The Gut & Brain Connection and Ending Inflammation w/Dr. Emeran Mayer EP 1138

This is episode number 1138 with Dr. Emmeran Meyer. Welcome to the school of greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, former Pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now, let the class begin. I've got a big announcement. The School of Greatness is available on American Public Television. That's right. When I started my podcast, I had zero listeners and I kept going because I wanted to help people get the information that I didn't have access to growing up. Now, not only have we become one of the top podcasts in the world, but I'm excited to tell you that the School of Greatness show is on TV and you can go to lewishowes.com/watch to see when it's available on your TV. Every person tuning in really helps us right so if you're able to also share this with anyone you think would find it valuable that doesn't consume podcasts regularly, that would be greatly appreciated. Again, that's lewishouse.com/watch. Check it out now. My guest today is Dr. Amar and Meyer, and I'm so excited about this one. He's one of the world's foremost experts on the gut-brain connection, and for over the past 40 years, his research and published work has offered groundbreaking evidence of the critical connection between the brain and the gut. He is the executive director of the GI Oppenheimer Center for Neurobiology of Stress and Resilience and the co-director of the Digestive Disease Research Center at the University of California at Los Angeles. He's written a new book called the Gut Immune Connection: How Understanding the Connection Between Food and Immunity Can Help Us Regain Our Health. And our conversation was so powerful that I wanted to break it up into two different parts. So look out for part two coming later this week. In this episode, we discuss the biggest triggers for inflammation, the foods we should eat and avoid to improve our gut health, why we've become so addicted to sugar and how it affects our body, whether our brain or gut health affects our body more, how our digestive system functions, and so much more. And if you're enjoying this and you know someone that could be inspired by this, please share this with a friend. And if this is your first time here, click the subscribe button on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or anywhere else that you're listening to this right now, as I'm so pumped about this one and I can't wait for you to listen to it.

Welcome back, everyone, to the School of Greatness Podcast. Very excited about our guest. Dr. Emeran Mayer, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for being here.

Thanks.

Very, very happy to be here, Lou. Of course, I'm very excited about this because I've been fascinated by the mind, the brain, and now more and more as I'm researching this about the brain and the gut connection. And my friend, our friend, Shawn Stevenson said, you got to bring this guy on who's been doing this for 40 years studying and researching and applying the intersection between the brain and the gut. and how it all connects to ending stress, inflammation, optimizing the body, feeling better and all these things. So you've been doing this for a long time. Now you're coming out into the world and revealing and sharing these lessons and these findings from the science that you're doing and the research you're doing. And I'm curious, in your studies, what are the biggest triggers for inflammation in the body? Is it environment? Is it what we consume? Is it toxins on our body that we're putting on ourselves? Is it stress hormones? What are these biggest triggers for inflammation?

Well, I mean, you listed them all. So, I mean, so the way the body works, it integrates influences from multiple sources, particularly the central nervous system, the brain. And it's sort of like this supercomputer applying artificial intelligence to these influences. And then it extracts patterns and decides on relevance and salience. And based on that salience, it makes responses in terms of this needs to be, we need to adjust this system, we need to adjust this system. And it's doing obviously a phenomenal job because a lot of the influences that we're exposed to, the brain and evolution is never encountered. The chemicals, the kind of food that we eat, we never, humans never were exposed to that kind of food. The visual experience is, you know, so, so, yeah, the brain and the brain-gut system, because I really always like to link, keep those together, and we can talk about this later. Why is, is a master in this, you know, in this. computation of salience and responding to it. And that system has worked so well that it's kept us alive as a species. And, you know, we're thriving. I'm not sure what's happening now. The salience, there's some sort of a mismatch now between the salience assessment and what's good for us on the planet. But, you know, there will be corrections in that as well, I'm sure.

Right.

Now, do you think the, is the brain influencing the body more or is the gut influencing the brain more?

So you could, you know, I've compared this to, to a central government and local governments in the states and counties.

And.

There'S, there's a lot of influence that goes, that comes from the body and, that plays a big role in our emotions, in our emotional states. And as I'll talk about, you know, there's a lot of stuff now going on with this low-grade immune system activation that we all, most people are now exposed to because of our diet. And that's a stream of information that constantly goes to the brain. You don't feel it. You don't It doesn't hurt, doesn't generate any symptoms, but over time it does change your brain structurally and functionally. So a big influence subliminally that goes to the brain all the time. And also big things. So people have said, yes, we can generate artificial intelligence, but it won't have emotions because it doesn't have the body to send this constant signals to it. But then on the other hand, I mean, the brain is obviously the most sophisticated computer in the universe up to now. And it sends signals to the body all the time. There's a part of the nervous system called the autonomic nervous system that reaches pretty much every cell in your body. You have a sensory part, the vagus nerve, that reports anything that goes on anywhere constantly to the brain. And then the brain as a system to respond to that. And again, it can influence every cell in distinct patterns. It doesn't always kick in because they would be overwhelmed. It kicks in when it's necessary. There's a threat, throwing this, you know, I'm curious about.

I don't know if you studied this, but I'm curious about when human beings look themselves in the mirror and they see themselves and they shape an identity, they perceive an identity, and maybe they look. chiseled. They're like this Greek God that's just chiseled. They're athletic, but they don't believe they're healthy or fit for whatever reason. Their identity has made them look like they're not, they don't love themselves or they don't believe that they look good or whatever it is. Does there anything to play around identity that we shape for ourselves, the image of ourself and making us either healthier or more susceptible to diseases or a weakened immune system? Am I out there too much by asking this, but I'm curious.

