's not just that you feel bad you know it's but I would say you know it's it's many parts of the body that reacts to emotions like your heart rate and the difference is the gut is the most complex system that's affected by this and the gut has the microbes the heart doesn't have that you your blood vessels don't have that any emotions it's not such a new thing that is the physical representation of your emotions just as like in your face and your muscles the impact on the overall organism is much greater because you know you have the system sitting there with the trillions and microbes that all little chemical factories you have you're the biggest part of your immune system the biggest part of your hormonal system it's all sitting there and when these signals go down from the gut it changes the whole interaction one thing that I really want people to understand that I was blown away by in your book and I mean it's right there in the title so maybe I shouldn't have been as sort of awestruck by it as I was but that there's a feedback loop going both directions so the gut is is as you've called it and I'm sure as it's called in your field the Forgotten organ right so that if you took all the microbiota in your body and condensed it down which we can't even see it so the fact that once you condense it down you realize just how big it is about the size of a liver no I'm not mistaken which makes it one of the largest organs in your body if you were to flatten it out it's bigger than a basketball court yeah so it's this massive sensing organ which I never realized it actually has the ability to taste though not it's the same receptors that we have on our tongue has ability to smell and so it's it's taking in all these cues that it's reading from the food and then it's speaking back to the brain and then the brain is speaking back to it and that through the millions of years of evolution it's gotten really good at communicating with us it's a big system but it's not the one that generates your emotions it's it's the system that completely takes care of you got activity and your daily option so anything that you do within food ingestion this system can handle unless you get stressed or emotionally upset about something then the big brain interferes with that a lot of people when they're stressed they don't feel it women feel it more likely than men do when there's a change in that gain in that sensitivity then all of a sudden patients develop all kinds of symptoms you know from from fullness bloating abdominal distension intolerance a certain food items is that why IBS was originally considered a psychosomatic problem you know some psychosomatic you know I mean today we call it mind-body medicine but the psychosomatic medicine movement was had had a wrong basic concept that that all these diseases were brain for brain diseases now we look at them as you know the brain got microbiome disturbances or alterations in the balances so one of the things pretty why you know many of these stress-related disorders become chronic because that system that normally keeps things in balance is altered and accepts a difference different steady-state a different stability state and once it has this new stability state it's it's stuck in that and it becomes chronic in it so basically it'll change its set point so it's if you're first starting to get stressed it tries to get back to a neutral set point but if you're always stressed always trust always dress that basically becomes a new normal absolutely what is the function of that so this this terrifies me as somebody who has a wife with microbiome issues that once you get it out of whack like it's hard but if you manage to get it out of whack and it's got its new setpoint how do you get it built back up and I read something terrifying which basically said if you look at us as the species over time there's this like stair-step declination of diversity in the microbiome and so if you know you're let's say your great-grandparents were here your grandparents were here your parents were here but you're here if in your life uux variance of decline you can get it back up to where you started but as far as I can tell from what I've read nobody thinks you can get it back to where your great-grandparents were why you understand that why can't I just take a probiotic yeah so this is this is a big issue right now you know so there was a recent papers I'm from this a population that that can do it so the hot star in in East Africa and Tanzania Rift Valley so these are some of the last remaining hunter-gatherers I think it's only a couple of hundred left that live that lifestyle and their microbiota their microbiome diversity has a seasonal variation so they found it they did if they test them in summer and winter and what what's different in summer and winter with these people is they they switch from a more plant-based diet to a more meat based diet their microbiome changes with these dietary changes when you look at them at the state when they don't have their high plant intake it looks like ours almost the same miss is the same species in the same types of microbes then when they go to the plant-based diet it regains its diversity so they still have the ability to go from from our level back up to the high level there's thousands of species that do not are not that essential and you can lose them but if you lose one of those keystone species and the whole system gets altered so it's it's possible would happen