Your Gut Is Also A Brain

a great, great point. And every once in a while they'll say things like, you know, if you guys want to mention this, did they say? I feel like every now and then we get emails that say, hey, did you forget that you have these things? I don't forget. I just assumed like everybody doesn't want to hear about it, you know. Oh I know. But we're just not good at this. As we stumble through at another self promotion, they have a book in the board game and they

both make great Christmas gifts. Please stop, this is making me so uncomfortable. Oh, buy them, everybody. Yeah, they're actually pretty good. We're proud of both of them. I mean we like, like we wrote a book, and we also um with our good buddy knows Parker, I should say, and we also helped create a board game with our good buddies over at Trivial Pursuit. So yeah, I'm very proud of It's a it's a legacy kind of thing,

you know. That's right. So we might have a couple of these reminders before Christmas because they do make great gifts for this stuff. You should know, friend in your life. Absolutely, So that was a great idea, Chuck, And it didn't feel so bad after all. That's right. And now onto our probably I think eighth episode. I think that culminates. It's culminated in this after many many episodes dealing with

this stuff. Well, that's funny that you say that, because I was gonna caveat this with this this will we will surely do another episode on this down the road within the next several years, I'm sure, because you're obsessed

with it. I'm obsessed with a number one. Absolutely, it's one of the most interesting things because this kind of stuff we're gonna talk about, the gut, brain, microbiome access um and it reveals, Chuck, like how little we actually know about our bodies and how they function, but it also provides these tantalizing clues about how cool the stuff we have left to understand is. You know what I mean, one day we're gonna understand exactly how our bodies function

and it's going to be mind boggling. I'm just very excited about it. So yes, I'm obsessed with it. But the other reason why we'll surely do it again is because the stuff that we're going to talk about, we've got to disclaim this episode and that it's pioneering, like like cutting edge research, not bleeding edge, cutting edge research, so it's going to keep evolving. But that also means Charles, that that that you and I can just be like gee, whiz and wow at this point because this is all

like just very early study kind of stuff. That's right, And if you want to really get ready for this one, you could listen to episodes on digestion, vehicle transplants, the microbio human human microbiome, project immune system, probiotics, and even our old buddy Fight or Flight. Yeah, and then just listen to the one on Pyromania for kicks. Did we do one on Pyromania? Of course, man, we did. Funny, I was looking through the list the other day for for a very special thing we have coming up that

we can announce yet. It's more self promotion too, which we're very excited about. But I was looking through all of our episodes and boy, it's getting more and more around, like, huh what really? Yeah, imagine somebody trying to wade into this stuff and just encountering it now, you know. Yeah. It was at one point though, I was like, was I abducted For a few years, I don't remember a lot of these. Yeah, I have the same same thing

going on. But also, Chuck, now that you mentioned the list, I want to give a huge hat tip again to our Minister of Stats, Jill Hurley just doggedly and tirelessly chronicles every single episode we've ever done. There's a Google sheet out there that's open access that has every single episode in order, including the selects or when they ran as a select. Just it's just an amazing thing that she's doing for free, for the love of it. I'm

guessing she still loves it. I hope Uh, well, Hurls if nothing else is uh stubborn, she won't quit even if so, let's talk about the gut brain microbiome access chuck, because there's a couple of ways to look at it. And the first way is the way that you would expect that you do things like digest food. Um. Your gut lining is produced mu gus um. You poop things out after you eat them, you even swallow, and your brain has a lot of other stuff to do than

to just micro manage that. So you have an entirely different secondary central nervous system that's dedicated exclusively to um eating, digesting and harvesting nutrients from your food. And that's called the enteric nervous system. That's right, uh, And this is definitely when we hit on in the digestion episode, but

they handle it all in the enteric nervous system. The e n S is really um similar in a lot of ways to our own central nervous system, and that it's made up of uh nerves and neurons and neurotransmitters, and it kind of does its own thing for the most part as far as controlling that stuff without the central nervous system lording over it. Saying you forgot this part. You might want to move this through the intestine a

little quicker it and it does its own thing. But this gut brain sort of connection that we're talking about is really a connection between the e n S and the CNS because they have figured that these two systems talked to each other, and they talked to each other from the gut to the brain, which is the really

