Of Mind and Microbiota

New discoveries are regularly made about the human body, and a lot of those discoveries center on how important the microbiota – the bacteria, fungi, viruses and other tiny organisms – that live in our guts are for our health and wellbeing. The ability of those little guys to flourish and procreate is the key to a surprising array of human illnesses, everything from obesity (which you might expect of gut biota) to mental health issues such as depression and Parkinson’s disease.

For years science thought that the microbiota mostly played a role in food digestion, and communicated to higher function systems – like the brain – only through hormonal pathways. However, it turns out that the microbiota in your gut can communicate directly with your brain by stimulating fast-response neurotransmitters in the enteroendocrine cells lining the digestive tract, where “gut enteroendocrine cells locally excite sensory nerves through release of the neurotransmitter glutamate. A recent study of enterochromaffin cells, a subset of enteroendocrine cells, also found that gut signals are transmitted at epithelial-neural synapses through release of the neurotransmitter serotonin. Together, these findings overturn a decades-old dogma that enteroendocrine cells signal exclusively through hormones.”

These cells are also believed to stimulate the release dopamine directly into your brain as well.  Dopamine and serotonin are basically little chemical messages letting your brain know whether or not you are a happy camper. Without these messages, you can become sad … even clinically depressed. Malfunctioning  microbiota, unable to thrive in a hostile gut biome, are probably why people with depression either lose their appetite or binge on junk food to try to alleviate some of the sadness.  Unfortunately, both these approaches do more harm to the microbiota. They either don’t have enough foodstuff to utilize, or the cheap sugars in junk food make give them a temporary boast and then burn them out. 

Happily for people who suffer depression, healing the microbiota may actually offer a drug-free way to manage depression. In a clinical trial in Australia, every one of the test subjects put on a the modified Mediterranean diet (the “ModiMed” diet) felt better, and more than 1/3 of the trial subjects “no longer met criteria for depression” – they were basically in remission! Moreover, “calories were not restricted and body weight stayed about the same for everyone in the study, so people didn’t have to lose weight to feel better.” It was all down to creating a better environment for the microbiota.

Fibromyalgia (a disease that has been historically downplayed and mocked as largely psychosomatic because it effects women disproportionally) may also be borne from an maladjusted gut biome. Someone who suffers from fibro may be having the flushed skin, flares of pain, and digestive issues because the microbiota in their gut has too many of some biota and not enough of others. So many people may be effected by fibro in modern, industrialized nations because our diets are mainly super-processed crap and sugar, which alters the microbial gut makeup in harmful ways compared to the guts of people still eating a more ‘normal’ human diet. In short, kids and adults in the so-called 3rd world may have less allergies and things like irritable bowel syndrome and chronic fatigue syndrome because they still eat ‘real’ food rather than Salty-Fluff-in-a-Box like we do in so-called 1st world nations.

As someone with both depression and fibromyalgia, I’ve been keeping up with the research on microbiota – and the links between diet and health — as best as I can for almost a decade now. My interest in increasing my ‘good’ microbiota got me started on probiotics and eating organic food (which has less of the pesticide which may be killing helpful biota) and made me leery of a blanket approval of GMO products. (I’m fine with GMO rice made to handle drought, but worried how GMO tomatoes with spliced scorpion genes might effect the gut’s microbiota.) Reading the various findings about gut biome and health also made me receptive to try a new ‘diet drink’ called Plexus a couple of years ago when my friend Brenda Bobo Sanders recommended it.

Now, I do NOT diet. Not in the restricted calories sense. I’ve ready Susan Bordo’s book Unbearable Weight and I am not falling for the patriarchal bullshit that I must be thin to be worthy of life as a woman. But I was willing to try Plexus because Brenda said it had helped her fibro symptoms. I wasn’t interested in weight loss (per se) but the idea of fewer fibro symptoms was too tempting to resist.

Let me be clear – there has been NO official medical study of Plexus and it’s effects on fibro. The purported effect on fibro is all anecdotal and word-of mouth. However, that being said …  OMG has it reduced my fibro symptoms!! It could be placebo effect, but I feel SOOOOOOO much better now that I am drinking the “pink drink” every morning. I think I am even experiencing weight loss, but since I don’t have a scale I cannot say for sure. My jeans are loser … but I am way more thrilled by the lack of pain and increased energy than I am by something as ephemeral as weight loss.

Plexus slim HAS been clinically demonstrated to improve gut health, and a healthier gut has made for a healthier me. Since I have been drinking it daily, my ‘crazy pills’ have been more effective for my depression (not proof, only anecdotal of course!) and I can get more done without being too tired and achy to move. Trips to the loo haven’t been sources of dread either! It isn’t cheap … but I can say it has been worth every penny.

Since it improves gut health in general, I decided to let my 13 year old daughter try it as well. Both she and I have Asperger’s syndrome, and there is a slew of new research about the “the bidirectional interactions between the central nervous system and the gastrointestinal tract (brain-gut axis) and the role of the gut microbiota in the central nervous system” and autism spectrum disorder. If nothing else, the Plexus would make her gut healthier … and that is never a bad thing. God knows making her diet wheat-free when she was 6 helped tremendously, so I’ve seen first hand how much food/gut effects an Aspy. She’s been on it less than a month, but it seems to be helping some of the mood instability and bathroom issues … here’s hoping for continued benefit.