Can Gut Issues Be Tied To Depression? #depression #microbiome

How does a bacteria in your gut affect your mood, affect your anxiety level, cause depression or inflammation? Now we're looking even at the brains of people who died of depression. And we can do neuroinflammation studies with imaging. And we see there's high levels of inflammation. So people don't think that, oh, I'm depressed, my brain's inflamed, but it actually is. We don't connect that often to what we're eating or to our overall health.

We now see studies that link inflammation to conditions like depression, anxiety, cognitive disorders, and more. And one of the things that I thought that was really interesting, SSRIs, they're not my favorite medication, but they actually have been shown to have an anti inflammatory effect. Should we be looking at medications that are anti inflammatory to be treating these conditions? A lot of that fine tuning of the science can actually be around the gut microbiome, finding where the GABA is produced and where it's hanging out. Lactobacillus plantarum influences dopamine and serotonin levels. So the more we know, I think the more that we can use that's not necessarily a prescription medication.