Ever wondered why your stomach starts to rumble every time you have to talk in front of a large crowd? Has it ever occurred to you why you get sweaty palms and you feel like your stomach is a giant knot moments before you have to have an uncomfortable conversation with a colleague or a friend? Have you ever seen red flags in interpersonal relationships and not listened to your gut? I know, I have. The ‘gut’-  a highly underrated organ in our body is actually our second brain and has more nerve endings than the brain. We’ve been asked all our lives to go with our ‘gut’ every time we are facing a dilemma or predicament and it turns out that there’s a science behind this.

This embarrassing body part becomes the ‘butt’ of all jokes and no one likes to discuss it openly in front of their physicians and doctors, let alone with their families. Scientists have now found that everything from depression, anxiety, heart disease and obesity can all be treated by feeding the gut flora. Thus, it is crucial to understand gut bacteria if we want to find solutions to a lot of these diseases. We eat inorganic food, subject our bodies to way too many antibiotics and medicines that in turn damage the gut and kill a lot of the healthy bacteria, predisposing us to a host of different diseases. This becomes a vicious cycle, especially with people with compromised immune systems that take several rounds of antibiotics a year.

Upon gaining a superficial understanding of the gut, doctors have found that the way to fix inflammation and disease is by nourishing the gut. We have to embrace the gut-brain connection and use a holistic approach to find the cause instead of treating the symptoms of a disease and masking it with pain medication and such. For instance, doctors are of the opinion that depression, in a lot of cases can be cured without SSRI and other antidepressants as long as we fortify the gut flora instead. A lot of functional medicine practitioners and holistic health specialists are adopting this whole body approach and supplementing diets with healthy fermented foods like kimchee, apple cider vinegar, kefir, yoghurt and prescribing OTC prebiotics and probiotics to enhance gut function.

I was given the book ‘Gut’ By Guilia Enders to read and review and here are my thoughts on the same. Thank you Speaking Tiger Publishing for sending this over.

Giulia Enders’ bestseller, Gut, while heavy on science, is never boring! I have to admit, I read several chapters more than once to experience her witty prose, while I ruminated over what I had just read. Having suffered from an auto-immune gastrointestinal disorders for over 3 years, Giulia has given me the confidence to talk about diarrhea, bloody stools, and mucous in a candid manner (maybe even at mealtimes!). Given the number of nerve endings in the gut, it’s a shame that it isn’t given the same “cool organ” status as the brain. It’s no surprise that her book is “the surprise international bestseller”, after all, everyone’s doing it, everyone’s intrigued by it, but few talk about it 😉

I want to end with a quote from her book. If this doesn’t make you want to pick up the book and begin research on the the ‘second brain’, I’m not sure what will.

“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 comment leaves a “bad taste in our mouth.” When we fall in love, we get “butterflies in our stomach.” Our self is created in our head and our gut—no longer just in language, but increasingly also in the lab.”

Stay Healthy!
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