Module 10: The Brain and the Gut
The gut and the brain are intimately linked and the focus of a new frontier in mental health research.
The organisms in your gut – mostly bacteria – are known as the microbiome and influence your brain function, especially mood, cognition and levels of anxiety.
Your brain and your gut are in constant communication. The gut is lined with millions of neurons and a nervous system superhighway called the vagus nerve that carries messages between the gut and the brain.
Increasingly, we understand that a healthy brain depends on a healthy gut. Having a more diverse microbiome is generally linked to better mental health and we’ll discuss the food moves to achieve this in upcoming modules.
Your gut and microbiome play a major role in regulating your immune system and levels of inflammation.
Every interaction with your environment has the power to change your microbiome, for better or worse, and this groundbreaking science gives us a powerful method to improve our mental health and mental fitness.
For these reasons, to heal the modern brain it is crucial that we all care for the health of our gut and the diversity of our microbiome.