Gut-Brain Relationship

How your gut and brain are connected?

Though your gut and brain are housed in different parts of your body, they are physically connected via the Vagus nerve originates in the brain stem and travels along to the gut, connecting the gut to the central nervous system. When it reaches the gut, it entangles itself to form little threads that wrap the entire gut.

Because the Vagus nerve penetrates the gut wall, it plays an essential role in the digestion of food but its key function is to ensure that nerve signals can travel back and forth between the gut and the brain. Signals between the gut and brain travel in both directions, making the brain and gut lifelong partners.

Before your gut and brain became distinct entities, they were one. They came from the same fertile egg that gave rise to all organs in your body. In fact, the central nervous system, made up of the brain and spinal cord, is formed by special cells known as neural crest cells. These cells migrate extensively throughout the developing embryo, forming the enteric nervous system in the gut. The enteric nervous system contains between 100 million and 500 million neurons, the largest collection of nerve cells in the body. That's why some people call the gut "the second brain".  It's also why the gut and brain influence each other so profoundly.

Role of Microbiome

Behind the gut-brain relationship is a huge collection of microorganisms that live in the gut so called "Microbiome". Your gut has about 39 trillion microorganisms in it. Collectively it weighs about three pounds, which is the same way as your brain. Our guts provide the bacteria with a place to live and thrive, and in return they perform crucial tasks for us that our bodies cannot perform on their own. We feed these organisms and they produce chemicals that we need.

When it comes to bacteria, there are good guys and bad guys. The microorganisms that live in the gut are normally good guys, but it's inevitable that some bad ones get mixed in. This is not necessarily a concern as your body generally make sure the good and bad bacteria stay at the right balance. But if diet, stress, or medication cause changes in gut bacteria, it can cause a ripple effect that leads to many negative health effects including mental function.

Scientists know that people who are depressed and anxious have very different microbiomes than people who are not depressed. With depression you have a higher number of bad bacteria that produce inflammatory chemicals, they send these inflammatory chemicals back to the brain and they get distributed in the body. Different collections of bacteria affect brain chemistry differently. For example, changes in proportions and function of Escherichia, Bacillus, Lactococcus, Lactobacillus and Streptococcus can result in changes in Dopamine levels and may predispose one to Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease.

In addition to regulating neurotransmitter levels, there are various other ways in which microbiota influence the gut brain connection. They are involved in the production of other important compounds like BDNF (brain derived neurotrophic factor) which supports the survival of existing neurons and promotes new neuron growth and connections. They influence the integrity of the gut wall which protects the brain and the rest of the body from substances that need to be confined in the gut.

How to take care of your good gut bacteria?

The ideal scenario is to have a diverse population of bacteria strains. Similar to fertile top soil needing diverse microorganisms, our microbiome values diversity! There are many factors that influence your gut bacteria diversity.

1. Diet

Clean up your diet by eliminating or reducing processed foods, sugar and red meat. Diets high in processed foods, sugar, red meat and fast food promote the bad bacteria.

Eat safe prebiotics. Prebiotics are the fiber that feeds the bacteria and keeps them in circulation. These are foods that are high in inulin, polyphenols and polyunsaturated fatty acids. Some examples of prebiotics are onion, garlic, bananas, walnuts, oily fish, and oats. Check out our article 'Eat for your Microbiome'

Eat probiotics. Probiotics contain the actual bacteria that you ingest to increase the good population of bacteria. You can get them from your diet, or supplements. It's always best to get important nutrients from your food rather than supplements because these foods contain live bacteria. Some examples of dietary probiotics are yogurt, sauerkraut, kimchi, pickles and kombucha.

You can increase the diversity by taking probiotic supplements along with eating probiotic food. The probiotic capsules contain freeze dried bacteria, that reconstitute once they get past the stomach and into the gut.

It matters when you take your probiotic supplements - you need to take them on an empty stomach before for your meal because your stomach secretes acid as part of the digestive process to break down your food. The most common good bacteria strains can survive the stomach acid if they're not exposed to the acid for too long. If you eat them with a heavy meal, there's a long waiting line as the food gets processed so the bacteria can get killed off while they sit in the stomach.

2. Sleep

Bacteria are sensitive to circadian rhythm changes, so poor sleep promotes bad bacteria and increases inflammation. Set a consistent bedtime that allows you to get seven to nine hours of sleep each night. Even if you've never been depressed or anxious, good gut health begets good overall health including maintaining a proper weight.