Yeah, no, no. So, I mean, this is definitely something that happens a lot, I mean, to a lot of people, that their identity is obviously shaped early on in life. You know, typically, there could also be genetic factors, but most of it will happen early in life, the feedback you get from your parents and from your friends, if that's generally positive or or negative. If it's negative, you know, it can have two effects. One is it can really damage your self-identity and your self-worth or you could rebel against it and say, I'm not going to accept this. You know, I'm creating my own, my own identity. I, I think it will have almost certainly it, it does have. I mean, anything that happens in, in the brain in terms of these emotional, like, or identity. In my own research, I've always been more concerned about the emotional influences on the body. So any emotion that you experience either chronically or so more of these emotions that are present all the time, background emotions, that has a mirror image in your body.

Really? So give me an example. If you're thinking, if you're feeling an emotion of not enough or lack or sick or stress. If you're feeling and thinking that consistently, then the body will mirror that.

The body will mirror it. And so I focus primarily on the gut, you know, because it's kind of a unique organ because it has all these other things in it, not just the gut wall, but the immune system and the nervous system of the gut. and hormonal system. But that will, so this is not separate, you know, this is like just as some people, you look at them and you look at their face and you can tell what's going on, you know, if you're good in that, the, you know, the furs between your eyebrows and, you know, it's, it's, unless you're a poker player, you, you exhibit these emotions in, in your face. But the same thing happens in every part of your body, you know, your, your heart and your I'm not sure about organs like, you know, like the kidneys and the liver. They're not sort of more mechanical devices or chemical devices, not as much these computational. So the heart is also the heart is basically a pump and, you know, but the gut is something that has, is in a different realm. You know, it's very sensitive to emotions. And I would say, the gut is.

Is that why you feel butterflies? You feel sick when you see something, you feel it in your gut?

Yeah, and also this self-identity. I'm, you know, quite honestly, before you ask the question, I never even thought about this, but I'm absolutely fascinated by this. I'm absolutely convinced that your gut has a mirror image of your sense of identity.

Really?

Yeah.

I think if you have an inferiority complex, that will affect the gut. And now, you know, since we talked a lot about the gut microbiome, that that lives inside the gut, which communicates very closely with the gut. Even that system gets these messages from the brain. And this is different. So if you are threatened by a wild animal, you will have a peak in your stress response and within a couple of seconds or minutes it will go down and be normal again. With these with these background emotions or something like a sense of identity that's with you all the time.

Always. Always thinking and feeling like, I'm not enough or imposter syndrome or something.

And it's ingrained in your unconscious. It comes out in your dreams.

So what does that do to the body or the immune system if you're constantly thinking these things or have a belief system that I'm not enough or comparing to someone else or something else or in lack or in scarcity. What does that do to the immune system, the gut, the body?

Yeah, so we're talking about the immune system. If you have this, you know, I talked about this acute threat or this acute emotion of an acute stress, it will temporarily increase the activity of your immune system because like spike up cortisol or something. of your stress system. But if it's chronic, it has a totally different effect on it, so often the opposite effect. And it will, I mean, there's many studies coming out on this now, that even early adverse life events that play a big role in shaping this identity, have been found to have an effect on the gene expression pattern in your immune cells, in some of your immune cells, which in an adult person. So, you can, there's a memory in these immune cells that reflects what happened to you at age of, you know.

5, 7, 9, whatever.

And that obviously shapes when these immune cells are called into action, that shapes the immune response.

There's a trigger that you'll feel when you see something that reflects what you went through, right?

So there's a memory, there's an immune memory. I mean, there's clearly also this brain memory in our unconscious. It's funny the way the body's organized that some of the systems, particularly the nervous system and immune system, can form these memories that then later really influence many functions in your body and also your behavior.

So, how do we heal these things? If we have this memory of something from the past in our immune system or in our DNA and our cells, how do we heal or move beyond it so it doesn't hold us back?

Well, there's different ways. There's some people that do this on their own. They pull themselves out of it. There's other people that go into psychoanalysis. So, I mentioned in my first book, I went through Jungian dream analysis for several years at some point in my life, during some an existential crisis and found that extremely helpful connecting to, I mean just watching your dreams for a while and realize some are recurring. I mean those are the ones that obviously have a big influence on because they're there all the time. So if you imagine every night, these experiences are recalled and even during your sleep effect, you know, systems within your body. So that's another way. There's ways today, you know, cognitive behavioral therapy doesn't deal with the roots of it. They just change your behavior. It's another way of dealing with it. So forget about reversing or patching up what happened early on. And then there's the most modern way. It's the psychedelics, you know, I'm not an expert on this, but I've gotten really interested in that for a variety of reasons, because when I first came to UCLA for, for training, I was fascinated by this whole counterculture. You know, there were Workshop in, in eseln and by the organized by the Ojai Foundation. And I listened to many of these leading figures at the time, you know, giving these workshops. And so this was in the in the early 70s, you know, and they, well, early, early 80s, I say, when I experienced it. And they talked about, you know, psychoanalysis with LSD or with ketamine. And, and then it was completely, you know, closed off for science from, for decades, and now it's coming back rapidly, you know, and there's some fascinating stuff coming out. I've you know, and also in my travels during college in South America, I've stayed with some of these tribes on the Orinoco River, and they use, you know, the same subs, a similar substance to what's in ayahuasca. And we've seen, you know, how they get into these trans states. And so now, you know, fast forward 35, 40 years. I find it fascinating that this is now back in the mainstream, you know, and it will. So this is just a way of removing the control. If you say it in a simplistic way, removing the control that we have, but prefrontal cortex to suppress these things, you loosen that control and then this stuff will bubble up. Maybe very painful. I think you shouldn't do it without the guidance of an experienced, you know, shaman or psychotherapist. but that's another way of processing. And now the majority of people go through life without ever dealing with this. They get sick, they get their heart attack, diabetes, they never think about this.

