Understanding How The Microbiome Affects Every Aspect Of Your Health | This episode is brought to you by Joovv, ButcherBox, and TrueDark

There’s a foundational piece of Functional Medicine that I find surprises many conventional health practitioners: it’s that the health of our gut impacts every other part of the body—even the brain. There are several reasons for this. When working correctly, our gut digests our food and absorbs nutrients so we can have energy and vitality. It eliminates toxins and fights pathogens. It’s also the home of trillions of microorganisms that aid in these processes and do so much more, like manage inflammation and produce neurotransmitters.

I was excited to talk to Dr. Emeran Mayer on this episode of The Doctor’s Farmacy, all about nurturing the microbiome to support whole-body health and fight the epidemic of chronic disease. Dr. Emeran Mayer is the author of the recently released book The Gut-Immune Connection as well as The Mind-Gut Connection. He has studied brain-body interactions for the last forty years and is the executive director of the G. Oppenheimer Center for Neurobiology of Stress and Resilience, and the founding director of the UCLA Brain Gut Microbiome Center at the University of California at Los Angeles. His research has been supported by the National Institutes of Health for the past twenty-five years, and he is considered a pioneer and world leader in the area of brain-gut microbiome interactions and its clinical implications.

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Here are more of the details from our interview: 

• The most common denominator in the chronic disease epidemic (8:01)

• How Dr. Mayer came to take a systems approach to medicine (11:04)

• Rethinking disease through our evolving understanding of the gut microbiome (16:32)

• Metabolites produced in our gut influence our health, for better and worse (24:53)

• Our thoughts, feelings, emotions, and stress affect our gut microbiome and full-body health, and vice versa (32:07)

• What will it take for conventional medicine to adopt a systems approach in patient treatment? (35:23)

• Treating neurodegenerative and cognitive issues through diet and lifestyle (43:02)

• Eating to support the gut microbiome and inequities in access to foods that strengthen microbiome health (47:20)

• Our gut microbiome interactions in our bodies mimic the soil microbiome’s relationship to plant root systems (56:25)

• How industrial agriculture has reduced the nutritional value of our food by damaging the soil (58:56)

Learn more about Dr. Emeran Mayer at https://emeranmayer.com/ and get his new book,

THE GUT-IMMUNE CONNECTION: How Understanding Why We’re Sick Can Help Us Regain Our Health at https://emeranmayer.com/the-gut-immune-connection-book/

Follow Dr. Mayer on Facebook @emeranamayer, on Instagram @emeranmayer, and on Twitter @emeranamayer.