surprising part. We've kind of always known that the brain talks to the gut, but now we're learning, Hey, it looks like the gut is actually sending messages to the brain, and a lot of the stuff we thought was a certain way could be actually backwards. Like ib S. Yeah, Like we've thought for a very long time that people with IBS UM, which is basically your your lower parts aren't working at full um, full steam. Either you're pooping too much and you've got really thin, watery poops, or

you're pooping too little you're constipated. Either way, you have irritable bow. It's one of the most appropriately named syndromes there is, right, And of course everybody's walking around knowing that anybody who has ib s is UM suffering from like stress or anxiety, and so it's bringing on like digestive issues. Well, this is what this this is why

this stuff is so mind blowing? Is this the field of research that investigates the gut brain microbiome access is saying, Actually, it's like Chuck just said, it might go both ways. You might have stress and anxiety not because of your your job or you know, like you're there's some something stressing you out. The guy down the block keeps looking at you, weird, That's not why you're stressed out or anxious. It's because you have IBS. That's causing your your stress

and anxiety. We may have have had it backwards all this time. Yeah, And to be specific, like you can get anxiety obviously because you have IBS. But what they're saying is is that it's a chicken in the egg thing.

Is the origin of this is actually in the gut and not like, oh, I have ib S because I'm anxious, right, And the reason why they're saying that this is even possible is because is that cross talk goes both ways, Like there's a We're starting to find more and more evidence of just how the gut could possibly speak to the brain and send its own signals, and one of the main ones is the vegas nerve, which made a starring appearance in our episode on what happens in the

brain during an orgasm. The vegas nerve is all about that, but the vegas nerve also has a lot to do with connecting the enteric nervous system with the central nervous system as well. Yeah, I mean we've known for a long time. Uh, And we talked about this sum in our Fight or Flight episode that you know, Let's say you're out in the woods and you're camping and you have to go to the potty, and you go and

you you squat down in the middle of nowhere. You're enjoying your time, you're about to do your business, and a bear pops his head up your your body. Well, the bear is like, I know what that means, but I'm here to interrupt that. The bears and I poop in the woods too, that's right. Uh, that bear like

you will go on an immediate sphincter lock. And it's not just because um, it's not just a physical reaction you and you have like you choose to do like, oh, I better stop what I'm doing because there's a bear. Like your body goes into fight or flight and it sends your brain sends a signal to your body saying, whatever else you're doing, shut it down now, because the most important thing going on right now is this barre in front of you. Yeah, like the FBI guy and

die Hard, shut it down now. But that's what man, because the brain is saying, we've got, um, we've got much better things to do with the energy that you're using to digest that food right now. So of course the brain can talk to the to the enteric nervous system when it's fight or flight time. And at this point, Chuck, I want to give another huge hat tip to our own Dave Rouse, who helped us with this one bang up job. He came up with an entirely new phrase

for fight or flight battle or skitaddle. It's so good that I wrote an email just calling that one out to him, saying like this was a priceless term. He said, that was all mine, so hopefully figure out a way to copyright that one he made up for Bruce Springstein, that's right. So um, so, yes, we know that the brain can talk to the e N S, but the e N S can talk to the brain via the

vegas nerve as well. And what they're figuring out is that it communicates in a number of different ways with the vegas nerve um specifically, uh those the and this is why they call it the um gut brain microbiota or microbiome access because what we're figuring out is, yes, you have cells that lying your your intestines, your guts that are neurons, You have neural cells, you have sensory cells, you have a lot of the same cells that um your brain uses to make sense of the world. Where

your gut has those same cells too. But we're figuring out that the bacteria that lives in your gut is actually communicating to your brain and saying, hey, change this behavior, Hey try this instead. Hey have you considered a red sweater? Greens just not your color, Like, the bacteria that live in our gut are telling our brains what to do. In some ways, it's pretty remarkable. This is why we

keep talking about this chuck. The bacteria. In addition to doing all the other great things they do, they produce metabolites,

