Ever thought about our stomachs affecting our thoughts and emotions?
“There is a huge and growing everyday body of evidence connecting the health of the gut to the health of the brain. In fact, there’s a saying in functional medicine, fire in the gut, fire in the brain, which means that if you have inflammation, parasites, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, fungal overgrowth, or dysbiosis in the gut, then that is going to produce an inflammatory response that in turn affects the brain and can cause inflammation and a whole bunch of other problems in the brain, and this is not a fringe theory at this point. It’s true that unfortunately not a lot of primary care doctors or even psychologists or psychiatrists are aware of this connection, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t well established in the scientific literature. It absolutely is. And in fact, it’s been known for almost a hundred years going back to some research that was done at Duke in the early 1930s and 1920s connecting the gut and the brain and even the skin in this axis—the gut–brain–skin axis, which I’ve written and spoken about before.”
This podcast goes into a lot of detail about how inflammation, anywhere in the body, can affect our minds (the frontal cortex).
Also, Kresser talks about the HPA axis, or the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis. If we’ve learned anything about topical steroid dependency, we know that overuse can lead to a suppression of the HPA axis. And then, add chronic, everyday stress to the situation, and you’ve got a system that is extremely overloaded.
The last big subject he touches on is deficiencies in the body that could be contributing to depression. If we are lacking in certain vitamins and aren’t using it optimally in the body (methylation issues) then it can be throwing our balance off.
I highly recommend this podcast if you wish to catch his more in depth explanations on depression and inflammation in the body. What we are eating and lacking in our diet could the reason we are mentally suffering and struggling to get through certain situations.
Preventable: Protecting Our Largest Organ 