MENTAL WELLNESS IS MADE IN YOUR GUT

Looking back as October marked Mental Wellness Awareness Month, it’s the perfect time to reflect on the rising mental health challenges faced by individuals worldwide. Conversations around the science behind mental wellness are shifting. For the last 200 years, most of the world thought that mental wellness was something controlled by the brain and treated as such. What scientists have been learned in the past five to 10 years is that it's not a head thing, it's a gut thing.

The data around mental health can be startling. One in five adults and one in six children today is being diagnosed with some form of mental health condition. This statistic alone highlights how early mental health struggles begin, affecting the lives of many before they even reach adulthood. And that's just the ones that are being diagnosed. The breadth and scope of this segment of this mental wellness crisis is likely a lot larger than many realize.

Many adults and children continue to live with anxiety, depression, inability to regulate moods, hormonal imbalances, elevated cortisol, poor sleep, ongoing fatigue, etc., and other mental wellness issues without ever being recognized or counted. Sadly, some accept these symptoms as a “normal” part of life, aging, or chalk it up to stressful jobs, relationships and situations they feel they can't do anything about. The good news is that they can do something about it. You can too.

Your gut is responsible for so much more than digestion. It’s also deeply connected to brain function. This connection, known as the gut-brain axis, refers to the biochemical signaling that occurs between the nervous system and the gastrointestinal system. The gut produces several essential neurotransmitters and hormones—such as serotonin, dopamine, GABA, and melatonin—that control various mental and emotional states.

• GABA: Helps calm the brain and reduce anxiety.

• Dopamine: Promotes feelings of pleasure and motivation.

• Serotonin: Regulates mood, contributing to happiness and emotional stability.

• Melatonin: Controls the sleep-wake cycle, ensuring restful sleep.

There are 100 trillion bacteria in the gut. A well-nourished gut has the good bacteria outnumbering the bad resulting in a healthy microbiome and the ability to naturally produce these crucial hormones. However, when the bad bacteria outnumber the good, it causes things like leaky gut where the body struggles to generate those hormones, leading to potential mental health challenges like anxiety, depression, hormonal imbalance, fatigue, weight gain, auto-immune disorders, insomnia and metabolic disorders.

Leaky gut occurs when the lining of the intestines becomes permeable, allowing toxins, bacteria, and undigested food particles to escape into the bloodstream. This triggers inflammation, which can impair the production of neurotransmitters and disrupt communication between the gut and the brain. As a result, individuals may experience persistent mental health symptoms that are difficult to manage without addressing the underlying gut issues first.

Some common things that are know to disrupt the microbiome are, ultra processed foods, sugar, alcohol, energy drinks, artifical sweeteners, seed oils, preservatives, pain medications, antibiotics, stress, poor sleep, dehydration. This is not a finite list, but reducing and/or avoiding as many of these a possible, while simultaneously increasing nutrient-dense foods and filling nutritional gaps, goes a long way to optimizing gut health and mental wellness.

Healing the gut is a powerful step toward improving mental wellness. Research suggests that consuming the right strains of probiotics, prebiotics, phytobiotics and a balanced diet rich in fiber and whole foods can restore gut health and, in turn, promote better mental well-being. What you feed, grows. So as you continue to put nutrient-dense, whole foods in, you'll continue to feed the good bacteria and eventually tip the scales in your favour so that the good outnumber the bad.

A diet that includes fermented foods like natural yogurt, kefir, kimchi, and kombucha along with fiber-rich, unprocessed whole foods helps keep those good bacteria fed and maintain a healthy microbiome. On the flip side, a typical North American diet where processed foods – breads, cereals, soda, alcohol, pasta, granola bars, things that come in wrappers – is daily or frequently on the menu, starves those good bacteria and feeds the bad. As that bad bacteria grows, it needs more food and so it prompts cravings for more of those processed foods. What you feed, grows. And knowing that, you can make appropriate choices to get the results you're looking for.

By using a health-focused approach and nourishing the microbiome, you uplevel health in the body, empower it to naturally produce the hormones necessary for mental wellness and support the gut-brain axis, that highway of communication so crucial for mental health and wellness. Healthy body, healthy gut, happy mind. It's a beautiful thing.

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