Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body’s Most Underrated Organ

by Giulia Enders

(often known as high-fructose corn syrup). Studies have shown that this syrup can suppress leptin, the hormone that makes us feel full, even in people who are not fructose intolerant. A salad containing the same amount of calories but with a homemade vinaigrette or yogurt dressing will keep you feeling full for longer.

While our hunter-gatherer ancestors ate up to five hundred different local roots, herbs, and other plants in a year, a typical modern diet includes seventeen different agricultural plant crops at most. It is not surprising that our gut has a few problems with a dietary change of that scale.

When the body has returned to a healthy equilibrium, even a sensitive gut can usually sort itself out. Then there is no need to impose a lifelong ban on certain products, but simply to make sure you consume them in quantities your system can easily cope with.

what we eat disappears into the realm of what scientists call smooth muscle.

Smooth muscle is not under our conscious control. Under the microscope, it looks very different from the tissue of the muscles we can control consciously, such as the biceps.

The microscopic structure of smooth muscle resembles an organic network, and it moves in mellifluous waves.

Our bellies don’t rumble when we’re hungry, but when there is a long enough break between meals to finally get some cleaning done!

Food needs to be digested in peace and not swept ahead too soon in a cleaning frenzy. Constant snacking means there is no time for cleaning. This is part of the reason some nutritional scientists recommend we leave five hours between meals.

Just like the small intestine, it bulges as it processes the food it receives, so as to hold it where it needs it to be.

However, it tends to remain in one position for a long time without moving—something

Anatomy books depict it in this way—like a child who blinks when the class photo is taken to appear in the yearbook looking dopey forevermore.

Most people are familiar with glutamate as a flavor enhancer, but it is also released by our nerves.

Those whose stomach stumbles less than once a week can turn to simple remedies for relief, such as antacids from the pharmacy or household cures like raw potato juice.

Incidentally, a 30-degree upper body inclination is also good for the cardiovascular system.

When the brain is stressed, vomiting expels partly digested food in order to save the energy required to complete the digestive process.

This is an acupuncture point that is now recognized by Western medicine as effective against nausea and vomiting.

If you don’t happen to have an acupuncture needle handy, you can try gently stroking the skin at that point until symptoms improve. This technique has not been proven in scientific studies, but it may be worth trying a little self-experimentation. In traditional Chinese medicine, stimulating this point is believed to activate the energy pathway, or meridian, running up the arm and through the heart, which relaxes the diaphragm and then runs on through the stomach and into the pelvis.

Between 10 and 20 percent of people in the United States are constipated. If you want to join this club, you must fulfil at least one of the following conditions: bowel movement less than three times a week; particularly hard stool a quarter of the time, often in pellet form (• • •), which is difficult or impossible to pass without help (medication or tricks); no satisfying feeling of emptiness on leaving the toilet.

Constipation results from a disconnect between the nerves and the muscles of the gut when they are no longer working toward quite the same goal.

The best parameter for assessing constipation is not how often you need to go to the toilet, but how difficult it is.

Dietary fiber is not digested in the small intestine and can knock on the wall of the large intestine in a friendly way to say there is someone here who wants to be shown the way out.

The best results are produced by psyllium seed husks and the rather more pleasant-tasting plum. Both contain not only fiber, but also agents that draw extra fluids into the gut—making

Those with no plum compartment in their suitcase can buy dietary fiber in tablet or powdered form from their pharmacy or drug store. One ounce (30 grams) is an appropriate daily dose of dietary fiber.

the rocking squat technique. Sitting on the toilet, bend your upper body forward as far as possible toward your thighs, then straighten up to the sitting position again. Repeat this a few times and it should begin to work.

The more moisture, well-fed gut bacteria, or molecular chains are contained in the gut, the more motivated it will be to move.

Cinnamon

There is only one other organ in the body that can compete with the gut for diversity—the brain. The gut’s network of nerves is called the “gut brain” because it is just as large and chemically complex as the gray matter in our heads.

Were the gut solely responsible for transporting food and producing the occasional burp, such a sophisticated nervous system would be an odd waste of energy. Nobody would create such a neural network just to enable us to break wind. There must be more to it than that.

We humans have known since time immemorial something that science is only now discovering: our gut feeling is responsible in no small measure for how we feel. We are “scared shitless” or we can be “shitting ourselves” with fear. If we don’t manage to complete a job, we can’t get our “ass in gear.” We “swallow” our disappointment and need time to “digest” a defeat. A nasty co...

The vagus nerve is the fastest and most important route from the gut to the brain.

So, this nerve works something like a telephone connection to the switchboard at a company’s headquarters, transferring messages from staff out in the field. The brain needs this information to form a picture of how the body is doing. This is because the brain is more heavily insulated and protected than any other organ in the body.

The gut, by contrast, is right in the thick of it. It knows all the molecules in the last meal we ate, inquisitively intercepts hormones as they swim around in the blood, inquires of immune cells what kind of day they’re having, and listens attentively to the hum of the bacteria in the gut. It is able to tell the brain things about us it would never otherwise have had an inkling of.

That makes it the body’s largest sensory organ. Eyes, ears, nose, or the skin pale by comparison.

The gut

Experiments like the one with the balloon show that feeling unwell and negative emotions can arise via the gut–brain axis when the gut’s threshold is lowered or when the brain insists on having information it would not normally receive. Such a state of affairs may be caused by tiny but persistent (so-called micro-) inflammations, bad gut flora, or undetected food intolerances.

Like patients with irritable bowel syndrome, sufferers of these conditions also show increased rates of depression and anxiety.

Chicken or egg

Stress is thought to be among the most important stimuli discussed by the brain and the gut.

It is kind enough to save energy on digestion, producing less mucus and reducing the blood supply. However, this system is not designed for long-term use. If the brain permanently thinks it is in an emergency situation, it begins to take undue advantage of the gut’s compliance.

As with emotional vomiting in response to upsetting situations, the gut reacts by ridding itself of food to save energy so it is available to the brain.

The difference is that real stress situations can continue for much longer than minor upsets. If the gut has to continue to forego energy in favor of the brain, its health will eventually suffer.

One theory proposed by research bacteriologists is that stress is unhygienic. The altered circumstances stress creates in the gut allow different bacteria to survive there than in periods of low stress.

We could say stress changes the weather in the gut.

If this theory is true, that would make us not just the victims of our own gut bacteria, but also the gardeners of our inner world. It would also mean that our gut is capable of making us feel the negative effects long after the period of stress is over.

So the process of making decisions based on gut feeling may involve the gut recalling how it felt in similar situations in the past. If

The nervous messages from a worried gut can also become embedded in a person’s mind. If it is the case that antidepressants increase neuroplasticity, they may work by loosening up such negative thought patterns.

The American researcher Dr. Michael Gershon takes this line of thought one stage further. He is interested in the possibility of developing effective antidepressants that only influence the gut and do not have an effect on the brain.

This would be particularly useful in treating the sudden onset of severe depression in people whose lives are otherwise fine. Perhaps it is their gut that needs a session on the therapist’s couch and their head is not to blame at all.

Anyone who suffers from anxiety or depression should remember that an unhappy gut can be the cause of an unhappy mind.

We are human beings, with arms and legs, genitals, a heart, lungs, and a gut. Science’s concentration on the brain has long blinded us to the fact that our self is made up of more than just our gray matter.

One of the most fascinating parts of the brain that can receive information from the gut is the insula, or insular cortex.

his theory that human self-awareness originates in the insular cortex.