From Veggies to Vagus: Enhancing Brain Health Naturally

In this episode of the Stance for Health podcast, Dr. Rodney and Karen Wirth delve into the intricacies of the gut-brain connection, highlighting the roles of the vagus nerve and the enteric nervous system. They discuss how disruptions in gut health can lead to inflammation and influence mental health, particularly in conditions like Parkinson's. 

Emphasizing a diet rich in vegetables and fiber, they argue that making simple dietary swaps can profoundly impact health, from preventing inflammation to maintaining cognitive functions. Their '9-Cup Challenge' encourages listeners to consume a variety of colored vegetables for optimal gut and brain health. 

Links promised in this episode for the following podcasts:

What in the World is This Leaky Gut Business?

You Can't Change My Mind About Seed Oils: Here's Why

Pesto Recipes from Dr. Wahls

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Transcript

[00:07] Dr. Rodney: Welcome to Stance for Health podcast with Dr. Rodney and Karen Wirth, where becoming healthy is not complicated.

[00:16] Control your health by focusing on six areas of life that we teach you so you finally have the energy you want to have to do what you want instead of being a victim of your age.

[00:27] I have over 20 years experience working as a chiropractor, and Karen is a author, speaker, and longevity coach.

[00:34] We've seen how a tiny change in your habits today can open up your life to a powerful future.

[00:44] Start today and take your Stance for Health.

[00:52] Karen and I are talking about the gut brain connection.

[00:56] And the other way to look at that is not just the blood brain barrier, but the gut blood barrier and the vagus nerve. Where's the vagus nerve? It's not in Nevada.

[01:07] It actually exits the brain stem on its own through the foramen lacerum. In fact, it's actually almost like its own separate spinal cord. Karen and I are excited to talk to you today about that connection.

[01:21] Karen: Well, and one of the things that most people don't realize,

[01:24] the human brain,

[01:26] the one up in your head, has a hundred million neurons. But when you look at your second brain, what they call the enteric system,

[01:34] it has 500 million neurons.

[01:39] Dr. Rodney: Now, the brain is actually used more for processing movement, but there's also, as you just said, enteric nervous system. And then there's fibers in the heart that have several neurons, too. 50,000 at last count. Big, huge neurons.

[01:58] Karen: And we have to think about the fact that scripture says, ”As a man thinks in his heart.” And then you've all said, “I've got a gut feeling about this.”

[02:10] Dr. Rodney: Right.

[02:10] Karen: It doesn't feel right in my gut. 

[02:17] Dr. Rodney: Seen that a lot on a lot of these talent shows.

[02:21] Karen: Yes.

[02:22] Dr. Rodney: The judges want to go with their gut on this one.

[02:26] Karen: So really, if you think about it, that vagus nerve you mentioned earlier,it goes from the brainstem to your entire intestinal tract, your heart and more. And it's called the parasympathetic system. Tell us more about those two.

[02:41] Dr. Rodney: Sympathetic versus parasympathetic. Okay. Para just means on either side of the.

[02:46] Karen: Oh, I didn't know that.

[02:47] Dr. Rodney: Right.

[02:48] And so you, in essence have is you have the sympathetic flanked by para. Sympathetic. What you're looking at most of the time with sympathetic is you're thinking of amplifying or upregulating,

[03:01] making something getting you ready for a fight, a stressful event.

[03:07] And then parasympathetic is bringing you back to that less heightened event or that less.

[03:13] Less of A sense of threat more, some people say, getting you to the feed or breed or the rest and digest place where, where humans really prefer to be most of the time, or they should be.

[03:25] Karen: But so that's also the autonomic system because you aren't consciously thinking breathe, breathe, breathe. We've talked about how breath work helps bring you into the parasympathetic.

[03:37] But think about digestion,

[03:39] it is happening without you.

[03:42] Dr. Rodney: Thinking about gets mind boggling sometimes with all the chemicals that happen too. You gotta have serotonin. Well, what's serotonin? It's not a girl's name. Sarah or Tony. Right. It is actually a useful hormone. You get that euphoric sort of feeling. There's a lot of chemicals in your body that are produced for local purposes and then some of it's for the whole body. And even though serotonin by itself is, isn't created necessarily for systemic use in the gut, that's the greatest amount of serotonin that's produced is in the gut.

[04:22] Karen: And then goes through the vagus system to the brain.