in Western society in developing countries that we lost some of these keystone species and so no longer have this ability to to to return I think it's gonna be one of the biggest challenges really - yeah and so and that if I can't do it through probiotics could I and I've actually seriously I put a date that if my wife wasn't better by and thankfully she is sort of beyond the critical threshold now but if she hadn't gotten better by X date I was gonna take her somewhere to get a fecal transplant is that a possibility like is that a way to at the moment the answer is No so there's many ongoing studies now clinical trials with fecal microbial transplants in so as you know this one condition were what works perfectly it's the best the best treatment in this one all you normal microbes are wiped out is C difficile colitis it's to get this some people get this when they receive antibiotics in the in the hospital see what's really well but you have to remember that in in that situation the normal microbiome has been wiped out pretty much so you start from scratch all the other conditions were it's been tried like inflammatory bowel disease and irritable bowel syndrome and autism spectrum disorder you have an alter microbiome but it it's it's it's an another stable state you know it has assumed another ecological stability state and it's it's very difficult to push it away from that there are studies going on were people get repeated and up cautious courses of antibiotics and then fecal microbial transplant like in you know an autism spectrum disorders that's been tried and the hypothesis there was that the microbiome is playing a role in autism yeah which is somewhat questionable I mean autism starts really in in in utero you know the abnormal growth of the brain so if anything I think it's potentially the microbiome in the metabolites of the mother did affect the child's brain development and so that's kind of my theory about this but a lot of disparate parents are doing these these transplants themselves then our our diet is clearly another thing you know the more plant-based fiber eat greater diversity of your microbiome is and this is sort of what this whole concept of you know the the plant-based diet comes in that the metabolites that these microbes produce the more you feed them what they have evolved for in evolution to break down these complex fiber components of plants the more you feed on that the larger the number will get and the more of these healthy metabolites civil you know they will produce and it's kind of interesting to me on one side from a gut microbial diversity gut health standpoint it's it would seem very easy to say what's what's the best diet for people but but then clearly we have others you know like in IBS it's like this fodmap diet which actually takes out a lot of the fiber these oligosaccharides we have the ketogenic diet you know which obviously is wonderful to lose weight and if you have diabetes - - you know get get your hemoglobin a1c down but but there's certainly not what the microbes for their health and diversity like you know so right I mean just sum the whole thing up I think we're beginning now to understand that there are situations were the diversity can oscillate depending what we eat let me ask you what's the role of the gut in depression and anxiety it's it's very interesting I mean there's studies going on and you know we would plan again of often this were large-scale studies was a dietary intervention like you know a Mediterranean type diet and negative in 600 people you know where you look at the brain in the microbiome before and after that dietary intervention particularly the focus on cognitive performance the cognitive decline and my guess is that over time there's this different influence now the ketogenic diet I find still find that puzzling you know there so a lot of people say oh it's when they started this I completely felt different the brain fog was gone it's in some ways paradoxical because it's not the good thing for your microbes necessarily but that's the situation where people report eyes they immediately felt better or different so I've used a ketogenic diet very extensively in my own life and then my wife has used it in her recovery as well and so I'll walk you through what each of this experienced so my experience is not with a lifting of brain fog or anything like that but a profound difference in the way that I respond to hunger so if I'm on a high-protein diet I'm never high carb I haven't been high carb in more than 10 years so my average daily carb intake is probably less than 30 grams and entirely from vegetables so what I see is when I get hungry from high protein I have a declination of performance I'm not able to concentrate I get slightly irritable maybe I get a headache I certainly don't want to concentrate like if you're gonna give me that there's any willpower component to this my willpower is way low when I get hungry on a high-protein diet because I'm burning glucose now my wife's experience has been the anti-inflammatory effects because she is often self-reported that her gut feels swollen she doesn't know how else to explain it she's like it just feels swollen so at you know she eats something and it's going through her system and it just feels irritated and inflamed and when she does a ketogenic diet that is significantly reduced however she'll still have bouts of what sound like typical IBS symptoms right she'll she'll have diarrhea shelf