Gut bacteria produce precursors for serotonin and dopamine through the shikimate pathway. When this microbial pathway breaks down, your brain loses a major source of these neurotransmitter building blocks. Tryptophan and tyrosine do double duty: they're needed for mental health and for building immune and skin cells.
The bacteria in our gut are the ones producing the raw materials. They're producing it, but if their shikimate pathway is disrupted, they are not producing it, and then we don't have the raw materials in order to get to serotonin and dopamine.
Correct. But you still have the extraction of those raw materials to a certain extent from the foods that you eat, right? So there will still be some tryptophan coming in through the food sources, but not to the level that the microbes can produce it because it is a symbiotic cohesive relationship between us. And remember, tryptophan Tyrosine is not just used for mental health stuff, right? It's used to build a tremendous amount of other systems and cellular evolutions in the human body. It's a very common amino acid on amino acid chains, you know, when we're building certain immune cells or skin cells or whatever else other cells in our bodies need to do.
And we can't make those, right? I'm not remembering which ones are essential versus not essential.
Yeah, yeah, no, it's an essential amino acid, so we need to extract it from food sources or alternatively the microbes in our guts. Make it for us, which is again one of the most overlooked areas of precursor or substrate extraction, probably in human biology.