3. Stress

As mentioned earlier, the gut-brain connection works both ways. So if gut bacteria can influence the brain, it is also true that the brain can change gut bacteria. All it takes is 2 hours worth of psychological stress to completely change bacteria in your gut.

For example, Lactobacillus normally help break down sugars into lactic acid, prevent harmful bacteria from lining the intestine and protect your body against fungal infections. But when you are stressed, stress disrupts its functioning, leaving you expose to harm.

When you have depression or anxiety, all these normal protective effects on the gut are compromised. As a result, food is not properly absorbed resulting in negative effects on the rest of the body.

4. Aerobic Activity

Aerobic activity improves the diversity of your microbiome. This could be 30 minutes of brisk walking or swimming five days a week.

Medications/Antibiotics

Lots of Medications and not just antibiotics can change the population of your gut in a negative way.

EAT FOR YOUR MICROBIOME

Take care of your microbe community and it will take care of you!

When we start to think about food, we are talking about a relationship with mother nature.

It starts with Photosynthesis which is a process that takes place in the chloroplasts of green leaves - carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air and water (H2O) from the soil, are combined to capture light energy and transform it to biochemical energy in the form of simple sugars. These simple sugars are the building blocks for life above and below the ground.

Plants also transform sugar into a great diversity of other carbon compounds, including starches, proteins, organic acids, cellulose, lignin, waxes and oils. Fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds and grains are ‘packaged sunlight’ derived from photosynthesis. The oxygen our cells and the cells of other living things utilize during aerobic respiration is also derived from photosynthesis. We have a lot to thank green plants for!!

As we bring the food into our body, we are in relationship with the microbiome (all the bacteria, fungi and beyond) that exist in our body as it digests all of our food. The microbiome is the life-giving garden within us and feed us a different nutrients than is on our plate.

The diverse microbiome is smart to know what we need today whether it's neurotransmitters we need to produce or it's nutrient delivery that we need. For example, it's going to extract vitamin c during the day you need a lot more vitamin c, it will interact with the gut membrane to induce serotonin and dopamine during the day you did not get enough sleep. We should be humbled by the fact that we have these nurse maids to take care of us every day.

Now we understand how the microbiome is critical to human biology. Scientists can trace cancer, autoimmune disease, autism, Alzheimer's, all back to changes within the gut flora. They may all be triggered by collapses of complexity of microbiome before the disease emerges. To begin the journey into a healthy human body, we need to start thinking more about what the gut microbiome needs and less about what the human body needs.

Be closer to the garden

The best way to experience medicinal quality in the plant or the fruit is right at the source. The further from its source, the more the reduction in medicinal quality and the more concentration of the sugar as it is ripens. In the grocery store, imported fruits and vegetables typically will come through extremely long supply chains with aid of chemicals. They have to be picked unripe and then ripened often under ethylene gas in the cargo containers to get them to ripen on the way to the store so that they look like they're ready to consume. They're long detached from soil and their biophotonic capacity therefore losing medicinal quality, the biophenols and natural scent.

Eat variety and colorful

The gut microbiome needs a massive variety of nutrients and in that variety create a diversification of the microbiome. Pick the most colorful plate of fresh produce you can. Use your sensory organs to find the right fruits and vegetables. Start with color, go to scent and then finally the tongue. Your tongue is an extraordinary analytical assay as it can measure thousands of chemicals in a split second and in so doing it's going to know whether you've got a really medicinal fruit or vegetable or an empty one. The more micronutrients you get the more opportunity you have for an explosion of micronutrient or microbiome diversity to support small and large ecosystems within the gut and gut lining.

In all of our arguments over carbohydrates protein and fat, we forgot to talk about the most important macronutrient within food which is of course fiber. Fiber has many different varieties (soluble and insoluble types as general concepts) of shapes and purposes which demands many different types of microbiome to interact with. The more variety and fiber the better for composting process of your gut.

Eat seasonal

As we get seasonal infections and aliments, it's mother nature who produces seasonal fruit and vegetable so as to consume as food as well as a substitute to medicine. For example, Oranges are available in winter. While eating oranges provides instant energy, it also helps to keep the skin from drying up and cracking. Mangoes are available in summer, it keeps the stomach cool and does not allow indigestion due to excessive summer heat.

When you buy seasonal fruits, you know that the nutrition level is high and fresh as they are closer to the source. When plants are grown off season, they can't follow their normal developing and maturing rhythms. When produce is harvested in season it is packed with more nutrients and simpler on your wallet compared to produce that is grown off season with the aid of possibly harmful chemicals, less nutrients and more expensive.