and these metabolites actually do function as neurotransmitters. And one of the big examples that Dave dug up and this is it's a big part of kind of one of the cruxes of this communication with the gut in the brain or these short chain fatty acids s f c A s. They are byproducts, are natural byproducts of fermentation when you're digesting this dietary fiber, if you're hopefully eating enough dietary fiber, something I've had to do a lot more lately. It's so good for you, it's crazy. It

seems like the key to health. It is. And I don't want to get to uh gross here, but I've been on a lot of high fiber and I have been more gassy than I've ever been in my life. And it's not even stinky gassy. It's just it's almost just like air. Very lucky. Yeah, because those are saying my, my, my toots don't stink anymore at all ever, But these like fiber toots don't really stink. That is really bizarre, because cruciferous vegetable toots can really clear room. I guess

there is a way to put it. That's your blessed, chuck, your hashtag blessed. Oh well, my family's blessed, I guess. But because I don't really care, but you're like, I kind of miss it. But where were we short chain fatty acids. Um, they are, like I said, natural byproducts, and they play a really big role in the digestive track. And they're sending there one of the things sending these signals to your e n s and they're saying, hey,

maybe you should make more mucus. Maybe I can get the gut a little less inflamed um, maybe I can stop a little leakage from happening. And so so the short chain fatty acids themselves, they're they're they're involved in neurotransmitters, but apparently they can talk to the brain themselves to right, like they don't have to convert into anything else, I think, so like just through through the vegas nerve. Right, yes, and so so here's where we're at. Yes, they go

through the vegas nerve. That's the key here, um. And we've recently found a new kind of cell that line the the gut that are actually connected. They connect the gut to the vegas nerve. They're called neuropods cells. And that's how they think that the gut is actually communicating with the brain through the vegas nerve. They think they found kind of like the smoking gun to the missing

link or whatever. But um, that's how these short chain fatty acids would travel up the nerve, they would send their signal up the nerve, or they would travel through the circulatory system, which is another way that they figured out the gut can actually impact the brain. Is so you get the vagus, nerve um, and then you have

the circulatory system. And if all of those metabolites that are being produced by your bacteria, they're fermenting in different bacteria ferment create different metabolites as they ferment your food and your dietary fiber, and those metabolites, like you said, sometimes they're short chain fatty acids sometimes which can be like a precursor to neurotransmitters or possibly a neuro transmitter itself. They actually build actual neurotransmitters to like seratonin, UM, dopamine, GABBA,

nor adrenaline. All these things are actually constructed by the bacteria in your gut as well. And we know for a fact that those things can make it through the circulatory system to the brain and they definitely have an impact on the brain and what the brain does. All right, maybe we should take a break, all right, take a pause for the cause I'm just gonna keep talking through the ad break. I'm too excited, all right, We'll be

back right after this. I skate, all right. So when we left, we were talking about a lot of stuff that sounds pretty amazing and that we're just figuring out, one of which is that, uh, the short chain fatty acids are actually able to stimulate that vegas nerve that we were talking about that stimulates nerrow the production of neurotransmitters. But here's sort of the the headline is some of these neurotransmitters can actually play a role in mood disorders.

So we're not just talking about um a two way street with things like fight or flight. We're talking about potentially autism, Parkinson's depression, anxiety like we were talking about with IBS. And they know this because they took in these poor little mice that they're always, you know, doing the hard work on mice, but they've taken mice. They've severed the vegas nerve in mice to see what happened.

And what they observed was that this gut bacteria had a real effect on brain chemistry because when they shut it down, they found big time reduction in stress hormone levels. Like they completely went away in these mice, right would you would think they're stress hormones would go up having their vegus nerves ever, that would be a really stressful thing. But now, um so that but that that's really like a good illustration of the point that we're at in research.

We there's there's not been a thing where it's like, oh, this is exactly how this happens. This is how your gut microbiota affects you know, your your your brain and your brain chemistry. We're not there yet. We just know that there is a definite correlation, not just in my studies, Chuck, but also in um human studies, which we'll talk about later.