cramping bloating pain like all of it and be like what just triggered that I was doing perfectly for let's say four days and now all of a sudden eating the same thing all the sudden she has like some big episode so clearly not a silver bullet for her but has been a big part of what we do to maintain her inflammation is yes so I mean I would say you know now with with this gut microbiome science I think there will be a whole revisiting of of dietary recommendations even though initially was a skeptic of the ketogenic diet but I mean you have to listen to you to to people I mean in some ways it tells you more than then then the mouse experiments you know so if people feel better obviously there must be a reason why that is the case I think nutrition and diet is just entering a phase of a real scientific rigor now which didn't have an in the past and that's largely driven by the interest in the microbes because you want to understand what the microbes do you know they live off what we eat so it's it's gonna be essential to - you know - to sort this out so really fast going back to depression and anxiety the the question that I most want to ask you why on earth is 95% of the serotonin which i think of I mean you know SSRIs right selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor which is used for depression which is all about the brain why is 95 percent of serotonin stored in the gut and what does it mean because you you say it's stored but I don't remember you following up on like what does it mean to be stored versus used is 95 percent used in the gut or like what what is serotonins role in all this it's it's a story in in in in progress you know I mean I wish I could give you the answer I ask myself the same question why why would you know evolution design us in a way that that molecule that plays such an important role in and sleep and well-being and pain sensitivity what what did all this be at the gut level and is it manufactured in the gut and stored in the gut or manufactured elsewhere and stored it know it know it is manufacture in the gut so is hormone tryptophan hydroxylase from dietary tryptophan that's that's taken up by these cells and interestingly so we now know last couple uses come out that this enzyme that that converts tryptophan into serotonin is to large degree under the influence of microbial signals so that the microbes can actually you know influence how much serotonin that you synthesize that you produce and ultimately also how much is being released when they are stimulated by microbial signals or by contractions of the carter baizen food product the serotonin is being released on the synapse and single sends a signal through the vagus nerve into your brain into emotional regulation centers of the brain so that's freedom at the main communication pathway between the serotonins that the micro of certain signals and and you know brain function and emotional function you know so for example TV the diet tryptophan and people have taken tryptophan supplements which really should be good for you in some ways because the microbes if they seem more tryptophan they send more signals to these serotonin cells that produce serotonin so you would have a very simple antidepressant initially think that's yeah that's the answer you know like there's a change in that microbial enter endocrine cell communication and that says somehow plays a role in depression and and and anxiety unfortunately it's not that it's not that simple I think depression probably starts at the brains is some vulnerability then it's becomes manifests during periods of stress or trauma the brain sends signals to the gut microbes changes their behavior their function and then these metabolites you know that that we know they probably go back to the brain and reinforce it and create this this vicious cycle of brain gut microbiome interactions that I processing underlies chronic depression and I've heard you say that you think meditation may actually play a role on that like what what's your belief about mechanistically what's going on like why would meditation help our hypothesis was that meditation changes the the activity of your autonomic nervous system that signals back to the gut clearly if you're in a state of relaxation or mindfulness will be less sympathetic or less stress signals going to the God that changes the microbes and metabolites and then that would in some ways you know break that that that that cycles but we did another study with with cognitive behavioral therapy in patients with with irritable bowel syndrome and as we had anticipated you know patients - quite well so about 60% response rates on that with his cognitive behavioral therapy the only thing that we found is which is interesting that you got microbial composition when you start out to therapy in some ways predicts if you're gonna respond to it or not wow I've never heard that before so you're saying that you could sequence the microbiome and say either you have a set up that matches people that have gotten a lot of benefit out of this or you haven't and potentially do you know what volume is doing in terms of sequencing yeah actually I'm I mean shoot this cause I'm on the scientific advisory board as a company and if you do that volume test it could end EF suffering from IBS it could predict you know if you're gonna respond to to what type of therapy diet or mind base or or medications I mean that technology and that approach I think has has the potential to really