Healthy Gut, Healthy Mind

Do you ever think of your gut as your “second brain”? Recent studies prove that the two are more closely interconnected than you think

- Lizzie Enfield

Supermarket shelves laden with probiotics, magazines filled with digestive health articles, gastroenterologists giving TED talks and a book called Gut becoming an unlikely international bestseller… It’s impossible not to have noticed the rise of what was once a fairly neglected organ.

Where Freud invented the “self” in the late 1800s, spawning a century of psychoanalysis, the 21st century looks set to be one of the gut.

Forget the subconscious. It’s all about what goes on in our intestines and how this impacts the mind, or to use the scientific term—the gut/brain axis. Because the two are interlinked more closely than we might have imagined. The gut contains as many neurons (or brain cells) as a cat has in its head. And think how wily cats are. These gut brain cells are linked directly to the brain via the vagus nerve.

So the stomach has a knowingness of its own, which seems extraordinary until you pause to think about our language: gut feelings, gutsy, gutted, gut instincts, gut wrenching and butterflies in our tummy. All these colloquial phrases imply a link between our stomach and our emotions and yet, especially in the century of psychoanalysis, we tend to think of the brain being the puppeteer and the stomach simply reacting to its instructions—the mind gets anxious and the stomach knots…

But now scientists have established that it works both ways, that the stomach is responsible for a lot of what goes on in the brain and may even be the organ that’s in the driving seat: the stomach knots and the mind gets anxious, not the other way around.