Dr. Will Bulsiewicz

That's the answer.

And simultaneously, we have discussed how our mood is affected.

Research is now showing, Jonathan, that the common tie between major depression and Parkinson's disease, and by the way, also Alzheimer's disease, is inflammation inside the brain.

So our immune system is getting activated in both of these places, both in the gut and in the brain.

And if you want to reduce these things, the most anti-inflammatory chemical that exists are the short-chain fatty acids, butyrate, acetate, and propionate.

And so it's kind of interesting to take that into consideration when we think about people that have irritable bowel syndrome.

And if you zoom in on their gut, what you would see is the gut microbiome is damaged.

There's a loss of diversity.

They've lost the anti-inflammatory microbes like bifidobacteria and lactobacilli.

They're not as well represented as they used to be.

And there's an increase in the pathogenic microbes, the inflammatory ones.

All right, so this is what we see in irritable bowel syndrome.

Well, actually, it kind of is in parallel to the same changes that we would see in a person who has a major depression.

similar changes in terms of loss of diversity and more inflammatory microbes and less of the protective ones.

So when we look at this whole picture, we start to see that the changes are occurring within the gut and the manifestation can affect gut rhythm, gut nerves, sensitivity,

and simultaneously can affect our mood.

So the advice that you received was to cut fiber.

Correct.

I understand why they said that.

On some level, if the only thing we cared about was improving your symptoms, fiber is hard for the gut microbes to digest.