break the current paradigm and at the current practice of medicine yeah I'm really intrigued to see what Big Data is able to pull out of this especially with that hypothesis that you just put forward which should be perfectly answered by that if we can see set States and then they have predictive abilities in terms of outcomes then if we can use big data to really work back what actually is the causative rather than just the correlative element of that'd be really fascinating all right I want to do a segment now called gut check nice and clever and I give us the top whatever number to three things that are going on right now either at the individual person level or at a societal level that have massive gut health implications that people may or may not be aware of the food industry has played a big role in providing us with nutrition that's not good for us of all the processed foods and a high sugar and high fat and so there's a pending I mean an ongoing paradigm shift as well so many of the CEOs of these companies have realized that a the consumer habits are changing there's some very visionary CEOs of some of these big companies it have in mind the benefit of the consumer not not the benefit of the shareholder so I think that's a very exciting thing and the change in the in the in the food that we eat and the awareness of people and the response now of the people that produce these foods I think that's that's clearly a you know big thing I think the the antibiotic use in terms of a negative example I think that's still unabated I think that yeah you know some pretty dramatic changes will have to will have to happen for this to really fundamentally change it in in ob/gyn in pediatrics and adult treatment these people would recommend antibiotic treatment for IBS which I personally think is in some ways crazy in a time where we all know that you know we don't want to harm the microbes so to give repeated doses of antibiotics for which keeps you a marginal benefit transient benefit I think is really irresponsible well I mean I would say the third thing is that there are now a massive effort to see how that the microbiome the wisdom that's in that system how they can be utilized to both for Diagnostics but also for personalized medicine it's conceivable that during that test it has more predictive value or diagnostic value than doing your annual physical and you - Wow your regular blood test potentially you know it's in a different stages of life so if you do this on a pregnant mother it could predict the risk for autism may if you do it and an infant you predict how this infant later will you know if there's a high risk of developing depression or and you know did this potential clearly has been recognized by people I get at why am i you volume or they to someone is this many players now not sure who's gonna win that race but it's is it there's a huge potential this could revolutionize medicine yeah so we've leveraged volume very heavily so we happen to know Naveen personally he's been on the show impact Theory a couple times great dude really like him yes and so he's allowed us to access the backend and work with some of the people that they have and the thing that is has been so terrifying and the thing that I'm pushing him that is the problem he has to solve is that the massive complexity so for instance what we realized was lisa has SIBO but she also has a deficiency in the variability the variety of species that she has in her gut she also has diminished lining of her gut and probably has some gut leak so it's like okay you can't attack them all at once so there's no one simple solution that's gonna solve everything and if you took the antibiotics for SIBO which like you were saying is the traditional recommendation well the problem is now you're gonna exacerbate all the other problems that she has lower down in the line so working on these like one at a time right okay so first we have to address SIBO and what do you have to do to do that that's already insanely complicated to tie this up with one thing that I just could not wrap this interview without talking about it's something you introduced me to I'd never heard of this before and while I think you mean it specifically in reference to the brain as an analogy I think it works for the complexity that I'm talking about which is the brain connectome what is the brain connectome what does it mean and maybe most interestingly what is the paradigm that it totally shatters the brain connectome project is something that's been initiated by the National Institute of Health and it's it's based on the idea that seems like obvious that every cell in in the brain is connected with each other and that there's there's networks of the brain that are connected with each other and it's like a massive supercomputer really the way it's organized and there are people that you know with fiber tracking and with brain imaging different modalities of and imaging that study this phenomenon and ultimately we'll be able to get a much more accurate this option of the functions of our brain which it's still pretty primitive the way it is right now you know and the impact will be I mean clearly there's a race on in understanding the brain and its potential and its role in disease and so for example that whole idea that the brain is is it's not just a cognitive machine and emotional machine but its primary function probably being the supercomputer that surveys every cell in your body constantly in