As a family medicine doctor at Evoke 5 Medical Center, 80% of what I do involves the gut. In my years of working with patients, I have seen firsthand that our G.I. system (aka the gut) is truly the pathway to everything. Our gut is responsible for breaking down food to give us nutrients, building neurotransmitters for our body to function, excreting certain toxins, and telling our genetic SNPs (the “light switches” of our genetic code) how to react to our environment.
The food we eat and the bacteria we house in our body talks to us through Messenger RNA (mRNA). This is how genetically good or bad things get “turned on” from our DNA to express certain genes or make certain proteins.
Your enteric nervous system (ENS) is the second-largest nervous system in your body, behind only the brain. In fact, your ENS is often called a “second brain.” It lives in your gastrointestinal tract and controls digestion, from swallowing to breaking down food to helping with nutrient absorption to elimination. Your ENS can control how you feel, how you think, how your body reacts to stress, how well you sleep, your hormones, and much more.
And it does all of this while communicating back and forth with the brain. Through the autonomic nervous system (parasympathetic and sympathetic), our gut can talk to our brain using the vagus nerve. This “gut-brain” connection is so important that there are more studies being done on this topic than anything else.
Nobody has a perfect gut. Even if you are the healthiest eater, you can still have problems stemming from food intolerances, deficiencies or bad organisms. When working with my patients, I look for signs and symptoms of inflammation. This includes, but is not limited to, bloating, diarrhea, constipation, brain fog, joint pain and skin issues.
Ongoing symptoms like these often indicate chronic inflammation throughout the G.I. system and the entire body. Chronic inflammation can stem from food intolerances and abnormal microbiome (all the bacteria that live in our gut). This can lead to chronic disease, such as autoimmune disorders, thyroid disorders, diabetes, cancer, heart disease and adrenal abnormalities. (Interesting fact: Babies initially get their gut microbiome from their mother through vaginal delivery. Children born via C-section don’t receive this, and that has been linked to a higher rate of conditions like asthma and autism.)
We have trillions of bacteria in our G.I. system that work in homeostasis with our body to create who we are. There are also many bacteria, yeast and viruses that can affect our genetics, mood, hormones and sympathetic neurologic system in negative ways. (Interesting fact: First-line therapy for depression now is a probiotic! Studies have also shown that transplanting certain bacteria in mice that were lacking a gut microbiome led to less anxiety.)
In the past, diagnosing gut issues has been a time-consuming exercise in trial and error. Now, with science and technology, we can take the guesswork away, efficiently and accurately diagnosing the issue and selecting the most effective treatment plan to optimize the gut.
At Evoke 5, I offer two different types of gut health testing to better pinpoint specific causes of inflammation:
1. Food sensitivity test. This involves in vitro measurement of specific IgG and IgA autoantibodies against 96 food allergens present in the human serum. The test can be used to help determine patients’ sensitivity to specific varieties of food.
2. Gut microbiome stool test, one of the most comprehensive digestive health tests available today. This test assesses bacteria, yeast, viruses and parasites in the gut microbiome, as well as relevant digestive and inflammatory markers.
By analyzing results from these tests and understanding how the gut functions, we can help mitigate inflammation, which in turn decreases or improves chronic disease. In many cases, we can get patients off of medication just by improving the gut. Less medication means less risk of bad side effects, more energy, less money spent on healthcare, more productivity at work, and an overall happier life.
Want to take a deeper dive into gut health? Here are some of my favorite resources:
- Harvard Health Publishing: “The gut-brain connection”
- Healthline: “The gut-Brain Connection: How it Works and the Role of Nutrition”
- National Library of Medicine: “The Microbiota-Gut-Brain Axis”
- Johns Hopkins Medicine: “The Brain-Gut Connection”
- Cleveland Clinic: “Gut-Brain Connection”
- Neural Academy: The Gut Microbiome and the Brain
- Brainbook: “Gut-Brain Link”
- The Conversation: “Fungal microbiome: Whether mice get fatter or thinner depends on the fungi that live in their gut”
- What Doctors Don’t Tell You: “Changing the Gut Microbiome Turns it into a Cancer Fighter”