How Trauma Affects The Gut

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

When you're traumatized, it's not just the brain. I mean, most of the research and most of the discussion focuses on damage to the brain, which is real, but it also damages our gut.

Hi, I'm Kasia Perowietz, one of the producers of the Doctor's Pharmacy podcast. In this mini episode, Dr. Hyman sits down with world-renowned expert in using mind-body medicine to heal depression, anxiety, and psychological trauma, Jim Gordon. While conventional medicine relies on talk therapy and medication to heal from traumatic experiences, Dr. Gordon shares why he also incorporates nutrition as a part of his trauma healing protocol. Let's listen in.

Well, trauma is a Greek word, first of all, and it means injury, injury to the body, mind, or spirit. And trauma is going to come to all of us. If it doesn't come early in life, it's going to come in midlife with illnesses or divorce or Difficulties losing a job or issues with wondering who we are. And if it doesn't come then, it's going to come if we're lucky enough to get older as we grow older and become frail and deal with losses of people and deal with our own death. That's traumatic.

So literally, it's not only a psychological problem, it's a physiologic, biological problem.

Absolutely.

It was really fascinating to me that, You talked about the trauma healing diet. And I don't think most people would think that food and trauma have anything to do with each other, but you say they do. Can you explain it?

When you're traumatized, it's not just the brain. I mean, most of the research and most of the discussion focuses on damage to the brain, which is real, but it also damages our gut. So, for example, from the top to the bottom. So we become more anxious and we eat foods to deal with with our anxiety. That's what happens when we're traumatized. Just as all, many of the people who come to see you are in that place. Second of all, we're eating fast. So we don't have time, the stomach doesn't have time to do its job. Third of all, the stress and comes with trauma causes problems in the small intestine. So we start the villi.

Leaky gut.

Yeah, and leaky gut, exactly. So the endothelial cells, the cells that line the small intestine, start opening up. and all kinds of proteins that don't belong in our bloodstream start leaking through.

You get feelings sensitivities.

Yes, so you get sensitive to things you were never sensitive to before.

That creates inflammation, which further inflames your.

Brain and inflames your emotions. Exactly, which in turn affects the gut, which disables the gut more, and it's a vicious cycle.

So that's the damage that trauma does. And there's really great data now how your microbiome plays a role in anxiety.

And depression and many mental and disorders. Exactly. And trauma disrupts the microbiome and promotes the growth of the pathogenic, the bad bacteria, and depresses the growth of the good bacteria. And we were talking about the vagus nerve earlier. The vagus nerve is responsive to the microbiome. So if the microbiome, the bacteria in the gut, is disturbed, then it's going to affect the vagus nerve, which is not going to be sending the same positive, creative, brain stimulating signals back to the hippocampus and the frontal cortex that it should be sending. So the gut is having a major effect on the brain.

What can you eat to help your trauma?

Well, most of what you can eat are exactly the things that you and other people who are doing functional medicine are teaching. Oh, that's good.

I mean, it's really- It's not ding dongs and cupcakes and- well, that's what.

We go, That's important because that's what we go to when we're traumatized. Comfort food. We go to the ding dongs, the cupcakes, the mac and cheese, the pint of ice cream.

And- Chunky monkey, that's my go to.

And there's a reason for it. Because it lowers the level of our stress hormones immediately. It increases the levels of dopamine and serotonin, increases endorphin. So we feel- Momentary pleasure. We feel, I'm sorry.

Momentary pleasure.

Exactly. And if we feel better for a while, the problem is that after a while, all those effects get reversed. So you have to have compassion for yourself if you're reaching for the chunky monkey after something terrible has happened. But then at a certain point, it becomes necessary, if you're going to heal from the trauma, to begin to reverse some of those dietary choices. and essentially the rules are very simple. The first rule, I would say, or the kind of secret sauce in this new diet is mindful eating, eating slowly, paying attention to how things taste, paying attention to the food choices you really want to make once you've cleaned up your diet a little bit. That's working on what, you know, what the Researchers call the cephalic phase of digestion, the brain, the mind. So we need to approach food a bit differently, slow down instead of just putting it in.

Eating unconsciously.

Exactly, eating unconsciously, which is what we do, and especially when we're traumatized, we reach for that comfort food. So eating whole foods, eating organic food, eating much more fiber. We want to nourish the microbiome that I suggest in addition to fermented foods, all the things that you would suggest to patients who are dealing with chronic conditions, I would say are even more important when people have been seriously traumatized because as we were saying earlier, the gut is leaking.

You heal the gut, you heal the brain.

Exactly. So, for example, I really recommend the importance of fermented foods. I also suggest that people take probiotics for several months after while they're dealing with trauma, shifting the kind of protein. that they eat, obviously eating much more fish and much less red meat, which is pro-inflammatory.

Yeah.

Also suggests supplementary Omega-3, supplementary fish oil, because that's important for brain healing and gut healing as well. Fiber is perhaps even more important than it is with more chronic conditions because it's feeding the microbiome, which in turn is stimulating the vagus nerve in appropriate ways to so that the brain functions properly.

We used to call it fiber, now we call it prebiotics.

Those too.

Yes.

Yeah.

Which could be called food too.

Yes, absolutely.

Food, vegetables. So it's the kind of diet. And then paying attention to other things that you may want to add to that diet, for example, turmeric. which I know is something that you use as part of your work with chronic illness. It's perhaps even more important after trauma because inflammation is an extremely important part of what trauma does. It promotes inflammation, promotes inflammation everywhere in the body.

In the brain too.

In the brain too, which causes symptoms are depression, anxiety, difficulty focusing, irritability, all of those things are compounded by the damage that's been done to the gut. So if we begin to come back into balance through eating this appropriate healthy diet, we're gonna be in better shape. The other thing is that it would also be important to use a high dose multivitamin multimineral. In recent years, there've been some studies done initially in New Zealand after the earthquake there, randomized controlled trial population trial using a multivitamin, multimineral versus a placebo for people who'd been through the earthquake. And those people who took the multivitamin, multimineral, and these people didn't even change their diet particularly, but just taking the multivitamin, multimineral helped to reduce the symptoms of post-traumatic stress. They were less anxious, their mood was better, they were able to focus better. So that's an important.

Yeah, it's fascinating. I remember reading in a paper years ago about Kosovo, where you worked. And they found that people who were in the war zone had much higher excretion of magnesium. And magnesium is what we call the relaxation mineral. It helps you calm down to sleep, to relax your muscles, your nervous systems, helps with anxiety. And all the stress we have causes all this chronic magnesium loss. It increases vitamin loss. And so we can actually help to fix that by replacing some of these nutrients.

Exactly. And it's vitamin loss at time when we need them more because when we're under stress, we need higher levels of many nutrients. So that's why it's important to supplement even the healthy diet with those, with, supplement with supplements.

Since trauma is kept in both the mind and the body, it makes sense that what and how we eat can be instrumental to long lasting healing. Additionally, practices such as deep breathing, meditation, dancing, and art therapy have all been shown to be effective tools to support the brain and the body. It can feel like trauma is something that will always be with us, but accessible methods for healing are proving otherwise and giving thousands of people a new lease on life. I hope you enjoyed this mini episode of the Doctors Pharmacy podcast. Until next time. Hi everyone. I hope you enjoyed this week's episode. Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner. If you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their find a practitioner database. It's important that you have someone in your corner who's trained, who's a licensed healthcare practitioner, and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.

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