Wow. I'm curious about the gut. When you say the gut, what is included in that? What are all the elements of gut?

Yeah, so let's start with, you know, when I went to medical school, the gut was basically the digestive organ.

The digestive organ.

So something that we know very well from the esophagus, the stomach, the small intestine, large intestine, each of those regions has a special task. And the ultimate goal, we thought, is the breaking down of food into absorbable and components that are then provide the nutrients for our body. That was the thought. But then, when I came to UCLA initially as a research fellow, worked in the lab late John Walsh, and so they found at the time that there were molecules in the gut that somewhat didn't fit that description, you know, there were, there were neuro neurotransmitters.

And.

So make a long story short.

Transmitters from the brain to the gut.

Same, same molecules.

Yeah.

And the receptors. And, and then people thought about, why is that? And it was the discovery of a nervous system in, in the gut, you know, 150 million neurons that are there and very similar in their 150 million.

Neurons in the gut.

In a gut, sandwiched. So if you look at a gut, you wouldn't see it. Gut has several layers and in between these layers there's a net of nerve cells that wraps around it. But because the gut is so long, it adds up with the numbers.

And.

The main function of that system is really to completely regulate the gut. In an animal model, you can take out the gut, put it in a test tube, and this gut will still have the same functions, peristalsis and secretion as it has when it's connected to the rest of the body.

You can put it in a tube and it'll still like process food, it'll still run it through the same way. So what does that tell us?

So it tells us that gut or this little gut in the brain is really the primary regulator of our gut functions, the digestive functions.

But.

Then there was another sort of realization that these same transmitters were also present within the brain, as in the gut. That caused a lot of surprise, you know, that why would he have that? Then again, a long story, the evolution. In evolution, we started out the most primitive organisms with that gut brain. And then gradually as animals, this was marine creatures, tiny marine creatures in the oceans, as we, as in evolution, polar animals developed with a head, then some of these nerves migrated to the head and formed, you know, the beginning of the central nervous system. And then there was some division of labor at some point that before the gut brain did everything because there was no head and no other functions, no other organs. So later, our big brains then took over the regulation, the response to the environment, the coordination of organs within the body, and the digestive side was left to the brain in the gut, the nervous system. But that means there's a very intimate relationship between these two, you know, more than with any other organ in the body. Clearly, the heart gets a lot of signals from the brain when we're stressed or the blood vessels, the blood pressure goes up. But it's nothing compared to what goes on in this multi-lane highway between the brain and the gut.

Really? So. And.

Yeah, I would say so a lot of people then think, you know, Are our emotions processed by the gut's nervous system? That's very not the case. I think there's still the more sophisticated things happen at the brain level. But it's this constant signal in a bi-directional way that... Like when we see.

Something, we feel triggered or we see a threat or... see something we like or we don't like, and then we feel it in our gut. Is it first processed through the eyes into the brain and then connects down to the gut, or as we see something and it goes from the gut up to the brain?

No, I would say this happens first in the brain and within milliseconds, as a signal down.

Instant, right.

And as you said, it can be good or bad, this arousal mechanism.

Yeah, it can be pleasure or pain or stress, right?

Yeah, it can be, you go on your first date and you have people talk about butterflies in their stomach, and it can be when you have to give a speech the first time. When you're nervous or an actor, you know, so it's the same mechanism. It's value neutral, you know, that arousal. But then there's also emotion specific signals, you know, that happen. So anger, anxiety, we don't know about something like jealousy, you know, that hasn't really been studied, but anger and fear. That has been studied. We know exactly the patterns that happen in every level of the gut when you have these emotions. And one of the reasons that these emotions then hang around for a long time, it's not like you can turn them off. Anger, you know, so some people train themselves, you know, to be. To have more Equanimity and not get carried away by the anger, but. A lot of people, that anger sticks with them or the fear. And then that's because it reverberates in these gut circuits, between the gut and the brain, and it sets up this vicious cycle. And the brain cannot easily shut it off unless you train it, train yourself to do it.

How do you train yourself to let go of anger?

Well, it's a lot of the meditative techniques of mindfulness that you.

It is the practice. It does not happen overnight. It is like a practice of doing.

It over and over. It is the practice you experience that emotion and you train yourself to let it go, to see it float away.

And not hold on to it. You studied Buddhism for a while as well, right?

This is something I have always been fascinated by. Looking back, I do not even know why I was interested. It is probably my own personal issues. But that stuck with me, that interest. And I find now more than ever the wisdom that is in these Buddhist concepts, both in terms of emotional regulation. I mean, who would have thought that mindfulness-based stress reduction would become a commonly used, like a household name, or an app? When I was first interested, it was an esoteric thing. People say, yeah, it's crazy, you know, Buddhism.

And the last decade has become the mainstream, you know, mindfulness, meditation.

