How Gut Health Impacts Sleep

Coming up on this episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

Now we know that certain bacteria in the gut communicate with cells that produce these sleep related hormones and neurotransmitters. So your gut cascade, your microbiome, has a huge impact on your sleep quality. And so now the question is, what do we do about it? Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark.

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Hi everyone, I'm Kaya Perowich, one of the producers of the Doctor's Pharmacy podcast. We all know that getting quality sleep is fundamental to our overall health and well-being. What you might not know is that your gut health plays a major role in your ability to get that quality sleep each and every night. Dr. Hyman sat down with sleep expert and host of the model health show.

Shawn Stevenson, to discuss the role that our gut microbiome has on our sleep. But I want to talk about something that a lot of folks still don't have a big awareness of, and this is the fact that your gut and the health of your microbiome has a huge impact on your sleep quality.

So your poop and sleep are connected? What a concept.

In a way. Okay, let's dig into that one. Don't do the two together.

No, that's not- you- know, that's called- that's going to blow people's mind and even my mind. Tell us how the microbiome and your.

Gut affects your sleep and what you can do about it. Absolutely. So let's start with the basic component. And I know again, these are going to be things people have heard about.

Before probably on your show.

But let's start with serotonin. Okay.

So it's pretty well known. And by the way, there's more serotonin.

In your gut than there is in your brain. Exactly. So upwards of 80 to 90% of your body's serotonin is actually located in.

Your gut, produced by your enterochromaffin cells, by the way. Yeah.

All right, so.

Those are special cells in your intestinal lining. Yes. Now.

I'm just translating all the big words.

See?

I like that. We're like flipping places because I would do this for you. So here's what's so interesting is that serotonin, we talked about melatonin being important for our sleep. in our circadian rhythm. Serotonin is a precursor or a seed to make melatonin. So already right off the bat, your gut environment, these cells in your gut are helping to make this compound that's related to your sleep quality. And with melatonin is what I want to liken it to, it's like that manual gear shifter for you to go through your sleep cycles properly and to actually get recovered. You need melatonin to be produced. And we'll come back to that. That's number one, serotonin.

And you can't just take melatonin?

I'll answer that in a minute. That's tricky.

Okay.

So, well, I'll just tell you. So I looked around because some of our colleagues would feel that, and this was just a theory, that if you take supplemental melatonin, it's going to reduce your body's ability to produce it itself. And that's actually, I couldn't find that anywhere. There was no evidence of that. What I did find was, taking supplemental melatonin, taking too much or too frequently can down regulate receptor sites for melatonin. So your body can still produce it, but the receptor sites that actually do something with the melatonin can get down regulated.

The key is there, but the lock isn't.

Yeah, so we do need to be mindful of that and we can come back and talk about that, but here's the biggest probably aha moment hopefully of this episode is that it's not just serotonin that's producing the gut. And so, check this out. And I just came across this. I'm gonna share this with you today. This was in the World Journal of Gastroenterology. Listen to this. They found that there's upwards of 400 times more melatonin in your gut than in your brain. Because you talked earlier about the pineal gland. That's what I was taught in school. It's produced by pineal gland in the story. This study found that you can actually have a pinealectomy. which is a removal of your pineal gland, which I don't recommend, by the.

Way, don't do that.

It's like a frontal lobotomy, you know, go there. And you don't actually lose those levels of melatonin that's located in your gut. So you have a gut brain and a brain brain. Exactly. And that's something really important to understand too. Your gut is really, it's often referred to as a second brain. We can call it the enteric nervous system. There's like 30 neurotransmitters just like your brain.

It's like a mass of nerve tissue. 60% of your immune system and most of the genes in your body.

As well. That Vegas nerve, so UCLA research has found that the Vegas nerve, which we thought was just kind of like the brain communicating more telling the gut what to do, 90% of those, the communication from those nerve fibers from the Vegas nerve to the brain is your belly, your gut telling your brain what to do in many ways. Totally nuts.

And the other thing people should know is that when you're stressed, not only is your cortisol high and you lead to more fat accumulation, stores belly fat, but it actually blocks your cell's ability to burn calories because the nerves, or the vagus nerve, help you metabolize your food, which is a relaxation nerve. It also has the effect of decreasing absorption of nutrients. So not only are you not absorbing, but your metabolism just slows down, which is amazing. It's just because of the nervous connection between your stress nerves and your relaxation nerves and all your gut function.

So profound. But this is just getting out of that isolation thinking. You know, this is what I was taught in school as well. It's like, that's functional medicine.

The body's a system.

