The Gut-Brain Connection: Why Your Mental Health Starts in the Microbiome

Coming up on this episode of the Doctor Hyman Show. The relationship between mental health and metabolic disease is is bi-directional, which means if you have a mental illness, you're more likely to have metabolic disease and vice versa. And if you have a metabolic disease, you're more likely to develop a mental illness. You're more likely to have a heart attack, for example, if you have depression. and you're more likely to develop depression after you have a heart attack. Before we jump into today's episode, I'd like to note that while I wish I could help everyone via my personal practice, there's simply not enough time for me to do this at scale. That's why I've been busy building several passion projects to help you. If you're looking for data about your biology, check out Function Health for real time lab insights. And if you're in need of deepening your knowledge around your health journey, check out my membership community, the Hyman H. And if you're looking for curated and trusted supplements and health products for your health journey, visit my website at drhyman.com for a summary of my favorite and thoroughly tested products.

We have a mental health crisis. Globally, three hundred million people are suffering from anxiety. Two hundred and eighty million people are suffering from depression. Now from treating thousands of patients over the last thirty years, I've learned that depression is mostly not in your head. It's in your body. When I treat patients' gut issues, and this is something I just discovered almost by accident. their mental health would magically get better. But it wasn't magic. It was science. I just didn't understand at the time. It's not magic. Gut dysfunction is Not the only cause of our mental health crisis. There's a lot of things that are driving it, but it's a major factor that's often unaddressed. Now when your gut is unhealthy, when it's inflamed, your brain is unhealthy, and also inflamed. When we fix The gut, then brain health, mood, memory, focus, and mental health all improve.

Now, why is this important? Inflammation is a huge driver of most of our mental health issues from depression, anxiety, autism, A D D, even things like Alzheimer's, schizophrenia, bipolar disease, all linked to inflammation of the brain. And where's this inflammation coming from? Obviously our diet, but also from our microbiome. And I learned this early in my medical practice. In fact, one of my early books called The Ultra Mind Solution, A deep Dive Into the Way the Body Affects the Brain, including the gut and the microbiome. Now conventional medicine views these two things as completely separate and unrelated. And typically if you have GI symptoms, you go to the GI doctor, a gastrinologist. And if you have mental health issues, you go to a psychiatrist to help with balancing your mood. They prescribe different drugs. For each condition, instead of understanding the root cause and treating that. And then we're gonna talk about how this works, why it's important, what the science is, and some of my clinical case studies, which are quite compelling. Now in functional medicine, we know the gut and the brain are intimately connected, and that the health of one directly impacts the other. So you can't fix the brain without fixing the gut, and you can't fix the gut. without fixing the brain. So it's bi directional. It's not mind body, body, mind, body, mind, mind, body. It's it's both, right? When we do that, and I've done this

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