And that all has to do with these Concepts that we just talked about, you know, to train yourself not to be stuck with these emotions, because these emotions that if they hang around, as we now said several times, it's not just within your brain. They circulate through your body.

The whole body.

The whole body. And it's, it has It's a very unhealthy situation to be in that state.

Now, how I've been studying a lot of breath work over the last four or five years, I was studying, you know, to become a meditation instructor in India that I've been learning from Wim Hof. I'm not sure if you're familiar with Wim Hof and his practices. There's the yoga practices in general of breath work. How much connection is there between the way we breathe the style of breathing, the shortness or the length and the calmness, the intensity of breathing in affecting the immune system and the gut-brain connection. Is there science around breath?

Yeah, there's a science. And I have to admit, I'm not an expert on the various techniques that people have been using. So we have been using in our work the simplest form, the abdominal breathing, with diaphragmatic breathing, where you basically just switch from your typical adult pattern. So if you have 10 people and you tell them, take a deep breath, they all take it into their chest.

Yes.

You know, this is it. And to switch that pattern to inhaling into your body, into your stomach, does wonders. And the reason it is because The diaphragm is closely connected and the lung closely connected to the vagus nerve with the brain, with these emotional centers within the brain.

So.

If you're stressed and you consciously now tell your diaphragm to go into a pattern that is associated with relaxation, it sends, so the body sends signals to the brain now. that are incompatible with the stress perception. And if you are good in doing this, train yourself, then you will be able to overcome it quickly.

Really?

So I've been doing this again, you know, you asked me why I started these things. I mean, I had some issues when I was younger where I thought this was, somebody taught me, a psychologist taught me this. and I've been practicing this for 60 years, you know, do it in the car if you have to give a talk in the car to the... and I've gotten so good in it that within seconds I can switch it, you.

Know, so... What is the practice?

Yeah, well the initial practice is you just, you know, spend 15 minutes, three times a day, lying down and breathing and counting your breaths and then Combining it with the mindfulness practice, that anytime you exhale, you let the negative emotions of anxiety go. And the only focus is on your breath and nothing else. You clear your mind of any distracting thoughts. And then if you do this long enough, it takes you a second to do this and you feel the warmth in your stomach. It's an interesting thing. So it comes back to the gut. So what happens when you do this and why does you get this, and why do you get this feeling of warmth and relaxation in your abdomen?

And then it sends signals to the.

Brain and it forces the brain to shift. The only humans that do this spontaneously are or young kids, infants, if you.

Watch.

You know, a child, they breathe into their belly spontaneously.

Automatically.

Automatically, and with becoming a teenager and being adult, it switches to the chest.

Why is that? Why do we shift from our natural state to an unnatural state?

I'm not sure. Yeah, I'm not sure. We don't teach our children that, you know, it's something that happens. maybe because as an adult we go into a more stressful interaction, confrontational attraction with the world. I also can answer this question if you ask me, do women breathe more through their belly than men do? My guess would be yes.

But.

Because women are generally more in touch with their with their emotional side. And, but it's, it's, it's something we have this biofeedback device with us. You don't need to hook yourself up to the electrodes or to EEG, you know, you can just sense it. And, yeah, I would say this should be, something should be trained in, in, kindergarten. In kindergarten.

Yeah.

Like many other things, like a healthy diet, you know?

So absolutely. Speaking of healthy diet, when we have sugar or processed food or something that is not whole healthy foods. What is that doing to the brain, to the gut brain and the brain connection? The moment we intake something that is processed sugary, alcohol, something that we know is not the healthiest consumption. What does that do to the gut? How does it affect the immune system and the brain?

Yeah, so there's a short term, a quick effect, and there's something that that takes longer. So the short-term effect, we have a lot of receptors in our mouths, you know, like sweet taste receptors and bitter taste receptors that also receptors that sense texture. So that's the immediate reaction. The brain gets this immediately and it forms memories of this and it forms the gain of these receptors is determined again early on in life, you know, you sweet preference is programmed early on in life. And we do this extensively with our kids that any positive event like birthdays or celebrations, lots of sugar, you know.

Oh, right. And so they want it more and more.

Yeah.

And, and then, for example, in, in Mexico with the former Mexican president Fox, who was also the CEO of Coke.

Oh, man.

So he, they promoted, you know, sweet drinks. Coke to mothers with young children to calm down their children. So they, one of the reasons for their big obesity problem is that their taste preferences have been programmed to, now this program is not permanent. You can change this as an adult. If you go to a sugar-free diet, you will initially it's hard because you have to overcome that set point. But you'll notice that after a short period of time, a few months, your sensitivity to sugar changes. And you actually develop an adversity to sugary foods, which is a very interesting experience. Same thing can be said about spices, bitter taste. As kids, we hate bitter taste. As adults, we lost some drinks that are really bitter. And these receptors quite interesting, they're not just in our mouth, but they're also in our gut. Obviously in our gut, they don't transmit conscious information.

So.

If I infuse something sweet into your intestine, you wouldn't know if it's sweet or not.

Really? It's more through the tongue.

It's the tongue and the rest of your oral cavity.

Huh, so if I just put it into my gut, I wouldn't know it was sweet.

Then you wouldn't notice it, but it.

Still has generated signals back to the brain. I'd feel probably more sick than anything. I'd probably feel like, ugh, because when you intake it, it tastes good and then 10 minutes later you're like, oh my stomach hurts. Yeah, right? Why is that? Why is something that tastes good going.

