The Mind-Gut Connection Quotes

“Many of the gut signals reaching the brain will not only generate gut sensations, such as the fullness after a nice meal, nausea and discomfort, and feelings of well-being, but will also trigger responses of the brain that it sends back to the gut, generating distinct gut reactions. And the brain doesn’t forget about these feelings, either. Gut feelings are stored in vast databases in the brain, which can later be accessed when making decisions.”
― Emeran Mayer, The Mind-Gut Connection: How the Hidden Conversation Within Our Bodies Impacts Our Mood, Our Choices, and Our Overall Health

“Recent studies suggest that in close interactions with its resident microbes, the gut can influence our basic emotions, our pain sensitivity, and our social interactions, and even guide many of our decisions—and not just those about our food preferences and meal sizes.”
― Emeran Mayer, The Mind-Gut Connection: How the Hidden Conversation Within Our Bodies Impacts Our Mood, Our Choices, and Our Overall Health

“The drugs used most often to treat depression are the so-called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors such as Prozac, Paxil, and Celexa. These drugs boost the activity of the serotonin signaling system, which psychiatry had long thought is exclusively located in the brain. However, we know today that 95 percent of the body’s serotonin is actually contained in specialized cells in the gut, and these serotonin-containing cells are influenced by what we eat, by chemicals released from certain species of gut microbes, and by signals that the brain sends to them, informing them about our emotional state.”
― Emeran Mayer, The Mind-Gut Connection: How the Hidden Conversation Within Our Bodies Impacts Our Mood, Our Choices, and Our Overall Health

“Gut microbiota have also been linked to depression, which is the second leading cause of disability in the United States.”
― Emeran Mayer, The Mind-Gut Connection: How the Hidden Conversation Within Our Bodies Impacts Our Mood, Our Choices, and Our Overall Health

“In Chinese philosophy, the concept of yin and yang describes how opposite or contrary forces can be viewed as complementary and interconnected, and how they give rise to a unifying whole by interacting with each other.”
― Emeran Mayer, The Mind-Gut Connection: How the Hidden Conversation Within Our Bodies Impacts Our Mood, Our Choices, and Our Overall Health

“Recent studies have shown that the composition of the nursing mother’s diet has a major influence on the baby’s risk for metabolic disease and obesity later on in life, and much of this is mediated by the early programming of the baby’s gut microbiota.”
― Emeran Mayer, The Mind-Gut Connection: How the Hidden Conversation Within Our Bodies Impacts Our Mood, Our Choices, and Our Overall Health

“Inside the cells of neglected rat pups, enzymes attached chemical tags called methyl groups to their DNA. This mode of inheritance is called epigenetic, since the tags sit on the DNA, and the prefix epi-, from ancient Greek, means “upon.” It differs from the conventional, genetic mode of heredity because the tagged gene still carries the same information, and makes the same protein. But when it’s tagged, it has a hard time doing so.”
― Emeran Mayer, The Mind-Gut Connection: How the Hidden Conversation Within Our Bodies Impacts Our Mood, Our Choices, and Our Overall Health

“The gut is also the largest storage facility for serotonin in our body. Ninety-five percent of the body’s serotonin is stored in these warehouses. Serotonin is a signaling molecule that plays a crucial role within the gut-brain axis: It is not only essential for normal intestinal functions, such as the coordinated contractions that move food through our digestive system, but it also plays a crucial role in such vital functions as sleep, appetite, pain sensitivity, mood, and overall well-being.”
― Emeran Mayer, The Mind-Gut Connection: How the Hidden Conversation Within Our Bodies Impacts Our Mood, Our Choices, and Our Overall Health

“The immune cells residing in your gut make up the largest component of your body’s immune system; in other words, there are more immune cells living in the wall of your gut than circulating in the blood or residing in your bone marrow.”
― Emeran Mayer, The Mind-Gut Connection: How the Hidden Conversation Within Our Bodies Impacts Our Mood, Our Choices, and Our Overall Health

“the ingestion of a probiotic-enriched yogurt for four weeks in healthy human females could reduce their brains’ response to negative emotional stimuli?”
― Emeran Mayer, The Mind-Gut Connection: How the Hidden Conversation Within Our Bodies Impacts Our Mood, Our Choices, and Our Overall Health

“One explanation of these differences may have to do with the fact that women store memories of physiologically painful or uncomfortable states such as menstruation, pregnancy, and childbirth.”
― Emeran Mayer, The Mind-Gut Connection: How the Hidden Conversation Within Our Bodies Impacts Our Mood, Our Choices, and Our Overall Health

“In one study, investigators observed a decrease in anxiety-like behavior when they fed the probiotic”
― Emeran Mayer, The Mind-Gut Connection: How the Hidden Conversation Within Our Bodies Impacts Our Mood, Our Choices, and Our Overall Health

“GABA, is one of the most abundant signaling molecules in the nervous system, where it keeps the emotional part of our brain, the limbic system, in check.”
― Emeran Mayer, The Mind-Gut Connection: How the Hidden Conversation Within Our Bodies Impacts Our Mood, Our Choices, and Our Overall Health

“The Drama of the Gifted Child, psychologist Alice Miller maintained nearly forty years ago that all instances of mental illness had their developmental origin in unresolved, subconscious childhood trauma, which could be physical or psychological in nature.”
― Emeran Mayer, The Mind-Gut Connection: How the Hidden Conversation Within Our Bodies Impacts Our Mood, Our Choices, and Our Overall Health

