Looking at Our ‘Other’ Brain

There’s a lot of science these days linking our ‘other’ brain to our primary brain.

That ‘other’ brain is your gut.

Signals pass both ways between your gut and brain all the time. Health and disease in one of them can affect the other one.

There are actually more nerve cells in your gut than anywhere else in your body other than your brain. It’s why you have ‘gut feelings’. Or ‘butterflies in your stomach’. Having awful thoughts might be ‘gut-wrenching’.

Gut health can have a big effect on mood.

It can also have an effect on a lot of cognitive issues.

One experiment looked at strokes. Scientists noticed often right after a stroke in mice, their gut became ‘leaky’, indicating poor gut health initially. Leaky guts can allow bad bacteria to circulate through the body and cause infections.

Infections are common in human stroke victims as well.

As we age the diversity of our gut flora decreases.

Gut health is now being linked to cognitive issues like Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia.

Another experiment on mice transplanted gut samples from mice that had Alzheimer’s to healthy mice. The result was that the healthy mice started showing signs of Alzheimer’s.

That’s why it amazes me that doctors don’t seem to talk about diet all that much. You would think what you eat would be the most important factor in a healthy gut.

We’re looking more into the gut at our assisted living homes. We are feeding everyone low-carb diets free from seed oils and sugar.

We are also signing up one of our residents for a gut mapping test. It’s called a GI-map from Rupa Health. It costs about $300 or $350 for an additional leaky gut test.

Of course it is not covered by insurance (it should be!) and you have to have a doctor order it.

The test is able to map someone’s gut from a stool sample. It will provide insight into the microbiome composition, the presence of pathogens, and other marker’s of gut health for our resident.

The particular resident has both Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

Hopefully from the test information, we can improve our resident’s gut health through some targeted therapies.

At this point we have collected the sample and sent it in for testing. As we receive the results I will be happy to share them with you. The family is ok with this as well.

Then we’ll see what we can do to improve the gut health of the residents. And hopefully improve his cognitive health as well!