In but hurts you? Well, because different mechanisms kick in. you know, your mouth, or the first impression, is all about the hedonic aspect of food. You know, it's the thing that nature has designed us to, you know, go after sweet berries, or to, so there wasn't that much sugar around, you know, like a million years ago. So whenever human ancestors found something sweet, They wanted to make sure they-- It was rare, too. It was rare.

It was scarce. Now it's abundant. It's in everything.

It's in everything.

And.

So what has happened now, it's no longer an adaptive mechanism to find these important things, but it's a maladaptive mechanism that causes all kinds of downstream problems. It's another thing about fat, you know, the same thing. Fantes is hedonic quality, you know, like butter, you know, people love butter. You love, you know, people love chocolates with a lot of, you know, fat in it and not the, the, the, just the, the bitter kind.

Yeah.

So that's another one. And it's another one of these adaptive mechanisms where you want to have, when things were rare, you want, you were craving for this, you know, high caloric highly caloric, opposite sugar and fat. But when it gets downstream, other things happen. So it changes, so both the sugar and the fat changes the receptors that sense it in a way that, for example, fat that goes down into your intestine, they desensitize the vagus nerve. So normally the vagus nerve generates a feeling of satiety and fullness. So you don't want to stop eating. If you're on a high fat diet, these receptors get desensitized and you no longer get that feeling. So now you can keep on eating because the feedback mechanism that shuts off this is no longer. And the same with the sweet taste receptors, you know, it does not. So our diet with having, you know, packed it with these these high caloric, high density foods has hijacked the system and it's moved into an opposite direction. Also the microbes, you know, so by eating these kinds of foods that are so overabundant in our diet now, you select a different population of microbes. And it's particularly true about So we crave the sugar, but not the complex carbohydrates, which are the good form of energy that we should be eating. So sugar isn't easily digestible, you know, immediately digestible and absorbable carbohydrate. The complex carbohydrates, which are mainly plants, they cannot be absorbed quickly. They need the microbes. So if you're on a diet that's high in these absorbable sugar molecules and deficient in the non-absorbable carbohydrates, you select a population of microbes that does not produce the beneficial things in your gut.

So.

You will ultimately, steps of events create a, you know, it's been called a leaky gut. So I got that. leads to the activation of the immune system in the gut that is not adaptive. So a lot of things that are happening today have become maladaptive. Evolution has designed us as this optimal machine that was perfect for hundreds of thousands of years. But we have changed the environment so dramatically that evolution never anticipated that. So now we have this big mismatch of the diet, that feels good initially, but has a lot of downstream negative effects. More depressed, but also most importantly, engages the immune system in a way that then affects the brain. So some people with subset of patients with depression have an immune component, brain inflammation. but then also with these neurodegenerative diseases, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

So.

Yeah, diet plays a big role at multiple levels, you know, and.

What.

We have to realize that what we were designed for, these optimal survival machines, we have to fundamentally change that concept, you know, we can no longer.

Follow.

That and trust nature that will take care of this. We have to really consciously change it because we're not otherwise we just continue to run into the health issues that we're facing now.

What would you say are the five foods we should be eating that will optimize our brain-gut connection? If we could choose these five foods consistently, what would you recommend?

Well, they would all fall into, oh, the majority would fall into the category of, of plant-based foods. So it could be leafy vegetables, Roots, seeds, nuts, and, and, and a big variety of, of these Foods. Not so not. So if you just eat Tomatoes or if you just eat kale, nothing else, it won't. It won't give you that benefit.

Really?

And the reason for that is.

I.

Mean, this is what I push in my book. We should really refocus our diet on feeding the optimal food to our microbes.

To the microbes, the microbiome of the microbes. Yeah, yeah.

Everything else will happen by default because we are designed. Our ancestors lived on a diet very low caloric density. They were harvesting and gathering.

You know.

Herbs and nuts and seeds and tubers and things that were around them, all very low caloric density, very low sugar in it, lots of fiber. Initially, humans weren't even able to process them. Then with cooking, we were able to break down some of the fibers, but If you think about it, the design of our bodies and our digestive system was really made with dealing with these types of foods that people encountered hundreds of thousands of years ago.

In nature.

In nature. So, we had a very large intestine, our fermenting system with all the microbes. very little was absorbed in the small intestine. And a lot of it happened, the salvage of calories happened by the microbes with the help of the microbes in the large intestine. We've completely reversed this. Now we have a diet that is 99% absorbed in the small intestine.

What does that mean?

That means we've taken out modern agriculture.

And modern- you- mean because of like no fiber or something and then it's processed in the small intestine. The fiber is more in the large intestine.

Yeah, it's taking out most of the fiber molecules. So we don't eat wild rice, but we eat the white rice. And we don't eat the types of potatoes, like the sweet potato, but we eat the potato.

There's this only- White potato.

Yeah, the white potato or the French fried potato. It's the dominant form.

The sweet potato is the better one.

And they've all been selected really based on on these taste preferences, which have taken us on the wrong way. There's also a lot of molecules in plants in addition to the fiber that are non-absorbable, these polyphenols or antioxidants. They're not absorbable, they need the microbes to break them down, and then.

So.

If you are on a diet that's deficient or very low in plant-based foods, you have a diet deficient in polyphenols and fiber. And so you, you know, prevent your microbes to get to normal, you know, service or normal servings of foods and The microbes respond to that in a pattern that ultimately leads to shrinkage of the compromise of the gut barrier activation.

Of the immune system.

