Dr. Shebani Sethi
speaker
159 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Dr. Shebani Sethi’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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And you got about two pounds of poop in there of microbes in your GI tract. So what do these microbes do? Well, they help you digest your food. They produce vitamins. They regulate hormones. And they help you get rid of toxins. It interacts with your whole enteric nervous system and central nervous system. So the microbiome is a whole other thing that's involved, right?
You don't just have your brain brain and your second brain. You have your microbiome brain, let's call it, right? It's really important. And it helps regulate everything in your body. And it regulates mood particularly a lot.
Now the composition of your gut microbiome, and I'm going into this because it's important to understand if you're going to understand what to do about fixing your gut and how this all works, because I want you to understand the importance of understanding your gut as it regulates, regulating your mood and brain health and pretty much everything else.
So the composition of your gut flora, it varies from person to person. It depends on their diet, right? So if you're a hunter gatherer, and eating meat or bison all the time, or if you're a vegan, all that changes based on what you're eating. It changes based on your lifestyle, stress, toxins, genetics, all regulate the microbiome.
Now there's a large research project going on called the Human Microbiome Project. It helps map out the gut microbiome of individuals who are healthy and who who are sick to understand better their gut bacteria species. So what defines a healthy gut? What defines a sick gut? And how does that relate to different diseases?
Now what's amazing also to me, this blew my mind when I learned about it, is it a third to a half of all the metabolites in your blood, All the thousands of molecules floating around your blood that regulate everything in your body are not human. They're from your gut microbiome.
In other words, these molecules produced from bacteria in the gut are absorbed and then impact your whole biology, including your brain and your mood. There's still a lot we don't know about what makes a healthy gut or a sick gut, but we know a lot. Now, your gut microbiome can produce healing metabolites that keep your gut and immune system healthy. Things like short-chain fatty acids.
We'll talk about those soon. Vitamins like B12, for example. Riboflavin made in your gut. Enzymes. Or it can produce harmful metabolites. So bad bugs produce bad stuff. Good bugs produce good stuff. And the bad metabolites from bad bugs can be things like cytokines. We've learned about from COVID, the cytokine storm. These are inflammatory messenger molecules of your immune system. Endotoxins.
literally poisons. We call these lipopolysaccharides. These are endotoxins, things that are toxic, produced by bacteria that can be absorbed across a leaky gut, cause you to be inflamed and create disease, including obesity and mental health issues and much more. So bad bugs make you inflamed and almost all issues related to mental health.
And it's really important to understand almost all mental health issues and brain issues, whether it's Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, autism, ADD, depression, anxiety, bipolar disease, schizophrenia are all caused by inflammation in the brain. So if we fix the inflammation, we can fix many of these things. And we'll talk about how to do that soon. Now, what is this gut mood connection?
We talked about, so what is the gut and what is the gut brain and the second brain and the first brain and the hormones? Okay, we talked about all that. So the gut microbiome actually influences brain health and function, and it impacts your mood, impacts your stress level.
So literally you can have stress molecules produced in your gut that are not because of something happening outside, but something happening inside. And it increases the risk of depression, mental illness via a complex network of things. nerve cells, endocrine cells, or hormone cells, immune pathways. It's the psychoneuroendocrine immune system, right? We talked about this a lot.
It involves all sorts of activities like the transport of neurotransmitters, tabloids, cytokines, and certain species of gut bacteria are directly involved in the production of neurotransmitters affecting both the gut and the brain. Let's talk about some of them. So dopamine, for example, is best known for its role in reward pathways, pleasure, motivation.
For example, we know about Adderall or these... ADD drugs, they all stimulate dopamine pathways. Sugar does. All the addictive compounds we like too. So does altruism, by the way. By the way, there are certain bacteria that help increase dopamine. Things like lactobacillus plantarum, bacillus subtilis, bacillus cereus, and certain strains of E. coli that are beneficial. Pretty cool.
What about serotonin? Another important neurotransmitter involved in mood. It's involved in regulating various physiological processes, including the secretions of your intestinal tract, peristalsis, motility, respiration, blood vessel regulation, behavior, mood. We know all about Prozac. That's how it works through inhibiting serotonin reuptake in the nerve cells in the brain, which
makes you have more serotonin. Now, certain bacteria that are good can actually help improve the concentration of serotonin. And by the way, 90 to 95% of serotonin in the body is produced in the gut. But bacteria like Lactobacillus plantarum or Streptococcus thermophilus, which are healthy bacteria you can get through supplements or you can help
help grow their diet, actually help with improving serotonin. What about GABA? This is the relaxation neurotransmitter. It's sort of the receptor upon which Valium and the Benzos work. So GABA is sort of a relaxation neurotransmitter and it helps reduce neuronal excitability, helps reduce anxiety and stress. sleep.
And a lot of bacteria can help produce this in your gut, like bifidobacterium, lactobacillus plantarum, lactobacillus reuteri, lactobacillus rhamnosus, even things like acromantia. We talked about this a little with Darlene from Pendulum Therapeutics. She basically was growing acromantia in this big vat to be a probiotic.
And they started to analyze what was in one of the metabolites that the acromantia was producing. And they actually found a big spike and it turned out to be GABA. So this acromantia bacteria, which is so important for so many reasons and have many podcasts and things we've written about it I'll share it in the show notes. Acromantia actually produces GABA. So it's like a natural valium.
Other bacteria can influence the levels of neurotransmitters by encoding genes for enzymes that produce neurotransmitters or directly impacting the synthesis of neurotransmitters or the breakdown of neurotransmitters. So the microbiome plays a huge role in all sorts of neurotransmitter function.
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