[04:24] Dr. Rodney: But some of it's actually produced in the other parts of the body too for, for use throughout the rest of the system.

[04:31] Karen: So when we talk about the gut, we talked about a micro biome. It's like its own little world that's regulating the hormones that do all kinds of things like what goes to your pancreas and, and the digestive juices and fertility, the movement of your digestive system. That how everything coordinates and gets rid of toxins and absorbs the nutrients. So it's critical to your health.

[04:58] Dr. Rodney: Yeah. And you know the purposes of what we're talking about here. Why do we need both the nervous system and the cardiovascular system? Well, for one, let's just say that the messenger needs to be quicker. In some cases you don't want the message to get there right away. So that's where the blood system or heracrine or endocrine system comes in with serotonin.

[05:22] It's producing serotonin for its own consumption and other times it's sharing it to be used elsewhere in the body.

[05:30] Karen: And the microbiome is almost like a separate brain. Depends on what you eat.

[05:39] We'll talk more about that later. It depends on stress. It depends on so many factors like EMF and the plastics that we're around. Basically we're in a world where it's hard to have a healthy microbiome.

[05:57] Dr. Rodney: If you want to have a healthy brain, you have to have a healthy gut. And how do you have a healthy.

[06:03] Karen: Gut, have a healthy brain.

[06:04] Dr. Rodney: Yeah,

[06:05] both of them. In fact. So many people would argue that if you get that concussion, you have this blood brain barrier disruption. Simultaneously, when that happens, almost simultaneously, the same inflammatory products are found in the gut, and you lose that gut blood barrier, or you basically start to have issues with your gut permeability.

[06:35] Karen: And we have a link in the notes for what is leaky gut, because we did a podcast around that, and it's so fascinating that leaky gut leads to inflammation. Usually when we think of inflammation, we're thinking about maybe inflamed joints or shoulder or ankles or elbows. We don't think about an inflamed brain.

[07:03] Dr. Rodney: Yeah. So we don't think of dementia as having that connection to inflammation.

[07:08] Karen: Other neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's or Parkinson's are due to the fact that the brain becomes inflamed. And now I'm, you know, I'm the research geek. I love to dig deep. So there is this study that was done with these poor little mice.

[07:26] So there is a protein that's linked to Parkinson's disease,

[07:31] and it's called misfolded alpha synuclein. So that's a protein that they found in a person's brain that has Parkinson's. They put it into the guts of healthy mice, and then they tracked it. Now, one set of mice they kept intact, and the other set of mice, they severed their vagus. This is to prove that the vagus is the highway where that information goes from the gut to the brain. So here's the information from this study: One month later, the ones that still had the vagus system intact, it had turned up in the brainstem. After three months, it had traveled to the amygdala and the midbrain.

[08:15] Dr. Rodney: That's where the substantia nigra lives. Oftentimes, that's where you see Parkinson's show up.

[08:21] Karen: And within seven and 10 months, it had turned up in other regions of the brain. Now, this is what happened with the same thing, but they had severed the vagus nerve. No signs of cell death were present in the brains of these little mice. And so that shows you that memory and anxiety and the Parkinson's, things like that, is traveling so often from the gut to the brain.

[08:49] Dr. Rodney: As far as speed of information, it's transmitted through the vagus, but also through the gut blood barrier. Practicing that skewed information that the nervous system is providing is affecting the brain.

[09:03] Karen: Wow.

[09:03] Dr. Rodney: Right.

[09:04] Karen: Yeah. You know, anxiety is directly linked to gut health.

[09:09] Dr. Rodney: No way.

[09:11] Karen: And when People have imbalances in their gut bacteria, they have extra inflammation and it disrupts the brain chemistry. It's kind of like a cycle that just keeps going.

[09:22] Dr. Rodney: And that's where that serotonin dopamine balance has, is, is really apparent, is in people that have the dementia, especially Parkinson's. Right. So that's another thing that, that we're getting at with today's podcast is all these things have links and it's important to, to know those behind the scenes so that you can do simple things. We're trying to give you simple things here that you can do to help prevent it.

[09:50] Karen: And that's what Stance for Health is all about, where small changes make a huge impact on your health. So let's talk first about diet. That's diet's role in mental health.