And so my lesson is always, you know, let's go back to a diet primarily that's optimized for the microbes.

The microbes, which is in the large intestine.

It was large intestine. And that will be the remedy for prevention of colon cancer, cardiovascular disease, probably most likely also prevention of Alzheimer's, Parkinson's.

Diabetes.

Yeah, all of those.

So, what are those foods to help prevent all those things are a big variety of leafy veggies, roots, seeds, nuts. What other foods were you mentioning?

So, it's also a few seafoods. there's mussels, there's the small fish like anchovies, like all the small fish that are basically the bait for the big fish. The small fish are still, there's several reasons for that. They're still abundant in the ocean, there's no decrease or no threat of extinction. They also are the lowest on the food chain, so they don't have this accumulation of of heavy metals and toxins.

Interesting. They're going direct to the source, not being eaten by something else that's being eaten by something else.

And they're very popular in the Mediterranean cuisine. If you go to Spain or Italy, you'll see them in the market. Go to restaurants. Here it's hard to find them other than in canned form.

Yeah, which is probably not the best form, is it? Or is it okay?

I can't answer that question, but it's the only one that's available. and there are companies that, you know, source these to sustainable fisheries in Spain that I would probably trust more than the marketing campaign that you see here. Mussels also, you know, very low on the food chain. Now these, and then, you know, wild salmon. So wild salmon is a controversial thing on the one side, if everybody switched to wild salmon, there would be none left. There's nothing left. So there are, again, a few sources for the sustainable harvest of salmon. They, you know, they're typically more expensive than the farmed salmon, but the main health ingredients is omega-3 fatty acids. they are in all these. They're in the small fish, they're.

In.

The muscles and they are in wild salmon. They're not in the...

The bigger fish.

They're not in the bigger fish and they're also not in the salmon that are farmed because they get a totally different nutrition. They don't get the food that, I mean, ultimately, you know, these omega-3 fatty acids come from the algae and the small fish feed on the algae and then the salmon feeds on it. So, if you remove that, you know, that source of omega-3 from the plants, then your fish will have a much lower concentration of these health-promoting molecules.

What does omega-3 do for the gut-brain connection?

So omega-3 fatty acids have always been, for a long time, been found to be promoting for brain health in general, you know, both the growth and the function. There's now also studies that these omega-3 fatty acids have an influence on the microbes. and I can't tell you exactly, I mean it's probably complicated because sort of, I mean I hope this is not too complicated for you listeners. So when you ingest fats, they are processed in our small intestine, there's bile acids that make them absorbable. then the kind of bile acids that are produced from the type of, depending on the type of fat that you eat. And there's probably a large variety of these bile acids. So the pattern of these bile acids that are produced then stored in your liver, in your gallbladder, excreted into the small intestine, they are metabolized by your microbes. depending on what microbes you have, they break them down into reabsorbable molecules that can get back into circulation. So, what ends up back in circulation, even though it starts out with facilitating fat absorption, once they get back into your circulation, they have a totally different function. They become signaling molecules to all your organs, including the brain. So, now in Alzheimer's disease, for example, we know that short-chain fatty, not short-chain fatty acid, that secondary bile acids have play a role in the neurodegeneration. So if you eat the fats that contain omega-3 or omega-6 or other saturated fatty acids, that has an effect on this system, which ultimately gets back into your blood and signals to your organs. So it's complicated. But I mean, everything, once you get into the brain-gut microbiome axis, it gets complicated. It's not linear, it's usually circular processes. And there's some unexpected players in this that we, you know, in our typical nutrition, education, don't really...

Interesting.

Pay attention or medicine, you know.

What would you say the main, the key factors to destroying our gut? What would those be? Is it just all unhealthy food? Is it certain types of food? Is it other substances, drugs or alcohol? What are the main things destroying it?

Yeah, so, you know, destroying the gut.

It causes leaky gut and, you know, inflammation.

Yeah, so, yeah, the so the factors that are worst for gut health, I would say, is that probably number one diet, you know, and there it's the standard American diet with the deficiencies and.

The sad diet, right?

That's a kind of a really appropriate acronym.

Yeah.

That's sufficient in all the components that are essential for a healthy microbiome and. ultimately then for a healthy gut barrier. And so then there's other things, there's toxins that come with the food and chemicals. So even if you're a vegetarian, you know, and you don't pay attention to where your food comes from, you may be absorbing a lot of stuff that are herbicides or pesticides and insecticides that are used, for example, for the production food industrial style production of soybeans, for example. So, you know, beans are very healthy. It's a high fiber, high protein kind of food. So beans are pretty, beans and lentils are probably one of the healthiest foods. But if they're produced with Roundup and all these chemicals to destroy the things around them, in increasing amounts, you now start, you know, having the opposite effect. You're killing certain microbes. And many of these insecticides and herbicides, they do have an effect on the microbes. They do not have a direct effect on our gut cells. So that's been worked out in early studies. That's why they were FDA approved. But they do have an effect on the microbes. And that science has not been pursuit in a great way and what effect this ultimately has on, you know, so for example, the Central Valley in California has an epidemic of Parkinson's disease.

Really, Central Valley in California.

Yeah, so the main producer of vegetables, so if you're a vegetarian, you would think, oh, this is the place, you know, where all my food comes from. But it is produced in an industrial agricultural style, you know, with with these, with the Roundup. It's not. So people always worry about the genetically engineered food. I don't think we have evidence that that by itself is actually harmful, even though we may not have the latest, the last answers on that. The problem is that what's been thrown.