Like there's plenty of human diseases that we've long known if you have this disease, you also have like irritable but irritable bowel syndrome or constipation is a hallmark of this neurological disorder that um that you wouldn't expect. We've known that they're connected, and that's it's all kind of correlative. Now we're trying to figure out the causes of it. That's right, and it's not just like this communication isn't only happening through the vegus nerve. Uh. You kind of

briefly mentioned before the break. But there are all kinds of ways that they're communicating that we're founding out. One of them is through the circulatory system. We used to think that the brain was just sort of shut down from behind the blood brain barrier. But now they're they're showing that, like hormones are getting through there, other things are passing through. We've known about grellin. We've talked about grellin for a while, the hunger hormone that basically the

stomach produces. It sends a message to the brain that says I'm hungry. So we've known that can pass through. But now they're learning things Like you mentioned serotonin to me. This is one of the facts of the show of

our Serantonin is actually produced by gut bacteria. Yeah, and um, I mean the brain also can produce serotonin, It can produce its own, But it appears that right that the serotonin, a lot of the serotonin that the brain uses comes from the gut, comes from bacteria fermenting food and producing as a biproduct of metabolism. It just so happens to

produce this neurotransmitter. And I don't think I don't think anybody who's looking into this is saying it just so happens, like we appear to have co evolved to take advantage of this, Like these bacteria started colonizing our guts producing serotonin so much that our bodies found a way to really use serotonin in all sorts of different ways, including

our brain to regulate mood and stuff like that. And that's like one of the one of the huge underlying messages of this is that our microbiome, the bacteria that live inside of us, they have way more genes than we have. We have something like to genes in the human genome, but our microbiome typically has something like two

million combined genes. And with those genes, with all those extra genes that we don't have, all that bacteria can produce stuff that we can't even produce, like vitamins and neurotransmitters that we wouldn't necessarily be able to produce on our own, and yet we rely on to function correctly. That's that's like, that's the most amazing example of symbiosis

I've ever heard in my life. But the idea that bacteria fermenting food in your gut chuck affects your mood or your outlook or whether you have a um a cognitive disorder. Like that's really substantial. It's super it's super substantial. I know, I feel like I could have come up with a better descriptor than really substantial, But I'm just

to agog. Should we talk about the study of college students? Yea, as far as you know, trying to provide a link between stretch, like a two way street between stress and our gut. Uh. They said, well, there's no better place to go than to college students who are prepping for exams. And they said, if we're going to find out what's going on down there, we need to look at their stools. And they tested the stools during exam week and found that their feces had a lot less lactobacilly, which is

one of the good back tier. Is then during the first week week of class when they're just getting to know each other and partying and stuff like that. The same when they studied monkeys, little infant monkeys, And it's one of those tests that's a little bit sad. No one's dying here, but they're stressing out mama monkeys on purpose. So they've got these mama monkeys and they'll play these loud noises while they're pregnant to kind of like shock them. And with the mothers who had to say, what, I

gotta stop you. I'm sorry, you just made a shock the Monkey joke without even intending. Yes, I could not let that walk by. Congratulations on the monkey Monkey great song. Did you know I gotta shut the monkey? Do? Dude? Do dude? Um? I wonder if they just walk around singing that constantly? He was. Probably there's no way they don't.

And then they get home at night and they're like, oh, and they feel a little get about it because they remember why they're singing shock the Monkey, because they're actually shocking monkeys for a living. Or and we mean shocking with loud noises, not shocking with electricity. Right, Well, yeah,

that's what I guess. Peter Gabriel men too, But no, I think about I don't know, maybe he was talking about with electricity or I wonder if there's just one person like the person who runs the lab on their way out says, you know, because they probably do it in their sleep there so you remember you got to shock the monkey tonight, and they everyone else just rolls their eyes and they have to They have to put up with Marty where the lab yeah, and where's the

piano keyboard? Tie? Every day. But they're different ones too, because some of them have red backgrounds. You can tell they're a little different alright. So, uh so they make these loud noises and then the monkey, the mama monkeys who were shocked, uh by these sounds, they had gut microbiomes with a lot lower levels of this good bacteria of lactobacilly and boy bifi doughe bacteria, bacteria that's like stuff in yogurt, I think both of those, which we'll

get to all right there. But they had a despotic disbiotic microbiome. Is the upshot of it, right, You get unbalanced basically because of these stress noises that they hear, right, So, but it goes the other way too, that they're figuring out that if your gut microbiome gets out of balance, then that can make you stressed out right, that can that can actually lead to mood disorders that they're they're

