Moment 161: The Surprising Link Between Your Gut And Your Brain: Gary Brecka

Gary Brecka (0:03)

The majority of people that suffer from idiopathic anxiety or generalized anxiety because of low serotonin, they also have gut issues. You show me a person that's truly depressed, and I'll show you some of these that's also suffering from severe gut issues, either gas or bloating or diarrhea, constipation, irritability, cramping, because the same neurotransmitters that affect these emotional states also are responsible for the motility of the gut, the speed of the gut. This is the most overlooked thing in all of bariatric medicine, because people that believe that they have all of these allergies, well, I'm allergic to wheat, soy, corn, dairy, blueberries, bananas, gluten. Yes, sometimes those individual allergies do exist, but the majority of time, even if you talk to somebody who says, yeah, I get bloated or I deal with gas or cramping or diarrhea or constipation or irritability, I deal with all of these gut issues, irritable bowel syndrome, Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis, all these names that we give to conditions of the gut. When you ask them, well, what are you allergic to? They give you this laundry list of things. Then you ask them another question and say, well, if you're really allergic to corn, is there ever a time that you can eat corn and not have a reaction? The majority of time people will say yes. Okay, well, right there you know you don't have an allergy. Allergies are not transient, allergies are consistent. You don't wake up Monday morning and being allergic to milk, and then you're unallergic on Wednesday afternoon and then re-allergic on Saturday morning. But what happens when people have gut issues that they can't explain is they always correlate it to what they last ate. And it's hard to make this connection. They're like, well, wait a second, I ate the same thing Monday and I was fine. And I ate the identical food on Wednesday and I blew up like a tick. So this is not an analogy. This has to do with the motility of the gut. So if you don't know what gene mutation you have that is causing a deficiency, then you don't know what to supplement with to restore gut motility. But once you do, the gut goes back to its normal pace.

Steven Bartlett (1:58)

‎What's gut motility?

Gary Brecka (2:00)

It's the pace of the gut. So if you remember Henry Ford was actually not made famous for the automobile. He was made famous for something called the assembly line. So the assembly line was just a glorified conveyor belt. Right? And when you walked into his factory, they put a part on it on one end. And about every six feet, somebody stood and tinkered with that part. So it went to me, I tinkered with it, it moved to the guy to my right. He did something to it, it moved to the guy to his right. And by the time it reached the end of that conveyor belt, it's fully assembled. This is very analogous to how the human intestinal tract works. It's 30 feet long. It's a giant conveyor belt. You put parts on it at one end as they exit the stomach in a very acidic environment. And it moves slowly towards the rectum. And before it exits the rectum, it's in a relatively alkaline environment. So instead of having people standing along a conveyor belt, you have bacteria that are graded by pH.

The sequence is very important. So imagine what would happen if Henry Ford walked into his factory one day and doubled the speed of the conveyor belt. The entire assembly line would break down. Not because there's anything wrong with the parts, the contents, not because there's anything wrong with the people that are working there, the bacteria, but because you change the speed. What if he went in there one day and reversed the conveyor belt? What if he just ran it in the opposite direction?

It would screw the whole thing up, right? So, by changing the pace of the gut, the speed of the gut, the conveyor belt, I've ruined this sequence of events. And I spend a lifetime trying to figure out what's wrong with the parts, what's wrong with the workers, what's wrong with the conveyor belt itself, nothing. It's how quickly or slowly it's running because the motility, this peristaltic activity is affected. And once you supplement for this deficiency and you return that activity to normal, you find that all of a sudden these strange allergies eviscerate and all of this gas and bloating and diarrhea and constipation and irritability and all of this inability to equate things that I'm eating back to what is going on in my gut seem to go away. It's true with all kinds of conditions. You know, we have subscribed in this world to the fact that we are so affected by disease and pathology. And once I get you to subscribe to the fact that you have a disease and you can get you to subscribe to a lifetime of medication. Serotonin, for example, 90% of it resides in your gut. So if you don't have it here, you can't have it here. So depression rarely begins in the outside environment. It usually begins in the gut. Now it may be trauma that led to the deficiency. But the fix is not in a chemical or synthetic or pharmaceutical blocking the brain's capacity to uptake these neurotransmitters. The fix is in restoring adequate levels to the body so it can naturopathically make its way back up the vegas nerve and arrive to the brain. Similar things are true with anxiety. I mean, if you actually have ever suffered from or know somebody who suffered from anxiety, if you ask them three questions, you can find out very quickly that their anxiety is not coming from a cluster of symptoms. It's not coming from their outside environment. It is coming from within them. It's coming from their physiology. I mean, if you know someone who suffered from anxiety and you say, well, have you had anxiety on and off throughout your lifetime? The most of the time, they'll say yes. Then if you say, can you point to the specific trigger that causes it? Very often, they'll say no. I mean, yes, I know some of my triggers, but I could be sitting in a podcast just like this in a very calm environment. There's no threats around and all of a sudden, I get overwhelmed by anxiety. I can be driving home from work on an otherwise innocuous day and I can be overwhelmed by anxiety. Well, that is not coming from your outside environment. This is coming from a process called methylation, and it is caused from excess catecholamines entering the brain and an inability to down regulate these. So the body's entering this mild fight or flight response without the presence of a fear. See, remember that as sophisticated as we like to think our brains are, it's really not. Our brain is very primal. You know what the brain cares about? The brain cares about survival. And so it doesn't care how fat or skinny you are, how pretty or ugly you are. It doesn't care about your skin, your hair. It cares about survival. And so when we understand that the brain does not know the difference between perception and reality, we start to understand how it can play tricks on us. So I always use the example that, let's say you drove home tonight and you got out of your car. When you got home, you got out of your car and somebody was standing in front of you with a knife. It's a very real threat, right? You'd have a fight or flight response. Your pupils would dilate, your heart rate would increase, your extremities would flood with blood. Your hearing would get very acute. Your brain would flood with catecholamines. You are getting ready to fight or flight. But you could also be laying on the 30th floor of a condo building in bed and start thinking about getting eaten by a shark. There is zero chance of a shark getting out of the ocean, going up a 30th floor elevator, right? Coming into your condo and biting you in that bed. But you can have the exact same response.