Onto these chemicals on top of the plants. So wait, the Central Valley in California is the highest. Density of Alzheimer's?

Is that what you're saying? Of Parkinson's. Of Parkinson's, sorry. It's an epidemic in that area. So a colleague of mine, UCLA studies.

That population and... Because they're getting their.

Food from that location. Well, they're exposed. So first of all, the people are exposed.

You know, these dust croppers fly over this.

Oh, and so it's just exposing the air as well. It's exposing the air. possibly the water as well. But then these foods, you know, have on the surface residues of these increasing amounts of chemicals that are being sprayed on them. And the kind of washing that you do at home, you know, this, like.

A rinse doesn't work. Really? Because is it baked inside the DNA of the, the vegetable or the fruit?

It's what the chemical reaction is and the physical reaction between these. But these herbicides, and it's multiple, it's pesticides and herbicides that are both sprayed on these plants that probably play a big role. So if you're a vegetarian or a vegan, I think you need to be concerned about the source where your food comes from. Interesting.

Wow, and Parkinson's is the, what's that disease? Is that the physical Parkinson's disease?

Yeah, so Parkinson's is a neurodegenerative disease. The advanced classical Parkinson's disease.

It's like the shaking, the tightness, the.

Gait, the posture, you know, the compromised walking. Wow. But that's the end result. You know, this disease in the majority of people starts in the gut, in the nervous system of the gut. So the first degenerations happen at the gut level and then they migrate these degenerative bodies, these Lewy bodies, they migrate up the vagus nerve into the nucleus of the vagus nerve in the brainstem and from there later to higher centers, emotional regulation, and other centers.

Are you able to reverse Parkinson's then through diet or once you- well, this.

Is the big hope. So, the time from When the damage first shows up in your gut to the time it shows up in your brain can be up to 14 years. So there's a long, wide open window where you can do interventions. And, you know, with that's for the time where dietary interventions would have the biggest effect. I don't think that once it has affected you and you develop depression and gate abnormalities that you can reverse this, you know, with diet alone. There's, you know, there's obviously the medications that we have in the future. There may be other ways of doing it, but for now, the biggest hope is that we can diagnose this early. They see it, the first symptoms. And so one of the first symptoms is It's kind of interesting is a new onset constipation because when these nerves in the gut are affected, it doesn't function as properly anymore. 99% of physicians and patients will not make that connection. This is the first sign of constipation.

Consistent constipation.

Yeah, first answer in somebody who never had that problem.

When you've never had it before, gotcha.

You know what's interesting?

I'm gonna share a personal a personal problem with you. When I was 16, I had eight teeth removed. I had my wisdom teeth removed and then four other teeth. I was supposed to get braces. They were doing it to create gaps, spaces so that I could get braces. I never got the braces until 20 years later, I decided to finally get Invisalign. They're not in right now. I take them out during interviews. and my jaw or my mouth or my teeth started to grow in a way where my back teeth never touched after that moment. So for 20 years, my back teeth never clenched down. It was just the front two teeth. And it would be very tiring to chew with just your front two teeth. So I would just swallow things after a few bites. And sometimes I would have, like, you know, it'd be constipation because, like, It was just whole foods in my gut and it was hard to break down. And in the last two years, I've been finally able to chew again fully and it's crazy the ability to just flow, you know, when I go to the bathroom as opposed to feeling that I'm curious if I did some long-term damage to my gut. It wasn't always like that, but I wonder if there is hope that I could reverse some of that, whatever damage I might have done internally.

Well, let me ask you, what kind of diet are you on?

Now I'm pretty healthy. I would say I'm 80% healthy conscious on the weekends. Have a pizza, have sugar, have some ice cream.

But you know, carnivore or carnivore?

I eat meat, yeah, yeah. I eat fish and chicken mostly.

There's an interesting side to that. So our stomach is very capable of breaking down foods mechanically. So if you don't chew things properly, the stomach will handle a lot of this and the compress. And the stomach then has a mechanism almost like a filter. You won't let any particle leave the stomach until it's one millimeter in damage.

To go down through the intestine. So it goes into the stomach first and then through the small intestine to the large intestine and then Then where?

Well, in the large intestine, it's being stored and then ultimately you expel it with your body.

Expel it. Is that the whole gut? The stomach, the large and small intestine.

Is that it comprising? It starts with the esophagus, you know. Esophagus. And you could almost say, since you mentioned it, that your oral cavity is part of it. It's part of the gut. It's part of it. It's the first step of it. I mean, there's multiple elements in your mouth and your tongue. but you could almost say part of it is already, you know, the entry zone to your gut.

So is that included in the scientific research of like the gut, the mouth and the tongue and the... Yeah, so.

I was telling you about these taste receptors, you know, they had first studies on the tongue and then later discovered also further downstream. It's certainly in terms of digestion, this relationship between the chewing and the... So the more you chew, the faster it will leave your stomach. If you don't chew it, the stomach could take two hours to break it down.

I'm assuming we want to chew it more. We don't want it to be stored in our stomach for eight hours, right? We want it to process quickly, is that correct?

That's probably... You could say it's... I mean, the human body is so adaptable. You know, our ancestors they might have just gobbled, like if you- Swallow it because they're starving.

Yeah, if you just stayed there for 24 hours, yeah.

