Gut Feeling: The Microbiome and Mental Health

1 / 2
Long understudied, the gut is beginning to be understood as a key player in division between disease and health, leaving scientists to go back to the drawing board to refocus on mental health and autoimmune diseases.
Long understudied, the gut is beginning to be understood as a key player in division between disease and health, leaving scientists to go back to the drawing board to refocus on mental health and autoimmune diseases.
2 / 2
“The Secret Life of Your Microbiome” by Susan L. Prescott, MD, PhD and by Alan C. Logan, ND with recipes from
“The Secret Life of Your Microbiome” by Susan L. Prescott, MD, PhD and by Alan C. Logan, ND with recipes from "The Gut Girl", Marlies Venier, dives into the underexplored key to health: the gut.

The Secret Life of Your Microbiome (New Society Publishers, 2017), by Susan L. Prescott, MD, PhD and by Alan C. Logan, ND presents the scientific connection between our bodies and the microbial world and suggests that the health industry not neglect the symbiosis of microbial and human life. The book includes recipes for a healthy microbiome from “The Gut Girl”, Marlies Venier, a skilled fermenter, blogger, and certified health coach. The following excerpt discusses the link between the gut, disease, and mental health from the theory of dysbiosphere, first described by John Arthur Thomson (1861-1933) as “the way life (Greek: bios) that surrounds us like a living globe (Latin: sphaera),” or “life in distress” (The Secret Life of Your Microbiome).

Shifting Psyche in the Dysbiosphere

At all hours of the day and night, just as surely as birds migrate and the Earth rotates on its axis, massive juggernauts traverse national highways and city streets. These semi-trailer trucks — 40-ton transport vessels unimaginable just a century ago — are filled to the brim with cargo that is driving dysbiosis — life in distress. Flinging open the back doors for forensic examination, we soon see the stash that is eroding life and health. Sugar-rich foods and beverages, cigarettes, ultra-processed foods, high-calorie/low-nutrient foods far removed from nature, energy drinks, and the raw material for fast food that gets assembled by workers who don’t receive a living wage are making their way to a city near you. These are all markers of a system of personal, public, and planetary health run amok. Yet, all the while, they are also our desperate attempts for a healing balm for all that ails us, along with literally truckloads of antidepressants. Distress in life serves only to increase the bloated haul.

Close to 30 million tons of sugar are hauled around the United States annually. The markers of our sedentary life — 37 million new televisions, 160 million new smartphones — scurry over interstate highways. Many more are destined for households in westernized and developing nations alike.

Psychotropic medications are increasingly prescribed to children, teens, and adults. Although prescription drugs don’t weigh much, they represent one of the most valuable commodities transported on US highways and rail routes — $914 billion per year. Despite having a per-pill weight which is next to nothing, the haul still amounts to over 200 tons of antidepressants, anti-anxiety, attention deficit, and sleep-enhancing medications. We also turn to dietary supplements to soothe us and help fill in nutritional voids — $30 billion worth of approximately 30,000 different dietary supplements in North America alone. Just one small segment of this industry — omega-3 and other fatty acids — tells a story of the sheer volume of our desire to be fixed: 120 million tons of fatty acid supplements are moved around our global transportation systems.

  • Published on Aug 14, 2018
Comments (0) Join others in the discussion!
    Online Store Logo
    Need Help? Call 1-800-234-3368