Pod Insights The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett Moment 161: The Surprising Link Between Your Gut And Your Brain: Gary Brecka About this episode In this moment, world-leading wellness expert Gary Brecka explains the fundamental relationship between our mental and our gut health. For years people have thought that their anxiety and depression are either all in their head or a product of their environment, however, Gary says the gut is the crucial hub for mental well-being. He believes that our gut functions like an assembly line. If anything disrupts its pace or workings, the wider factory of our body and mind is at risk. As a result, Gary believes that it’s crucial, before anything else, to find out how your gut is working to ensure optimal mental and physical health.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:03 Gary Brecka? La majorité des personnes qui souffrent d'anxiété idiopathique ou générale à cause de faible sérotonine ont aussi des problèmes gènes. Vous me montrez une personne qui est vraiment déprimée et je vais vous montrer une personne qui souffre aussi de problèmes gènes sévères, soit gaspillage, ou bloch, ou diarrhée, constipation, irritabilité, crampement, parce que les mêmes neurotransmetteurs qui affectent ces états émotionnels sont aussi responsables de la motilité du gout, de la vitesse du gout. C'est la chose la plus importante dans toute la médecine bariatrique parce que les gens qui croient que ils ont toutes ces allergies, "je suis allergique à la farine, à la soja, à la pâte, à la laitue, aux noix, aux bananes, au gluten..." Oui, parfois ces allergies individuelles existent, mais la majorité du temps, même
0:45 Gary Brecka? si vous parlez à quelqu'un qui dit "Oui, je suis bloqué" ou "je m'occupe de l'asphalte", ou "crampement", ou "diarrhée", ou "constipation", ou "irritabilité", "je m'occupe de tous ces problèmes gènes", syndrome de l'oreille irritable, maladie de Crohn, l'ulcrite colite, tous ces noms que nous donnons aux conditions du gout. Quand vous leur demandez "Eh bien, qu'est-ce que vous êtes allergique à ?" Ils vous donnent cette liste de choses, puis vous leur posez une autre question et dites "Eh bien, si vous êtes vraiment allergique à la pâte, est-ce qu'il y a toujours un moment où vous pouvez manger de la pâte et ne pas avoir une réaction ?" La majorité du temps, les gens diront "Oui". Ok, vous savez que vous n'avez pas d'allergie. Les allergies ne sont pas transitoires, les allergies sont consistantes. Vous ne vous réveillez pas le lundi matin en étant allergique au lait, puis vous êtes allergique le dimanche soir, puis vous êtes alors allergique le samedi matin. Mais ce qui se passe quand les gens ont des problèmes gènes qu'ils ne peuvent pas expliquer
1:30 Gary Brecka? est qu'ils correspondent toujours à ce qu'ils ont mangé la dernière fois. Et il est difficile de faire cette connexion. Ils disent "Attendez une seconde, je mangeais la même chose le lundi et je suis en bonne santé, et je mangeais le même aliment le dimanche et j'ai brûlé comme un tic." Donc ce n'est pas une allergie, cela a à voir avec la motilité du gout. Donc si vous ne savez pas quel gène mutation vous avez qui cause une déficience, alors vous ne savez pas quoi supplémenter pour restaurer la motilité du gout. Mais une fois que vous le faites... The gut goes back to its normal pace. What's gut motility? It's the pace of the gut. So if you remember, Henry Ford was actually not made famous for the automobile. He was made famous for something called the assembly line. So the assembly line was just a glorified conveyor belt, right? And when you walked into his factory, they put a part on it at one end.
2:14 Gary Brecka? And about every six feet, somebody stood and tinkered with that part. So it went to me, I tinkered with it, it moved to the guy to my right. He did something to it, moved to the guy to his right. And by the time it reached the end of that conveyor belt, it's fully assembled. This is very analogous to how the human intestinal tract works. It's 30 feet long. It's a giant conveyor belt. You put parts on it at one end as they exit the stomach in a very acidic environment. And it moves slowly towards the rectum. And before it exits the rectum, it's in a relatively alkaline environment. So instead of having people standing along a conveyor belt, you have bacteria that are graded by pH. The sequence is very important.
2:55 Gary Brecka? So imagine what would happen if Henry Ford walked into his factory one day and doubled the speed of the conveyor belt. The entire assembly line would break down, not because there's anything wrong with the parts, the contents, not because there's anything wrong with the people that are working there, the bacteria, but because you changed the speed. What if he went in there one day and reversed the conveyor belt? What if he just ran it in the opposite direction? Throw up. It would screw the whole thing up, right? So by changing the pace of the gut, the speed of the gut, the conveyor belt, I've ruined this sequence of events. And I spend a lifetime trying to figure out what's wrong with the parts? What's wrong with the workers? What's wrong with the conveyor belt itself? Nothing.