Reference -- Christine Jones PhD., Zach Bush MD.

What is Regenerative Agriculture?

"There can be no life without soil and no soil without life; they have evolved together"

--Charles E. Kellogg, USDA Yearbook of Agriculture, 1938

Regenerative agriculture is a method of farming that “improves the resources it uses, rather than destroying or depleting them”-- According to the Rodale institute

Regenerative Agriculture is a holistic land management practice that leverages the power of photosynthesis in plants to close the carbon cycle, and build soil health, crop resilience and nutrient density. Regenerative agriculture improves soil health, primarily through the practices that increase soil organic matter. This not only aids in increasing soil biota diversity and health, but increases biodiversity both above and below the soil surface, while increasing both water holding capacity and sequestering carbon at greater depths, thus drawing down climate-damaging levels of atmospheric CO2.

Degenerative farming practices destroy the soil while regenerative practices create a healthier soil structure. Regenerative Agriculture is the paradigm to build for all life on earth including human.

"If you take care of your soil, it will take care of you"

Why Regenerative Agriculture?

For a Healthier Future "Restoring nutrient density to food"

Soil dysfunction impacts on human and animal health. Over the last 70 years, the level of every nutrient in almost every kind of food has fallen between 10 and 100 percent. This is an incredibly sobering fact. An individual today would need to consume twice as much meat, three times as much fruit, and four to five times as many vegetables to obtain the same amount of minerals and trace elements available in those same foods in 1940.

Dr. David Thomas has provided a comprehensive analysis of historical changes in food composition from tables published by the Australian Medical Research Council, the Ministry of Agriculture, the Ministry of Fisheries and Foods, and the Food Standards Agency. By comparing data available in 1940 with that in 1991, Thomas demonstrated a substantial loss in mineral and trace element content in every group of food he investigated.

Publication Title: The Power of The Plate: the case for regenerative organic agriculture in improving human health. Issued by: RODALE Institute, Year of publication: 2020

Publication Title: Why would a sane society support ecologically destructive food production when it isn't necessary? Issued by: New Foundations Farms, Year of publication: June 2020

Fight Climate Crisis "The soil carbon sink"

Soil can function as a carbon ‘source’ - adding carbon to the atmosphere - or a carbon ‘sink’ - removing CO2 from the atmosphere. The dynamics of the source-sink equation are largely determined by land management.

Over millennia a highly effective carbon cycle has evolved, in which the capture, storage, transfer, release and recapture of biochemical energy in the form of carbon compounds repeats over and over. The health of the soil - and the vitality of plants, animals and people - depends on the effective functioning of this cycle.

Technological developments since the Industrial Revolution have produced machinery capable of extracting vast quantities of fossil fuels from beneath the Earth’s surface - as well as machinery capable of laying bare large tracts of grasslands and forests. Taken together, these factors have resulted in the release of increasing quantities of CO2 to the atmosphere while simultaneously destroying the largest natural sink over which we have control. The decline in natural sink capacity has amplified the effects of anthropogenic emissions.

Over the last 150 years, many of the world’s prime agricultural soils have lost between 30% and 75% of their carbon, adding billions of tonnes of CO2 to the atmosphere. Losses of soil carbon significantly reduce the productive potential of the land and the profitability of farming. Soil degradation has intensified in recent decades, with around 30% of the world’s cropland abandoned in the last 40 years due to soil decline. With the global population predicted to peak close to 10 billion by 2050, the need for soil restoration has never been more pressing.

Publication Title: Regenerative Organic Agriculture and Climate Change.: A Down-to-Earth Solution to Global Warming, Issued by: RODALE Institute, Year of publication: 2020

Five Principles for Soil Restoration

Publication Title: Five Principles for Soil Restoration: Light Farming: Restoring carbon, organic nitrogen and biodiversity to agricultural soils, Issued by Christine Jones, PhD

1. Green is good - and yearlong green is even better

Every year, photosynthesis draws down hundreds of billions of tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere. Green plants are the most powerful tool we have at our disposal for the restoration of soil function and reduction in atmospheric levels of CO2. While every green plant is a solar-powered carbon pump, it is the photosynthetic capacity and photosynthetic rate of living plants that drive the biosequestration of stable soil carbon.