Yeah, and if you look at some animals, the way they gobble things down. So I think we're adapted to different situations that we live in quite well. But what you describe doesn't make 100% sense to me that this is so related to your bowel movements. but certainly, you know, because it might.

Have been diet, too, because I just didn't have a good diet. You know, I was just eating whatever I wanted because I was young and working out all the time.

I, I think that could be. That might have been it.

Okay. And now I'm eating more consciously.

Yeah.

Green juices and smoothies and healthier vegetables.

You know, all that stuff. So. But then the good thing is that you, that you didn't, you know, that you died, that your constipation didn't kick in now, you know, because. if you told me you always had normal bowel movements and, and the constipation just set in recently out of the blue, I would look, so what I do in my clinic, when somebody comes to me like that, I look at their hand movements, you know, and this is characteristic pathognomonic movement where people use their thumb and their index fingers to have this movement, which is characteristic for Parkinson's disease. If you see someone doing what, what's the movement?

It's this rolling movement between, you know.

Like without having anything there. Yes. Between your thumb and your index finger. First two fingers. Middle finger.

So if you see someone doing that kind of throughout the day or randomly, then that's... And that person comes to.

Me and says, God, you know, I can't believe that my bowel movements have changed so dramatically. I would, and I've done that, I've sent people like that to a neurologist for an early diagnosis.

Really?

Several times it was correct.

So you've seen this in person before?

I've seen this.

You've seen people come in, and you typically men or some women as well?

I've seen this for a million men.

So they're common, and how old are they? What's the age range?

I've seen it in their 50s.

You know.

And you'll notice them touching their fingers in this motion.

Yeah.

So, then ask, so have you always had this and have you noticed this? The person said, no, I have noticed it. I haven't noticed it. Really?

So, you're observing this as they're telling you about their bowels or about their constipation.

Really? So, this has been really fascinating. And so, this is why I think in terms of novel therapies, you know, and what we can make a big impact on the disease that's really devastating is if we have these early diagnosis, we have a window before the main, so before this migration to the brain has happened. I mean, there's another manifestation of Parkinson's disease that people have this, what's called a REM sleep abnormality, or during REM sleep, you have these vivid dreams. And the only reason that you Don't thrash around and hit your spouse next to you.

Right.

Is because the brain is a mechanism to inhibit your motor system. So, you know, when you have these vivid dreams, your brain shuts off the motor system. Yeah, the motor system.

It feels like you're running and jumping, but you're just laying.

Yeah. And so, that's another thing that some patients, the spouses, so I always ask the spouses also, have you noticed there's something different? from what you have been used to that the person next to you hits around or falls out of bed or something like that. So that's something that happens. So the REM sleep is regulated by a nucleus in your brainstem very close to the vagus, the nucleus of the vagus. And, that's an indication that some of this migration has happened to the brainstem. But, if you have that abnormality, you almost have 100% certainty that you'll develop Parkinson's disease.

And, is there a way to reverse this?

We don't know.

We don't know yet.

We don't know yet.

So, maybe there's a way to delay it or to turn up events.

Delay it. There could be medications to break up these degenerative bodies. So, a lot of effort going into this now. So, I think it's very exciting.

That's crazy that you can just notice this from people and see these signs. I am fascinated by all this and I want to take it another direction for a second about, we talked about the gut-brain connection. There's a gut-brain and then there's the brain and then the gut and the brain connection, correct? But what about the gut-mind connection and the way we think, the mind, I guess, outside of the brain, the mind or wherever you want to are thoughts outside of the brain. What is that connection like, the gut and the mind?

Yeah, so I don't, I mean, this was something when I published my first book, people got fascinated by the idea does the gut have a mind?

Does the gut have a mind?

Does the enteric nervous system have a mind because it's similar to the brain?

Because the mind-gut connection was your first book.

And I would say, I don't think we have any evidence for that. But as a scientist, I never ruled something out. Based on our current knowledge, there were concepts about the mind Dr. Dan Siegel, for example, who's sort of a prominent expert on the mind, he also doesn't believe that the mind is a property of our big brain.

What is the property of?

It's a system. It's a system how a brain interacts with the environment, with the people around us. and there's this loop, you know, that goes so that the mind is not an isolated self, but to the self, I mean, this gets into this Buddhist discussion, you know, self is kind of an illusion, the mind is something bigger that connects us with the people around us, with their minds. And I would say I kind of like this idea, but I would include the feedback loop back to the gut, you know, so it's a It's a brain-gut-mind.

Mind.

Mind and people around you. That's the system of the mind. Thank you so much for listening to this episode.

I hope you got some value out of this. If you did, make sure to share this with a friend and spread the message of greatness to the people in your life. You can post it on social media, just tag me Lewis Howes as well and let me know that you're listening to this. And if this is your first time here, click the subscribe button over on Apple Podcast or Spotify, as well as leave us a a rating or review over on Apple Podcast and let me know the part of this interview that you enjoyed the most, the part that you got the most value from this. I'd love to hear your thoughts over there. And I want to leave you with this quote from Julius Irving who said, if you don't do what's best for your body, you're the one who comes up on the short end. And that is true. It's all about having the knowledge, seeking the wisdom, and then applying the wisdom into daily practice to optimize your body. The gut and brain connection is real and it's so powerful and I can't wait to bring you part two coming next of this powerful interview with Dr. Amar and Meyer. And I want to remind you today, if no one has told you lately that you are loved, you are worthy and you matter. And I'm so grateful for you and you know what time it is. It's time to go out there and do something great.