Yes, everything is interconnected and it's just beautiful symphony if everything's working well. So Caltech researchers to kind of get to how does this all connect, they discovered that, and this was just, I mean, it's been around for years, but this is more of a recent, like, Okay, meta-analysis. Now we know that certain bacteria in the gut communicate with cells that produce these sleep related hormones and neurotransmitters. So your gut cascade, your microbiome has a huge impact on your sleep quality. And so now the question is, what do we do about it? How do we protect or support our microbiome? And that's one of the things that's going to help to improve your sleep quality. So let's just go through a couple. the biggest thing in my opinion is avoiding things that mess it up. All right, so one of those would be eating processed foods. So that crazy amount of sugar has a tendency to feed pathogenic opportunistic bacteria. Right? So that's one thing, avoiding haphazard use of antibiotics. They have a place, but we shouldn't be using antibiotics every time you get the sniffles. All right. And that's literally what when I was a kid, just give them some antibiotics, right? We would even, like if my mom had some antibiotics, you know, just totally negligent.

Yeah, give them whatever's in the cupboard.

Also, pesticides, herbicides, rodenticides.

Metals.

Yeah, these things, side literally means to kill, by the way. But these have a pretty, because they're meant to kill small things, guess what your microbiome is made of, you know?

And so, and how many millions and millions of people are taking acid blockers which also terribly disrupts your gut microbiome.

Simply put, your gut microbiome must be healthy for you to be healthy, which is why functional medicine puts a major focus on the gut. Dr. Hyman recently spoke with his colleague at the Ultra Wellness Center, Dr. Elizabeth.

Boham, about the functional medicine approach to gut health. I call it the weeding, seeding, and feeding program. So you weed out the bad things, you seed it with the good things, and you feed it with good nutrients and all that stuff. So it's really, it's so powerful, I can't tell you, as a functional medicine doctor for the last 30 years, and you've been doing this almost as long, the results you get from focusing on the gut with so many conditions, whether it's autoimmune or that it's allergic, whether it's digestive, whether it's your skin issues like acne and eczema, whether it's your mood, whether it's weight metabolism, whether it's migraines, whether it's Alzheimer's, I mean, Autism, ADD, it's just amazing when you start to focus on this. So let's break down the 5R program for everybody. So we got the remove. So what are we looking at?

We're removing... Removing unhealthy foods or inflammatory foods for that person.

So they can be food sensitivities, things.

Like gluten and dairy. Allergies, big ones.

Sensitivities, yeah.

And then we're removing... Processed food and junk food. Oh yeah, that's for sure. And sugars and, you know, excess sugar, which is feeding the wrong bacteria. And then we're removing the unhealthy bugs or yeasts or viruses are found.

You might have a cure overgrowth, yeast overgrowth, a parasite.

So you remove... Then we replace...

But you might also remove things like heavy metals or stress or toxic people in your life or whatever's giving you a stomach problem.

Replace means just replace some of those digestive enzymes if needed, re-inoculate, so the.

Replace also could be like prebiotics, right? So putting in the fibers to feed the gut and to actually maybe use hydrochloric acid sometimes for people who aren't digesting their food as they get older.

Yeah, and to help get them off of the acid blockers, which we know are creating a lot of problems because we need that acid in our stomach to digest our food. So reinoculate giving all the good prebiotics and probiotics, the good bacteria and all the things that feed the good bacteria. And then the fourth R is repair.

Know what probiotics to take?

Oh, that's a great question.

I wanna know, what are you prescribing?

Oh, my goodness, that's such a, that goes on and on.

We could talk about that for the next hour.

Yes, it's true.

Right? There's more and more probiotics on the market every day and they all have different roles and different functions. Yeah. We're just sort of, honestly, I think, you know, we've been doing this forever, but it feels to me like we're.

At the infancy of this understanding of how to use these in medicine. Yeah. So, I mean, there's some great brands that I trust and I use all the time, but when somebody is doesn't maybe know what to do, I'll say, you know, go to a reputable place, a reputable pharmacy or a good wellness store pharmacy, and get a probiotic. Try it if it makes you feel worse, then stop it. Because there's some good bacteria that make people feel worse.

They have bacterial overgrowth.

If you have bad bugs growing in.

There and you put the, good bugs in there, they have a fight and.

They cause all sorts of problems. And so that means we just have to do more work before we can start it. So they got to reinoculate and then repair. And that's the fourth R. So that's things like giving good protein, good amino acids, which are the building blocks of protein. Sometimes repair. Yeah, to help repair that barrier, that coffee filter, right? We have to repair it with good protein. And sometimes we'll use amino acids like glutamine that help repair it. We'll give more zinc, whether it's from food sources or as a supplement. Maybe we'll give some vitamin A, which also helps with healing that barrier. It helps with healing the endothelium in the gut. So those are things we will do to repair. And then rebalance, right? That's the fifth R, which is really focused on Managing our stress and how we're reacting to the world, because we know that when our parasympathetic nervous system is engaged, when that calming nervous system is engaged through meditation and yoga and breath work, that our body has the ability to heal and it heals better when our body is at rest. If you'd like to learn more about improving your sleep or fixing your gut.

I'd encourage you to check out Dr. Hyman's full-length interviews with Shawn Stevenson and Dr. Elizabeth Boham. If you enjoyed this episode or if someone you know could benefit from it, please share or leave us a comment below. Until next time, be well.

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