The UltraMind Solution (66 page)

We call it the ENS, or enteric (or gut) nervous system, as opposed to the CNS, or central nervous system. The small intestine alone has as many neurons as the spinal cord. Ninety-five percent of the body’s serotonin (remember, that’s the happy mood chemical) is produced by the gut nerve cells, and every class of neurotransmitters found in the brain is also found in the gut.

The question is how does this nervous system below interact with the one above?

The gut brain actually comes from the same embryonic tissue as the “brain” brain. And it is still connected via the autonomic nervous system— the sympathetic and parasympathetic nerves.

Acting completely independently, it has a number of important jobs: it keeps everything moving in the right direction from the top down by coordinating the contraction of muscle cells; it triggers the gut hormones and enzymes to be released from cells to promote digestion; it helps keep the blood flowing so that when you absorb your food it can get to where it needs to go, and it controls the immune and inflammatory cells in the gut.
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All that happens in the background and is communicated back up to your brain via the autonomic nervous system. Think of it as two independent, but interdependent, businesses that must coordinate and communicate but can act independently.

But how does this interaction affect us?

Nearly everyone has experienced “butterflies” in the stomach, or had diarrhea under acute stress, or, worse, became incontinent in life-threatening situations. Clearly, we can have a “nervous” stomach because of our thoughts and feelings and external events. But can we have a “nervous” brain (or a depressed or hyperactive or autistic or demented brain) because of mischief originating in the gut—specifically due to problems with digesting food, the gut immune system, or signals that go haywire on the way from our gut-brain, or ENS, to our “brain” brain?

In medical training, most doctors think pejoratively of people with
“functional bowel” disorders. Doctors see nothing with the tools they use—scopes, X-rays, and scans. No tumors, ulcers, or blockages. Nothing “real.” So these patients are just neurotic people with emotionally triggered symptoms. Right?

The evidence is directing us otherwise.

The suffering for millions is real. So the question becomes, are these tens of millions of Americans “crazy,” with “psychosomatic symptoms” that lead them to be irritable, anxious, depressed, and obsessed with their digestive system? Or are we missing something?

Thankfully, new science is shedding light on this topic.

Over the years I have seen emotional, psychiatric, and behavioral symptoms triggered by problems in the gut. One of my patients was a thirty-year-old executive who would experience anxiety and insomnia whenever his irritable bowel would act up. Another was a little boy who would have explosive bouts of anger whenever his stomach was a little “swollen” with gas. Yet another was a woman who found herself free of lifelong depression after a course of antibiotics (metronidazole) we used to clear out bad bacteria from her gut.

When psychiatric symptoms are “coincidentally” cleared up with antibiotics, that gets my attention.
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How could this happen? An autistic boy I treated actually began to speak after changing his diet and eliminating gluten and dairy, which altered the “information” that went into his gut.

These remarkable stories are all evidence of the intimate connection between your gut and your brain.

Doctors often blame a patient’s psychiatric problems for their gut symptoms. They are “psychosomatic” illnesses created in the brain of people whose anxieties get the best of them.

But perhaps, very often, it just may be the other way around. Mischief in the gut causes disturbance in the brain. Fix the gut, and mood, behavior, and cognition all improve.

Many different factors affect gut—and brain—health:

Unfriendly bacteria in the gut and other bugs like yeast that produce brain toxins.

Fermentation of starches from your diet, which produce gas and toxic levels of ammonia.

Odd, partially digested food proteins that interfere with normal brain operations.

Activation of the immune system because of digestive imbalances
that damage the protective barrier, which normally keeps the outside world from entering through the gut.

Why are millions of us having all these gut problems?

The answer is that we are not very kind to our gut. We eat a SAD diet (Standard American Diet), which is low in fiber and nutrients and rich in sugar, additives, and chemicals, which changes the ecosystem of our gut.

We are under chronic stress, which damages the normal intestinal barrier and affects the ENS.

Our drug culture pushes antibiotics, anti-inflammatories, aspirin, steroids, and acid-blocking medications that all disrupt our gut’s ability to stay in balance and do its job.

