Interconnected Health and the Gut: Analysing My Latest Results and Exploring the Links Between Gut Health and Mental Health with Not One But Three Doctors!

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What does your gut health have to do with your mental health and physical health in general? Functional medicine practitioners, Doctors Tamsin Lewis, Victoria Fenton, and Alberto Pertusa join me today to talk about my latest gut microbiome test results, the links between gut health and mental health, and the importance of gut health to our overall health and wellbeing.

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Topics Discussed in this Episode:

The links between physical health, particularly gut health, and mental health
The GI-MAP and its advantages over other gut microbiome tests
What is candida, what are its symptoms, and how we can treat it
How often you should get a gut test
Gut protocols and gut supplements
The gut microbiota-brain axis

Key Takeaways:

Gut health is absolutely paramount and we can actually prevent lots of things like autoimmune conditions, mental health conditions, as well as physical health conditions by keeping our gut healthy.
The GI-MAP is an advanced form of testing the gut, which looks at the DNA of various pathogens in the gut as well as gut health markers.
Candida can be totally asymptomatic, but one of the most common symptoms is sugar cravings and people not being able to regulate their sugar consumption.
No gut protocol comes without consequences because we’re treating bacteria.
Gut supplements are either supporters or treatments, and they sometimes cross over.
Biofilms are the reason why gut issues remain. They can cover over the bacteria and basically protect them from your own immune system.
There’s a common misnomer that excess acidity in the gut causes reflux and causes problems with digestion. It’s actually impaired production of acid that often makes things worse.
Stress is one of the biggest things that affect gut health. It a bidirectional relationship — stressed guts create stressed people and vice versa.
Systemic inflammation, which is inflammation in the body and potentially the brain, is linked with potentially all mental conditions but the evidence is more for depression.
Any protocol that potentially improves gut health could directly or indirectly improve mental health.

Action Steps:

Get a gut microbiome test, particularly the GI-MAP.
Look at your gut microbiome in the context of you and how you feel, how your gut feels, how your energy feels and how your weight is.

Tamsin Lewis said:

“The bugs in the gut actually speak via the gut-brain axis. They actually speak to the brain via the nerves… there’s sort of the sickening process going on that these little things in the gut are waving via various neural mechanisms and then changing how you feel and function.”

Victoria Fenton said:

“These gut bugs can, to a certain extent, drive behaviour, because they need their food and their intake and they will actually be able to ask you to do that. It sounds nonsense, but actually, it can drive your cravings and it can change the way you want to select your food.”

Alberto said:

“What happens in the gut may actually be playing a significant role in what happens in the brain.”

Thanks for listening!

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Links to things we discuss in the show: