Ask AI Mark argues that IBS doesn't just cause anxiety—it may trigger brain inflammation that produces anxiety symptoms. The gut and brain influence each other in both directions, challenging the idea that anxiety is purely psychological.
If you're anxious and you have GI symptoms, most certainly if it's a diarrhea constipation picture where you're rotating between the two, sometimes having irregular bowel movements, it's gonna be called IBS and you're just gonna, you know, you're gonna be treated, you know, very just symptoms only for both of those conditions when they're really connected and by altering the gut microbiome, by changing your diet and adding in foods that will enhance a normal balanced functioning non-inflamed gut, we can actually improve your anxiety as well.
Okay, what you just said was pretty radical here, right? That we used to think when we went to medical school, we were taught that people with irritable bowel syndrome, it was caused because they were emotionally unstable.
Yeah.
But they were anxious and they had emotional issues and that's what was causing the irritable bowel. What you're saying is the opposite. What you're saying is that we've learned now, and this is well-documented science, We've learned now that if you have irritable bowel syndrome, meaning you have bad bugs in your gut, you have inflammation in your gut, you have leaky gut, you have food sensitivities, that this causes inflammation in the brain. So that basically an irritable bowel causes an irritable brain. And that is actually the direction of the problem. And yes, of course, if you're stressed, you can have gut issues too, because it's a bidirectional system. But it's important to understand that we mislabel a lot of these things that have to be kind of de-stigmatized from being emotional problems to being physiological problems.