a millisecond millisecond time scale and monitors for potential threats to its home it to the homeostasis of the organism and then responds you know based on its memory its experience but but also based on on on inborn patterns to overcome that perturbation so understanding how the brain does that this regulatory role I think will also revolutionize medicine I mean it's as you said earlier you know medicine until I mean even today 95% of medicine does not take the brain into account in inhale Center which is crazy it's the most powerful machine you know in the well certainly on this planet that you would not take this into account in your theories of how the body functions and it's really amazing to me but but that is changing I mean so the the connectome project is one of those areas that is really pushing ahead and and will will establish the the correct role of the brain and you know in our physiology and our health I love that notion of of a connectome of being far more interrelated and I think that's the the thing that was the big breakthrough for me it's far more interrelated than our metaphors and our analogies up to this point would lead us to believe which is the exact issue that we're having with digestion right you've talked about people have historically thought about it as this machine kind of like a car and it's like if you take care of it and give it the right fuel it'll last about 75 years and you know with having to address the occasional infection or whatever but but not understanding the role that communication plays that there's the as you said the bi-directional communication of the brain to the gut that gut to the brain that so much of our immune system is housed in the gut right and oh man when I read this in your book I almost flipped out that the reason that so much of our immune system is in our gut is because of its encountering potentially deadly bacteria in the food that we eat yeah and I thought oh like it was one of those that should be patently obvious but never made my radar until I read it and I think what you're working on is is so critically important in this moment I because it's affected my life I know just how important and I worry that Lisa and I are sort of the the tip of a spear of what's coming which is really terrifying if we don't get a lot more answers I think there's going to be an immeasurable amount of suffering and yeah so getting some of these answers is incredibly important in your book has really been a touchstone for that all right before I ask my last question where can these guys find you online my personal website Imran Myers calm that guides you then to all the other areas all right my final question and this admittedly is meant to be hard because I want to force you into a binary situation where you can only choose one thing what one thing could people do additively or subtractive lee reductively I guess to have the biggest impact on their overall health and well-being yeah so with the one thing that's makes it difficult I would you know I already start with the exercise part but right after that or at the same level the diet part I did not see that answer coming I'll be honest really yeah well the exercise diet yes exercise now the exercise part is because you know there's so many studies the benefits on cognitive function and the slowing the the cognitive decline and stress reduction and change structural change in the brain so I disappointed you with the exercise but now I love that being surprised is the best possible answer yeah that's awesome dr. Maier thank you so much for coming straight real pleasure guys if you haven't already discovered him out in the wide world if you haven't read the book if you haven't gone to his Facebook page his website Instagram page go check it all out he's really somebody that is that the absolute forefront of discovering this and what I love about him and what I think is is just so apparent in the talk that we had today is he's not dogmatic he's really trying to discover the answers he has a deeply inquisitive mind and something that we didn't get to talk about in the interview he was meant to take over a chocolate business which was in the family for generations and he left that because he had a deep passion for his inquisitiveness around the subjects that we talked about today and that shines through in everything that he does and you get the sense of somebody really trying to discover the truth and that to me is what the show is all about we are going to succeed or fail based on our ability to really look at a lot of different hypothesis and build a worldview based on that rather than presenting dogma so just incredibly grateful for you coming on the show today it was really really amazing guys dive into his world I think that the connection between the mind and the gut is just absolutely and critical and you've got to figure that that one out for yourself for sure if you want to be able to optimize your mind and live the best life possible so thank you guys so much for joining us today and if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care [Music] [Music]

Channel: Tom Bilyeu

Views: 126,563

Rating: 4.8740473 out of 5

Keywords: Tom Bilyeu, Impact Theory, ImpactTheory, TomBilyeu, Inside Quest, InsideQuest, Tom Bilyou, mind gut connection, emeran mayer, gut health, second brain, enteric nervous system, microbiome

Id: filqDSbSOAA

Length: 37min 16sec (2236 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 29 2018