connecting like a really poor diet. It's very low and like dietary fiber, because again, that's what your microbiome likes to crunch on and produces really important things like serotonin and dope. I mean from that, if you don't eat very well, it's possible your mood might not be as great, or your outlook on life, or your mental health might not be as great as it could be if you actually did have a much healthier diet. That is very sub stanchel it is, and I think that kind of

stuff kind of feeds on each other. It becomes this circular loop. Yeah, well that was something that was that Dave pointed out to that they're starting to realize that your CNS, your central nervous system, and your entire nervous system are probably in communication constantly. They're just sharing information back and forth because there's no it doesn't make any evolutionary sense for your bacteria to just be running the

show and telling your brain what to do. That's one of the grimmest things I can possibly imagine, is that we're actually just puppets for bacteria and our guts. But at the same time, it doesn't make sense for your brain to be controlling your e n S. Your e n S is a semi autonomous nervous system, so they're not bossing each other around. They're just sharing information and

then making adjustments accordingly. But they can also affect one another and impact one another negatively when things are out of whack, whether you're stressed out, it can affect your gut, or if your gut's not doing well, it can stress you out. That's what we're trying. And that is so substantial is that the second time he said that third third, I don't think you picked up the second one. That's all right, and this is like the reason this is

big stuff. And if you're wondering, like, yeah, but where is this all leading, We're about to tell you because if you have uh, I mean it's not just ib S, if you have Parkinson's, or if you or a family member is on the autism spectrum disorder. They're not saying that they can cure this stuff, but they are finding out very promising tests and studies that things like Parkinson's and autism can be um can be mitigated somewhat with the use of certain probiotics and maybe in the future

fecal transplants. Yeah, I don't think anybody credible is saying like, oh, we can cure autism spectrum disorder with um, you know,

probiotics or something like that. But there's a lot of mounting evidence that you can alleviate a lot of the symptoms, including things like UM uh like behavior that like social avoidance UM or not being interested in social novelty, UM, A lot of the classic symptoms that as associated with autism spectrum to sword that in my studies at least, do they clear up a little bit, they adjust, They actually kind of go away in some cases when you adjust the gut microbiota of these mice who have the

mice analogy of autism. Yeah, and you know g I problems are UM not always, but pretty much synonymous with autism spectrum disorder. Uh. If you have Parkinson's, you probably also have constipation. This has been true from the very first patients that were diagnosed by by Dr Parkinson himself. He realized that you also have constipation back then. This is sort of in the age where I can't remember one of the recent episodes where he used to sort

of have colonics and enemas for almost everything. Well, that was probably the Kellogg's episode. Now we referenced the it was like a couple of weeks ago. Okay. I don't know why we talked about colonics and animals a lot in this show. I think it was maybe we're talking about the bleeders the barber's. Uh, yeah, that was it, because they used to give people animals for everything. But

they may have been onto something a little bit. Is like kind of quacky as it sounded back in the day where if you had Parkinson's and constipation, they would give you a colonic or something or an enema and it would kind of help your Parkinson's out. And people dismiss that a long time ago, but they may have

actually been onto something a little bit there. Yeah. The idea is that this is the current understanding of why Parkinson's and um and and gut issues may be related, is that they actually think it might start with gut issues. That you have a certain type of E. Coli that's producing a protein called curly su r l i, and that curly has an effect in causing other proteins to misfold, which makes it a pre on. Remember those. Yeah, So this pre on curly causes misfolding of proteins in your gut. Uh,

they end up clumping, which ends up constipating you. And this process starts a good twenty years before you show the classic symptoms of Parkinson's. This is amazing, right, But the point is is that by this time, after twenty years, your curly production has gotten so good that it starts to travel up to the brain where it starts misfolding proteins up there, and then you start to have the classic symptoms of Parkinson's like tremors and shaking and eventually

possibly even hallucinations and things like that. Um that that is all that, but that it all starts in your gut with these um the E coli that that is colonized your gut miss creating this curly protein pre on. Yeah, and this is one of those where like research is gonna help hopefully yield some uh if not cure some things that and help mitigate some of the effects of Parkinson's. But what it really could do is service and an

early warning system. That's not to say that if you have constipation, you're gonna get Parkinson's in twenty years, but if you have chronic constipation, and it could be one of those things that they then look out and say, hey, this is something we might need to watch out for, right.

