The Effects of Food-Related Compounds on the Central Nervous System

The blood-brain barrier is a border that prevents certain substrates in our blood from crossing into the central nervous system. A lot of these compounds act through signaling pathways, so they bind to these kind of protein signaling pathways and they influence a particular pathway. So it's possible that we have compounds in the diet that don't have to necessarily, that are metabolized in the gut by the bacteria that we have. Those metabolites are absorbed in greater quantities than the parent compound that we've consumed.