2. Microbes matter!!

One of the most important groups of plant-dependent soil-building microbes are mycorrhizal fungi. These extraordinary ecosystem engineers access water, protect their hosts from pests and diseases - and transport nutrients such as organic nitrogen, phosphorus, sulphur, potassium, calcium, magnesium, iron and trace elements including copper, cobalt, zinc, molybdenum, manganese and boron - in exchange for liquid carbon. Many of these elements are essential for resistance to pests and diseases and resilience to climatic extremes such as drought, waterlogging and frost.

3. Diversity is not dispensable!!!

Every plant exudes its own unique blend of sugars, enzymes, phenols, amino acids, nucleic acids, auxins, gibberellins and other biological compounds, many of which act as signals to soil microbes. The greater the diversity of plants, the greater the diversity of microbes and the more robust the soil ecosystem.

The belief that monocultures and intensively managed systems are more profitable than diverse biologically-based systems does not hold up in practice. Monocultures need to be supported by high and often increasing levels of fertilizer, fungicide, insecticide and other chemicals that inhibit soil biological activity. The result is even greater expenditure on agrochemicals in an attempt to control the pest, weed, disease and fertility ‘problems’ that ensue.
It doesn’t need to be complicated. Something as simple as including one or two companions with a cash crop can make a world of difference.

4. Limit chemical use

The mineral cycle improves significantly when soils are alive. It has been shown, for example, that mycorrhizal fungi can supply up to 90% of plants N and P requirements. In addition to including companions and multi-species covers in crop rotations, maintaining a living soil often requires that rates of high-analysis synthetic fertiliser and other chemicals be reduced, to enable microbes to do what microbes do best.

Profit is the difference between expenditure and income. In years to come we will perhaps wonder why it took so long to realize the futility of attempting to grow crops in dysfunctional soils, relying solely on increasingly expensive synthetic inputs. No amount of NPK fertilizer can compensate for compacted, lifeless soil with low wettability and low water-holding capacity. Indeed, adding more chemical fertilizer often makes things worse. This is particularly so for inorganic nitrogen (N) and inorganic phosphorus (P). An often overlooked consequence of the application of high rates of N and P is that plants no longer need to channel liquid carbon to soil microbial communities in order to obtain these essential elements. Reduced carbon flow has a negative impact on soil aggregation - as well as limiting the energy available to the microbes involved in the acquisition of important minerals and trace elements. Lack of trace elements increases the susceptibility of plants and animals to pests and diseases.

5. Animal integration

A multitude of animal species were in contact with soils prior to agricultural intensification. There is no doubt that soil function is improved by their presence. The re-integration of animals into cropland can be extremely beneficial - for both the soils and the animals. The way livestock are managed has a significant impact on soil function. In actively growing perennial pastures, it is vitally important that less than 50% of the available green leaf be grazed at any one time. Retaining adequate leaf area reduces the impact of grazing on photosynthetic capacity and enables the rapid restoration of biomass to pre-grazed levels. Significantly more forage will be produced during the growing season - and more carbon sequestered in soil - if pastures are grazed ‘tall’ rather than ‘short’. In addition to maintaining photosynthetic capacity though management of leaf area, the height of pasture has a significant effect on moisture retention, nutrient cycling and water quality.

Documentaries

Why Regenerative Organic? Part 1: Big Agriculture is Broken

Episode 1 of a series of videos produced by Patagonia

Why Regenerative Organic? Part 2: Soil is the Solution

Episode 2 of a series of videos produced by Patagonia

Kiss the Ground : Trailer

Fresh produce provides maximum medicinal benefits…the freshest fruit and vegetables smell and taste amazing also!!

That’s why at Only-Good-Stuff we encourage pre-ordering.

Consuming the freshest produce available is the best way to experience the medicinal qualities of the produce - we minimize the supply time from the source to you. The further and longer from the source, the more the reduction in nutrients and the higher the concentration of sugar as the produce ripens.

Delivery of fruit and vegetables via a traditional supermarket cold/fresh “push” supply chain takes significant longer then with our pre-order, “pull” delivery system. A typical supermarket supply chain may take weeks from source to store. From source (may be domestic or overseas) -> repacking -> to distribution center -> delivery to various outlets -> display on shelves ready for purchase (may be kept for days on display).

Produce is long detached from the soil (which in many cases is not nutrient dense but instead is polluted with chemical fertilizers and pesticides) meaning it loses its medicinal qualities, biophenols and natural scent…Have you ever noticed there is little or no “fresh” produce smell in supermarkets?).

Imported fruit and vegetables are typically delivered via extremely long supply chains with the aid of potentially harmful chemicals, are typically less nutrient dense and are usually more expensive…all for your convenience - But is it worth it?