“Studies are currently under way to determine if gut microbial changes are associated with positive mind-based interventions, such as hypnosis and meditation, and if these changes lead to symptom improvements in such disorders as irritable bowel syndrome.”
― Emeran Mayer, The Mind-Gut Connection: How the Hidden Conversation Within Our Bodies Impacts Our Mood, Our Choices, and Our Overall Health

“the gut is in fact a theater in which the drama of emotion plays out, that drama might be less likely to become a painful melodrama for patients.”
― Emeran Mayer, The Mind-Gut Connection: How the Hidden Conversation Within Our Bodies Impacts Our Mood, Our Choices, and Our Overall Health

“Who would have ever believed that simply transferring fecal pellets containing gut microbiota from an “extrovert” mouse could change the behavior of a “timid” mouse, making it behave more like the gregarious donor mouse?”
― Emeran Mayer, The Mind-Gut Connection: How the Hidden Conversation Within Our Bodies Impacts Our Mood, Our Choices, and Our Overall Health

“Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are,” wrote Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, a French lawyer, physician, and author of an influential nineteenth-century book on the physiology of taste.”
― Emeran Mayer, The Mind-Gut Connection: How the Hidden Conversation Within Our Bodies Impacts Our Mood, Our Choices, and Our Overall Health

“There has been a dramatic, continuous increase in the reported prevalence of autism spectrum disorders, from 4.5 in 10,000 children in 1966 to 1 in 68 children aged 8 years in 2010.”
― Emeran Mayer, The Mind-Gut Connection: How the Hidden Conversation Within Our Bodies Impacts Our Mood, Our Choices, and Our Overall Health

“your gut microbes are in a prime position to influence your emotions, by generating and modulating signals the gut sends back to the brain.”
― Emeran Mayer, The Mind-Gut Connection: How the Hidden Conversation Within Our Bodies Impacts Our Mood, Our Choices, and Our Overall Health

“Recent studies suggest that in close interactions with its resident microbes, the gut can influence our basic emotions, our pain sensitivity, and our social interactions, and even guide many of our decisions—and not just those about our food preferences and meal sizes. Validating the popular expression of “gut-based” decision making in neurobiological terms, the complex communication between the gut and the brain plays a role when we make some of our most important life decisions.”
― Emeran Mayer, The Mind-Gut Connection: How the Hidden Conversation Within Our Bodies Impacts Our Mood, Our Choices, and Our Overall Health

“we can define gut health as a state in which the hormone-producing cells produce enough of the ones that make us feel hungry when the body needs energy, and enough of the satiety-signaling molecules after a meal in order to tell the brain that it’s time to stop eating.”
― Emeran Mayer, The Mind-Gut-Immune Connection: Understanding How Food Impacts Our Mind, Our Microbiome, and Our Immunity

“alterations in gut microbial networks caused by diet can alter brain networks, leading to behavioral changes in social interactions, which then affect brain networks again, ultimately resulting in more changes at the level of gene expression in microbiome networks.”
― Emeran Mayer, The Mind-Gut-Immune Connection: Understanding How Food Impacts Our Mind, Our Microbiome, and Our Immunity

“encompasses not only the gut’s nervous system but also its endocrine and immune systems, which together regulate metabolism and the intake of food and defend the body against pathogens.”
― Emeran Mayer, The Mind-Gut-Immune Connection: Understanding How Food Impacts Our Mind, Our Microbiome, and Our Immunity

“The Second Brain,”
― Emeran Mayer, The Mind-Gut Connection: How the Hidden Conversation Within Our Bodies Impacts Our Mood, Our Choices, and Our Overall Health

“In this book, I will offer a revolutionary new look at how the brain, the gut, and the trillions of microorganisms living in the gut communicate with each other. In particular, I will focus on the role these connections play in maintaining the health of our brain and our gut. I will discuss the negative consequences on the health of these two organs when their cross talk is disturbed, and propose ways of how to obtain optimal health by reestablishing and optimizing brain-gut communications.”
― Emeran Mayer, The Mind-Gut Connection: How the Hidden Conversation Within Our Bodies Impacts Our Mood, Our Choices, and Our Overall Health

“There are some 8 million microbial genes in the gut—400 times more than in the human genome. Even more astonishing, we humans differ very little from each other genetically, sharing more than 90 percent of our genes, but the assortment of microbial genes in our guts differs dramatically, and only 5 percent of them are shared between any two individuals. The gut microbiome adds a whole new dimension of complexity and possibilities to our brain-gut emotion-generating machinery.”
― Emeran Mayer, The Mind-Gut Connection: How the Hidden Conversation Within Our Bodies Impacts Our Mood, Our Choices, and Our Overall Health

“Your gut has capabilities that surpass all your other organs and even rival your brain. It has its own nervous system, known in scientific literature as the enteric nervous system, or ENS, and often referred to in the media as the “second brain.” This second brain is made up of 50-100 million nerve cells, as many as are contained in your spinal cord.”
― Emeran Mayer, The Mind-Gut Connection: How the Hidden Conversation Within Our Bodies Impacts Our Mood, Our Choices, and Our Overall Health

“there are more immune cells living in the wall of your gut than circulating in the blood or residing in your bone marrow.”
― Emeran Mayer, The Mind-Gut Connection: How the Hidden Conversation Within Our Bodies Impacts Our Mood, Our Choices, and Our Overall Health

“In Meaney’s rat studies, when the daughters of stressed, neglectful rat moms became mothers themselves, they behaved no better toward their own pups. His study found that the effect could last for several generations, suggesting that the stress experienced by the mother, and the ensuing effect on her behavior toward her pups, could somehow be passed to their offspring.”
― Emeran Mayer, The Mind-Gut Connection: How the Hidden Conversation Within Our Bodies Impacts Our Mood, Our Choices, and Our Overall Health