Your Gut Microbiome: The Most Important Organ You’ve Never Heard Of | Erika Ebbel Angle | TEDxFargo

so I'm here today to talk to you about the importance of listening to

your

gut. Hi, I'm a 38-year-old entrepreneurial biochemist, I went to MIT School of Medicine, and I've decided to dedicate my life to studying the gut and gut.

microbiome

Six years ago I even founded a company to address this topic and I am a regular contributor to some of the posts you see here as a gut health specialist. I have been very lucky over the last few years to have worked with professionals. athletes and professional athletic teams to try to improve their gut health because it is closely related to things like increasing performance, decreasing illness, and improving recovery time, so why am I here today?

Well, I'm here to talk to you about what I think is

most

important

.

important

organ

and that is the gut

microbiome

, so for those of you who don't know what the gut microbiome is, it's everything from the mouth to the colon, from the entrance to the exit, everything in between, so the stomach, the small intestine, the large intestine and all the little bugs that live there, bacteria, fungi, viruses and cells, there are trillions of these little bugs that live there and we'll talk about this a little later, but diversity is very important in the intestine, why?

It's important to have a healthy gut, it's really important for long-term health, so if you have a healthy gut you'll feel more energetic, get sick less often, have greater mental clarity and ultimately be healthier. emotional well-being versus if you don't have a healthy gut, a lot of research shows that this is linked to things like autoimmune diseases, diabetes, neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer's and even emotional issues like anxiety and depression, so our topic today is you . what you eat, so you're probably sitting there thinking, yeah, you know, when I was a kid, my parents always used to tell me that you are what you eat when they were trying to foist broccoli on me or if you were really lucky, Brussels sprouts and other things. well, but the reality is that they are actually right, eating poorly can do two things: first, it can prevent you from getting the nutrients you need to stay healthy and, second, it can damage and change the entire composition of

your

intestine. which will prevent you from digesting things properly and creating the nutrients you need to function, so today we're going to look at three molecules that are obtained from dietary intake.

You have to eat these things, so the first one is something called tryptophan. You've probably

heard

about this Thanksgiving, everyone is talking about the tryptophan-induced coma that occurs after eating food. It's found in Turkey, but it's also found in things like eggs and chia seeds, so your body takes tryptophan and converts it into a lot of other really important things. Two molecules that we're going to talk about today, one called serotonin, serotonin, it's something that makes you happy, very important, and something called melatonin, which actually helps you sleep, so imagine if you don't have tryptophan or not? you are consuming it. enough tryptophan, no matter how many roses, diamonds or chocolates your partner brings you, it just won't make you happy and that's a little sad, plus you won't be able to sleep so you won't be able to count sheep at night.

Another example is a compound called tyrosine, so tyrosine, another amino acid, is found in foods like almonds, but it's also found in lentils and seeds, and tyrosine from edamame is also converted into a variety of things really. important, so we'll talk about dopamine. compound that you may have

heard

of that essentially motivates you to do things, so it is this initiative-oriented behavior that helps drive an epinephrine, which is also known as adrenaline, the fight or flight molecule, which is really useful when you're in this scenario, so you know, imagine if you don't have these things, what would happen.

Well, this is what would happen if you were drooling on your couch or, worse yet, were chased by a cougar, which I'm sure. You know who knows, it can happen at some point in everyone's life, the emoji is you know, hey, you don't want this to happen, right, you need a body to respond to these types of situations. Third, we'll talk about something called indole-3. lactic acids, so it's very important that they are found in fermented foods, like pickles, sauerkraut, kimchi, kefir, ila is very important because your body absorbs it and there are certain bacteria in the intestines that actually convert the ILA into something called IPA indle Pro prion ik acid that in appropriate Ik acid is actually one of the body's strongest antioxidants and again, you may have heard of what you know this word antioxidant, but I'm going to explain to you what it does, so A variety of different chemical processes take place in your body and many of them create things called free radicals, these are bad, they are reactive species that damage cells, damage DNA and can ultimately lead to things like cancer, so so these antioxidants go in and actually break down free radicals, keeping you healthier longer.

