The Mind-Gut Connection: How the Hidden Conversation Within Our Bodies Impacts Our Mood, Our Choices, and Our Overall Health

by Emeran Mayer

It’s clear that the increased availability of animal protein has had significant benefits. It has played a major role in enabling our brains to grow larger over the course of human evolution, and it has helped increase our average height over the past century. But in contrast to our ancestors’ protein supply, our livestock often live out their lives in small pens, eating feed (like corn) that their digestive systems are not built to handle, and which is designed to fatten them as efficiently as possible. They ingest antibiotics and other chemicals, which reduce the diversity of their gut microbes and make them more vulnerable to serious gut infections. For all these reasons, the meat, eggs, and milk that come from these animals—and derivatives of these products (often no longer recognizable as food) in today’s processed food—are dramatically different from only fifty years ago, and they have fundamentally altered our diet.