[10:01] Dr. Rodney: I had a feeling you were going there. Absolutely. So anything that you can eat that is, is not pro inflammatory, in other words, not processed, pretty much if you pull it out of the ground and it's not a bag of Doritos that's been buried, just having fun, poking fun, Any processed food like that is going to affect you way differently than enzyme rich and antioxidant rich foods.

[10:33] Karen: When we switched to our anti inflammatory, basically paleo way of eating, which was to be anti cancer, we became diligent label readers. And you would just be amazed at how much sugar is in everything, not just your desserts, and especially how many unhealthy fats are out there. So those vegetable oils are just everywhere, but they're fueling that gut dysfunction.

[11:03] Dr. Rodney: And remember, it's not necessarily a real vegetable that they're talking about. Remember that it's a seed oil. And what we mean by seeds is typically the pro inflammatory seed that was processed that. We go into that detail on another.

[11:19] Karen: Podcast and we'll put the link in the notes as well. So what do we replace it with then? Because that's how we've been eating now for five years and it is a wonderful way to live and not that difficult. It does take effort, however, and it takes intention and it takes the disappointment of seeing something that looks so good turning it over. And it has one of those ingredients that we avoid. So what we have done is we look for the nine cup challenge. We're issuing it again to eat nine cups of raw vegetables. We can cook them, but we measure them when they're in the raw form.

[12:04] Dr. Rodney: And as another rule of thumb with that too, each of those colors actually need to be slightly different because of that pigment has an effect on your gut as well.

[12:15] Karen: And the polyphenols in there.

[12:16] Dr. Rodney: Yes.

[12:17] Karen: Why is fiber so important, Doc?

[12:20] Dr. Rodney: Fiber is important for more reasons than one. The first one we think of is just for both. We think of it as well. If I have fiber, then I can go to the bathroom. I won't be constipated.

[12:33] When you feed yourself fiber rich food, both soluble and insoluble, the insoluble may be something that you can't digest, but the bacteria, the good guy bacteria in your stomach will actually produce for you symbiotically good B vitamins like folic acid, folate, another way of saying the same thing, and a host of other things, but they produce for you good vitamins.

[13:05] Karen: That's incredible. The other thing is that when we started adding carbs back into our eating, we made sure that they were starch resistant. So that would be sweet potatoes. Because the good guys in your gut really enjoy them. Would you believe that we need to acquire a taste for bitters like arugula that I raisin. My little raised bed garden is so yummy. But it's bitter.

[13:39] Dr. Rodney: Yeah. And we've gotten away from that flavor choice because it in the west here we've gotten away from things because if it doesn't taste good initially, we haven't developed a taste for it. We haven't. It's not been an acquired taste. If it's not sweet or it's not salty, we don't want it. It's not desirable. And yet bitters are very much like that array of four colors that Dr. Wahls was referring to earlier.

[14:05] Karen: I like that. There's also a lot of different probiotics, prebiotics that you can take. And we'll go into more of that in future podcasts, especially as we talk about some of the processes within the gut to produce exactly what you need as far as staving off hunger so that your ghrelin and leptin work. There's just a lot of simple things you can start doing. So my challenge to you is to eat more vegetables. Cook them yourself. They're so easy to stir fry. That's what we're going to go have lunch in a few minutes.

[14:47] Dr. Rodney: That sounds good. Stomach is calling.

[14:50] Karen: Make your own sauerkraut.

[14:52] Dr. Rodney: Oh, fantastic. Yeah.

[14:53] Karen: And I am going to learn how to make kefir eat well. What you put in your microbiome is going to help your brain. And you do it one bite at a time. You can change how you eat. You can change your taste for food. We have done it and we wouldn't go back. In fact, we haven't gone back even on holidays. We just make our own replacement food. And I love it best when everybody eats what I've brought. And the taste is wonderful. We're enjoying it as we work together to take our Stance forHealth.

[15:32] Dr. Rodney: In other words, just to close with one final thought. When you've done everything else you can do and you've been frustrated, get to the place where you can take a stand. We're basically kind of like in. If you're familiar with the location in Texas known as the Alamo, it's our last stand. Okay, you got this. Keep going. And every once in a while, if you feel like you're stuck, maybe you're taking your stance and you don't realize it. Thank you for listening today.

[16:04] Thank you for joining us at Stance for Health podcast, where getting healthy and staying that way are not as complicated as you might think.

[16:13] Subscribe now and discover steps and small changes that can increase your energy and open the door to vibrant health and longevity.

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