IPA is very important, so clearly eating certain types of foods is really necessary to stay healthy, but it's not enough, you need a healthy microbiome to be able to execute these conversion processes that we're talking about to ingest things, digest them, and spit them out. . I've discovered other molecules that are really important for your health, so let's talk a little bit about what makes a healthy microbiome, so I've tried to simplify this a little bit, but essentially each emoji is a type of bacteria, you have different ones, so you have There are some that digest vegetables, others that digest meats, breads and oils, and your intestine is populated by many different types of things, so in a healthy intestine you have very diverse species, now let's say you decide that you are only going to eat food. that are high in fat, such as hot dogs, ice cream, and pizza, although pizza sounds great right now, if you train your systems to do this, your gut will begin to use more and more bacteria of the type they are accustomed to look at the types of foods that you eat and eventually you're going to skew the proportions of those bacteria that are going to outcompete the other types that are out there because they're just not used and then you're going to end up with a situation where you can have a very unhealthy set of bacteria. and low diversity in your gut, now you might be wondering if you can reverse it, mind you, but it often takes a lot of time and energy to do so, sometimes you really can't, sometimes you just know once those bacteria are gone. it's really hard to get them back so what's really interesting is that the body tries to make the right building blocks even if you've damaged your gut, so again on the bottom right you can see there's a silhouette and you can see the little emojis.

Basically, they have eaten food, but there is not a diverse set of bacteria. They've eaten your food and are trying to create these compounds to keep you healthy, but there just aren't enough of them. they are not working the right way, while on the other side you have a silhouette where the person has a lot of diversity, a lot of different bacteria emojis and can absorb food, digest it and spit out a lot of things that are really important to keep you healthy now here it is The sad part many of the things we do in our lives are in fact completely lethal to the microbiome.

I love potato chips, unfortunately you don't find much healthy stuff in

most

chips. I'm not going to find tryptophan or ILA antibiotic drugs helpful, but they kill bacteria and they don't just kill bad bacteria, they kill all bacteria and often after you've gone through a course of antibiotics you kill your microbiome, sometimes

never

. is rebuilt. appropriately again stress you know you hear this stress kills kills stress is bad we could have a whole 30 minute talk about the impact of stress on the microbiome stress is actually extremely bad for the microbiome your central nervous system with which you brain is intimately connected your gun the two of you talk to each other think about it when you're stressed you have a headache you feel terrible you often feel that stress in your stomach butterflies in your stomach anxiety sometimes you have to go to the bathroom more it's him they talk to each other all the time, they are intimately connected, so the more stressed you are, the more likely you are to damage your microbiome and lastly, you know we live in a very aseptic society and this is bad, it decreases the diversity of bacteria in the gut, One of my favorite examples is that many years ago children would play in the dirt and be exposed to all kinds of different things, now children come in, watch TV, play on their phones and many more things.

The diseases are actually connected to a lack of diversity in the gut. Things like autism and ADHD. It is very important to go outside. So what can we do about it? The good news is that all is not lost. It is possible to improve the intestine and this is one of them. Of the things that I do every day and I'm very fortunate in my job, my company is actually trying to measure the functional state of the gut, define what it is, and then create interventions to improve it. We call this improving your interior. fitness, so what are some simple things you can do to help improve your gut? one, we've talked about changing your diet, two, we've talked about stress management techniques, incorporating mindfulness, meditation, breathing exercises to minimize stress or exercise is great fifteen twenty minutes of walking a day can help you stay regular .

Knows? We talked about it in front of the group. That's what we do. It can help you mitigate your stress. In fact, it can help promote the growth of certain. types of bacteria and, finally, specific supplements. I'm not saying take a lot of different supplements. What I'm saying is if there are certain things your body needs you could take a supplement, yes sometimes there's a lot of fish you have to eat. Order to get the equivalent of a pill, but make sure it's what you need so that the next time you're lying on the couch feeling lethargic and not sure why or you're sick for the fifth time in a year, you listen to your gut, thank you.