And that's actually I've seen somebody proposing a paper from I think this year, UM, that you that that you use the bio markers of what's called leaky gut UM as a early diagnosis of autism, because autism is usually diagnosed after a few years of age UM I think maybe three or five or something like that, that they don't typically diagnose it before then, but that you would have leaky gut like long before this, and you could you know, find it and possibly treat it because so

leaky gut is this idea where your your your gut lining is meant to be semi permeable, where only the stuff your gut wants to make it through, like nutrients and neurotransmitters and stuff like that UM, are able to pass through. Leaky gut is where you have basically holes and cracks and that that that lining and so unwanted stuff like toxins and bogs and um partially digestive food can make it through your gut and causes inflammation and

then there's this whole cascading problem. And that that is why UM leaky gut is associated with things like autism and I think even rhuma, toy arthritis, and a whole host of other other diseases. So they're saying, if we look for leaky gut and we find it, there's a good chance. I think, like people on the autism spectrum have leaky gut as well, UM, that that would be a pretty good indication of autism diagnosis later in life. Yeah.

I talked to uh one of my really good friends has a son with autism, and I was texting him about this, and it's like, man, there's a lot of really interesting research. And asked him about his son having g I issues and he said since day one, literally, And you know, I was like, you're gonna really dig this. He's a listener to so it's like, you're gonna really dig this episode. I said. There, they've come a long way, I said, and you know that the future looks bright

for you know, helping to mitigate maybe some symptoms. Yeah, there seems to be treatable. Leaky gut seems to be a treatable thing where it's probably the result of UH dis biotic um microbiota um and that if you you know, introduce certain kinds of um of bacteria that you want

that's missing. It may actually alleviate symptoms. Um. Again, I don't think anybody's saying like you can cure autism just with probiotics, but it's possible that that probiotics could really change, um, somebody with autisms life for the better in a lot of ways just from a probiotics supplement. And so there's a bunch of companies apparently, uh, they're just growing. Vential capitalists are just throwing money at any company working on

this right now. They're called psychobiotics. Um. This idea that you can create like a probiotic cocktail to treat something like autism or multiple sc sclerosis or or rheumatoid arthritis, and that you don't have to use pharmaceuticals or drugs that function in ways we don't really understand that what you're doing is going to the bacteria and saying here, live here and do your natural thing and produce this stuff that this patient isn't producing on their own, won't you?

And that's just the most substantial way you can think of to treat something like that. Super substantial, super substantial. All right, Well, let's take our second break and we will come back and wrap this puppy upright after this kind of huge sk So back to the autism spectrum disorder. Uh. They have found that this is about ten years ago.

They found a correlation between mothers who had a high uh sort of long term, prolonged fever during pregnancy that they were seven times more likely to give birth to a baby who had symptoms of a s D. Again correlation uh. And then again the mice come into play. They got these pregnant mice, they infected them with a flu virus. Uh, it's just poor mice, and they caused a spiking fever and they gave birth to babies. And they can't test baby mice for autism, but what they

can do is study their patterns and their behaviors. And they did find that they had limited social interactions, they had decreased vocalizations, they were doing repeated behaviors, they had leaky bowels, some of the things that you might experience

on the autism spectrum disorder. Right, So they kind of trace that to this idea, this theory, and there's a bunch of theories about how people might develop autism, but this idea that um, when the mom has a fever UH, an immune response is activated by a gut micro a particular one called segmented filamentous bacteria, and that it gets

uh T cells and cytokines active. Remember we talked about cytokines in the m r n A episode and they are helpful, but they can also overblow things quite a bit because they run around activating all sorts of other

immune cells UM and basically say go, go go. And so the idea is that this triggers inflammation, and inflammation seems to a huge problem for all sorts of things, everything from neurological disorders to um to arthritis, to UH irritable bowel syndrome to to basically anything that can be wrong with you seems to have some sort of basis and inflammation, like your body's mounting in immune response and