And we are exposed to toxins such as mercury, which damage our normal gut function.

All in all, we live in dangerous digestive times.

An article in the
Journal of the American Medical Association
by Dr. Henry Lin
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mapped out a new way of thinking about irritable bowel and the psychological symptoms seen in irritable bowel patients.

He turns the current view on its head by saying that bacterial mischief in the small intestine (from bacteria that migrate up from the large intestine into a normally sterile territory) triggers an immune and nervous system response that sends messages back to the brain, which lead to insomnia,
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“sickness behavior,” anxiety, depression,
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and impaired cognitive function.
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The gut immune system “speaks” to the brain, sending messages of inflammation, which increases levels of CRF (corticotropin releasing factor) in the hypothalamus (which, in turn, increases stress hormones like cortisol),
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and changes neurotransmitter levels.
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Your gut is talking to your brain. And when these bacteria are involved, the communication isn’t good.

So, bottom line—little bacteria in our gut start a cascade of immune and neurological events that stop our brain from doing what it was designed to do and this creates poor connections and communication all around.

This is one of the major ways your gut sends signals of ill health to your brain that can manifest themselves as any type of broken brain and many other illnesses.

I want to discuss how this happens. Let me start by telling you the story of one of my patients, who suffered from this problem.

Bugged Out: How Bugs in Your Brain Make You Crazy

The most remarkable story of how bugs in the gut can affect your brain is from a woman who came to see me with the typical “whole list” of problems (which is why I call myself a “whole-listic” doctor).

Most of her problems started in her gut—she had the usual diagnoses of irritable bowel syndrome with terrible bloating after meals as well as acid reflux, and she also had an autoimmune disease with joint pains and lots of inflammatory symptoms such as allergies and rashes.

She also had metabolic syndrome, or prediabetes, thyroid problems, and chronic stress.

In addition to all these problems, she also suffered from debilitating obsessive-compulsive disorder. She was an educated, otherwise well-balanced human being, and there was nothing odd about her on the surface. But she could not pick up anything off her floor or clean or move anything in her house because of this weird obsession— for years!

In the ten years before she came to see me, she had become increasingly withdrawn because of her severe fatigue and her frustration and exhaustion from these quirky behaviors.

Actually she had been given many “diagnoses” over the years by many different doctors, including depression, anxiety, OCD, and sleep disorder. She also had severe fatigue for many years.

As a result, she took many drug cocktails over the years, including Ritalin and Dexedrine—or speed. When I first saw her she was on Provigil (a new drug to wake up the brain), and Depakote, a seizure drug given to OCD and bipolar patients, as well as two antidepressants, Celexa and Wellbutrin. She was also on a highly controlled new drug for sleep called Xyrem (which was the knockout date rape drug, or GHB). This was quite a collection of mood stabilizers, uppers, and downers—this woman was a walking pharmacy.

We found she was allergic to gluten and dairy and she was making very odd peptides (little proteins) because of poor digestion. These are morphinelike proteins that result from incomplete digestion of casein (from dairy) and gluten (from wheat), which have been linked to many psychiatric disorders, especially autism and ADHD.
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She also had vitamin D and magnesium deficiency, which can contribute, as you learned in chapter 6, to depression and anxiety.

When we looked at her gut environment with a stool analysis, we found there weren’t any of the normal healthy bacteria growing, her gut lining was inflamed, and some strangers had taken up residence in her gut, including yeasts and odd bacteria.

A gut is a veritable ecosystem—like a rain forest. There are over five hundred
species of bacteria living there weighing in at a whopping three pounds. There is more bacterial DNA in your body than human DNA. All of them need to be in balance and in the right place (mostly in your large intestine) for your gut to function properly.

There are good bugs and bad bugs. The good bugs help digest your food, produce vitamins, control inflammation, boost immune function, and more. The bad bugs produce toxins, ferment starches leading to bloating and gas, and sometimes move into areas of the bowel like the stomach and small intestines where they create terrible mischief. We generally want to get rid of the bad bugs and add more good bugs or probiotics to keep the gut healthy.