Gut Health Influences Mental Health
Many of us have heard the expression “the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach”. That may be more true than we realized and it may apply to all of us. Until recently the research community had not given much thought to how gut health influences mental health.
While we all may feel sad or low in energy at times, depression is not a variation of one’s mood, but an illness. It has been conventionally described as a chemical imbalance, or, more specifically, a particularly low level of serotonin (the happy hormone) in the brain. And this could be a serious problem: out of approximately 40 million brain cells, most are influenced either directly or indirectly by serotonin – it impacts our mood, sexual desire, sleep and memory.
“Creating a healthy gut microbiota is being investigated as a viable treatment strategy for serotonin-related brain-gut axis disorders,” noted Behavioural Brain Research in January 2015, while Buchan adds: “Supplementing with probiotics has been shown to provide a multitude of health effects.”
Healing the gut is not an overnight process; one needs to create the correct environment for probiotics to be cultivated, otherwise they simply pass through our body as if in a hollow tube. Yet simple adjustments, including eating cultured (probiotic) food such as sauerkraut and kefir, can begin to lay a good foundation for change.
Whatever the individual health story is, researchers and doctors are clear: professional psychological, nutritional and biochemical support are imperative and essential to the healing of depression. Understanding inflammation and the gut certainly shines a whole new light on depression.
Source: Follow Your Gut To Know What Is Causing Your Depression – Longevity LIVE
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