you're suffering as a result. And so that's what the idea is with this, that these UM cytokines actually travel through the placenta and have an impact on the neurodevelopment of the fetus, and that that is what causes autism UM. So that it's traced back to this the to the guts ability to trigger the immune system, which is another whole thing that has you know, it has even wider implications than UM than autism spectrum disorder to like, it can trigger all sorts of other problems. UM. It might

not even have to do with the developing fetus. It can happen within you, like it can cause UM cytokines to to travel up to your brain and produce neurological disorders, and you as well mental health issues. And you as well that that the gut and inflammation happening in a bad combo is is nade good for the average human. They're finding, that's right. You mentioned psychobiotics before the break. This is the idea that you can again use something

like probiotics to treat anxiety or depression. And uh they have had a little bit of um good fortune with with the results here, and it looks like, I mean, they're doing some of this on humans, a lot of those in rats. I think in two thousand eleven they studied both rats and humans and they gave them uh strains of bacteria for about thirty days, lacto Bacillus helveticus and UH Beefidobe that's the same one from before the

feto Bacterium long hum. They should just name these, Yeah, exactly this column by their pet name, like Lacto and Biff, those two old friends. It's right, they really are too. They seem to. They pop up a lot where it's like, no, this is what you want. Like if you look at probiotic supplements almost across the board, you're gonna find Lacto and Biff in there. Yeah, Lacto and Biff, the two,

the two we love to eat. But they've then put these people and mice through stress test and found a quote significant reduction and anxiety like behavior in the rats and actual psychological UM distress was being alleviated in humans as well. Yeah, I mean there's that there. This is where we're we're what we're moving towards now is treating mood disorders, neurological disorders, mental health issues, UM, a whole host of physical maladies, chronic diseases UM with with probiotics.

If you can figure out what's missing in these patients, then you can grow that bacteria and put them in the person through like pills, and it's possible they'll clear it up. Another UM theory of where autism comes from is that there's a depleted gut where there's there's bacteria that's missing from the person. And they found in my studies they are able to produce germ free mice chuck and they they those germ free mice tend to exhibit

the autistic um uh symptoms. Um that when they treat them with with probiotics, that those autistic symptoms tend to clear up, which is pretty amazing. Yeah, it almost it doesn't almost seem like like what is definitely happening. As science has progressed over the years, it feels like it's

become way way less segmented. Um, it's like, here's here's your brain, and here's your nervous system, and here's your organs and here's this stuff, and it's all compartmentalized, and it just seems like through our own research over the years, everything is linked together. It seems like, yeah, there's a whole um, a whole field called functional medicine that's developing that gets super poop pooed by skeptics, and um, it's understandable.

It's a very early field and there are plenty of practitioners who overdo it in in what they say that that can be accomplished, But the the whole idea behind it is is it's integrated with another name for it is integrative medicine. Where, um, you you don't like one of the first things you would do when somebody came in with a problem, no matter what it was, adjust their diet to a healthier diet and start there. Because this idea of like the there's your part of a big,

interconnected whole, that that's how our bodies function. Um, it seems intuitive to me now, you know. Yeah, I mean Emily goes to a functional medicine doctor, uh, in addition to our our regular m d um. It's it's sort of it doesn't have to be a one or the other thing. Ideally, I don't ideally they worked not together together, but they won't even speak to one another. But as a patient, ideally they worked. You can work with both, is what I'm saying. Yeah, you just don't tell them

about each other. She is as as you know, is uh, suffering through lime right now. I didn't know that. Oh no, oh, I didn't tell you that. No, man, that's terrible. Yeah, it's been a bad scene at the house for a while. Uh, but her her diet is one of the big She's on this crazy weird awful diet, nothing but goat milk. No, but lots of weird like forest floor tea and just stuff that you know, not able to eat. I mean you name it. Man, So many things that she can't

have right now. Uh, to try and help it out because you know, the antibiotics they put her on, we're wrecking her. Well. Yeah, that's another thing too, is they're figuring out that antibiotics to treat just you know rando stuff or like the flu or something like that, that that can have a huge, terrible effect on your gut chemistry and can have cascading effects down the road. There's there. That's say, another thing that they're just kind of in the initial studies of it. It's not not in any

