If you didn’t hear it, there
was a recent National Public Radio story on “How the bacteria in your gut may
affect your brain.” Here’s a link: http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=244526773&m=245913171
The show reports that “Doctors
have long had clues that there may be a connection between what's going on in
our heads and what's going on in other parts of our bodies.”
One of the hosts, Steve Inskeep
reports that it “Turns out you really can have a gut feeling about something,
because evidence has been mounting that those microbes in the body may be
important for our emotional health as well as our physical health.”
They went on to play an
audio interview between NPR’s Rob Stein and Dr. Emeran Mayer, a Professor
in the Departments of Medicine, Physiology and Psychiatry & Biobehavioral
Sciences at UCLA. Here’s the bit that caught my attention:
“MAYER: It really happens
rarely in science that you sort of stumble into an area that all of a sudden
opens up this completely new frontier.
STEIN: A frontier that could
help explain that old idea of gut feelings. And Mayer thinks he already has the
first good clues this may be true, after analyzing about 60 volunteers like
Pria.
MAYER: We found that the
type of community you have, of microbes you have in your gut, is reflected in
some ways in some basic architectural aspects of the brain.
STEIN: The brain connections
of people whose microbes are dominated by one species of bacteria look
different than those of people whose microbes are dominated by another species.
That suggests that the specific mix of microbes in our guts helps determine
what kinds of brains we have, how our brain circuits develop, how they're
wired.
MAYER: The brain circuits
obviously determine certain ways of how we perceive the world and react to the
world outside of us.
STEIN: This could help
explain why some people are born with brains that don't work the way they're
supposed to, causing problems like autism, anxiety, depression.
MAYER: It opens up a
completely new way of looking at brain function and health and disease. I think
that's, you know, kind of a revolutionary concept”
For me the research findings suggest that good microbes
in your gut make for better brain function. And, tantalizingly, improving those
microbes may also improve brain function.
And, since Greek Yoghurt is
a tasty source of good microbes, and I'm part Greek, I will continue to use it instead of sour cream
wherever I can.
And here’s a link to the
transcript: http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=244526773
Image
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