3:39 Gary Brecka? It's how quickly or slowly it's running because the motility, this peristaltic activity is affected. And once you supplement for this deficiency and you return that activity to normal, you find that all of a sudden, these strange allergies eviscerate and all of this gas and bloating, diarrhea, constipation, and irritability, and all of this inability to equate things that I'm eating back to what is going on in my gut seem to go away. It's true with all kinds of conditions. You know, we have subscribed in this world to the fact that we are so affected by disease and pathology. And once I get you to To subscribe to the fact that you have a disease and it can get you to subscribe to a lifetime of medication.
4:22 Gary Brecka? Serotonin, for example, 90% of it resides in your gut. So if you don't have it here, you can't have it here. So depression rarely begins in the outside environment. It usually begins in the gut. Now, it may be trauma that led to the deficiency. But the fix is not in a chemical or synthetic or pharmaceutical blocking the brain's capacity to uptake these neurotransmitters. The fix is in restoring adequate levels to the body so it can naturopathically make its way back up the vagus nerve and arrive to the brain. Similar things are true with anxiety. I mean, if you actually have ever suffered from or know somebody who's suffered from anxiety, if you ask them three questions, you can find out very quickly that their anxiety is not coming from a cluster of symptoms. It's not coming from their outside environment.
5:07 Gary Brecka? It is coming from within them. It's coming from their physiology. Right? I mean, if you know someone who's suffered from anxiety and you say, "Well, have you had anxiety on and off throughout your lifetime?" The most of the time, they'll say yes. And then if you say, "Can you point to the specific trigger that causes it?", very often they'll say, "No." I mean, "Yes, I know some of my triggers, but I could be sitting in a podcast just like this in a very calm environment, there's no threats around, and all of a sudden I get overwhelmed by anxiety. I can be driving home from work on an otherwise innocuous day, and I can be overwhelmed by anxiety." Well, that is not coming from your outside environment, right? This is coming from a process called methylation, and it is caused from excess catecholamines entering the brain and an inability to down-regulate these.
5:50 Gary Brecka? So the body's entering this mild fight-or-flight response without the presence of a fear. See, remember that as sophisticated as we like to think our brains are, it's really not. Our brain is very primal. You know what the brain cares about? The brain cares about survival. And so, doesn't care how fat or skinny you are, how pretty or ugly you are, doesn't care about your skin, your hair, it cares about survival. And so, when we understand that the brain does not know the difference between perception and reality, we start to understand how it can play tricks on us. So I always use the example that, let's say you drove home tonight, and you got out of your car, when you got home, you got out of your car, and somebody was standing in front of you with a knife. It's a very real threat, right? You'd have a fight-or-flight response.
6:33 Gary Brecka? Your pupils would dilate, your heart rate would increase, your extremities would flood with blood, your hearing would get very acute, your brain would flood with catecholamines, you are getting ready to fight or flight. But you could also be laying on the 30th floor of a condo building in bed, and start thinking about getting eaten by a shark. There is zero chance of a shark getting out of the ocean, going up a 30th floor elevator, right? Coming into your condo and biting you in that bed. But you can have the exact same response. If you're watching a movie or something. Exactly. So one is entirely real, one is entirely perceived. The physiologic response is identical. So now, once we understand this, now we begin to understand how I can feel the presence of a fear, which is what anxiety is. It's a fear of something happening in the future.
7:17 Gary Brecka? Usually it's not going to happen, usually hasn't happened in the past, and is not likely to happen. But it's, it's, this fear starts to build up. You start to get very anxious. It can actually change your heart rate to the point where you can, panic attacks can land you in a hospital. Or it can be mild enough that it just causes you anxiousness, mild anxiety. But there's no presence of a fear. And so you start trying to correlate it to your outside environment, starts to drive you crazy because you go, "Well, I don't get it. I'm on vacation with my wife, or my spouse, and my kids, and I'm in the resort of a lifetime. I've been here a thousand times. I love this place. There's no reason I should feel like this." But all of a sudden, you have this feeling of anxiousness, anxiety. So these are, these are lack of raw material in the human body.
8:00 Gary Brecka? My mission is to try to help people by taking a genetic test once in their lifetime. Find out where is methylation broken? And then stop supplementing just for the sake of supplementing, and start supplementing for this deficiency so your body can thrive.
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