shade on antibio aotics. They basically have saved more lives than can be possibly counted, but that but we have tended to kind of lean toward prescribing them willy nilly, and people don't finish their their prescription anyway. So there's all sorts of problems with it. But they're finding like there's a lot of less less than obvious problems that can come about from killing off your gut microbiome. Totally. So there's one last thing I want to end with

real quick, Chuck. One of the guys, the guy who actually um along with it, a guy named Ted Deanan, coined the term psychobiotics and psychobiome, which is a description of how your microbiome produces neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine and all that that. Um. His his name is John Crying, and he has a theory of why, uh, we would have evolved to have a microbiome that would impact whether we're social or not, because it's weird if you think

about it. Why would your your gut microbio biome b being off like this biotic have any impact done social socialization? Right? Yeah, I mean this is super interesting. And the Ted talk is uh, it's a Ted med It's it's awesome if you have time to go watch it. A little heavy, but good stuff. Um. His theory he basically studied the same germ free mice that you were talking about that have they basically don't have a microbioma of their own.

Very sad uh, and he's he found out that these germ free mice showed a lot of social impairment, especially the male mice, and He compared that to the uh GERM free mice two symptoms of a s D and found that it also affected males. So again that got him thinking kind of like what's going on with this stuff?

So he said, I wonder if like having a healthy, sociable human is dependent on that gut bacteria, with the idea being that we're all hanging out together in groups, you know, tuk tuk in the gang, and we're trading bacteria with one another. We're in close contact with one and other and swapp and spit with one another, so our bacteria is more varied basically, and that's how it's selecting that as a positive trade. Yeah, And from the bacteria standpoint, the more humans there are around, the more

hosts you have to colonize, the more the bacteria species thrives. Right, So it's like, uh, it's beneficial either way. Like we actually get a lot out of being social, Like we have longer lifespans, we have a better outlook on life, the more like close friends and support network we have.

It's just been documented over and over again, and it seems to be like the more we look into the microbiome and the psychobiome that that is driven by bacteria that seem to make us more social through their byproducts that they make that travel to our brain. Is that circular loop again? Yeah? Yeah, so win win is another way to put it, and I love them. Uh, you

got anything else for now? Nothing that's super significant? Okay, Well, if you want to know more about the psychobiomego why John Crying's Ted med Talk and also UM check out on Science the Journal Sciences website, Meet the psycho Biome. It's a really good introduction to UM. And since I said it's a really good introduction too, it's time for a listener mail. I'm gonna call this from listeners in the in their seventies. We love to hear from our listeners that are even older than me. It makes me

feel good. Hey, guys, my wife and I love your podcast, and this I think is just a bit of a reminder for us. I've been listening UM for years now every afternoon while playing Spite and Malice. Do you know what that is? It sounded really familiar and I didn't have time to look it up because that emails just came in right. Yeah, this is hot off the precess. We're both in our seventies and love learning things we

still don't know. But this email is to mention to both of you lately that your childhood vocal or religious vocabulary his upticks some just reminding you that young people around the world are listening and the word use brain framing is occurring bigly. We suggest for your consideration to stay with secular language like CE for the current era. Uh. We used, we used to DeVault the CE. I guess we kind of have flap back a little bit. Heavin'tly.

I hadn't noticed. I wonder if we didn't in the folklore episode because they were just referenced folklore and we just ran the folklore select recently, so maybe they're maybe they're thinking, like that's a current episode. Oh that's my guess. Okay, it's your guess, is that we're on it. I feel like we're on it. I didn't. I hadn't noticed anything like that. I feel like we've said BC recently. I think you're talking about the headache powder, Okay, which I love.

We suggest you use secular language like CE for this current era. For example, and explaining historical timelines and science miracles or humicles as we call them. Uh, and science is miraculous in its own right, with all credits to the the amazing human beings who discover the actuality of our natural universe. Thanks for what you do, keep them coming. This is from Andre and Meredith Ryland in Pensacola, Florida.

Thanks a lot, Andrea and Meredith. We appreciate you guys writing in and if you want to be like those two and write in yourself, well we want to hear it. Send us an email to Stuff podcast at i heeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.