If you’ve got leaky gut, there is a very good chance that you have leaky brain. Now, what do I mean by that? The brain normally has a communication system with your rest of your body and one of those main systems is a very large nerve that runs from your brain to all of your organs, your heart, your lungs, your gut called the vagus nerve. Now, when I was in medical school long ago, I was taught that the ma- vagus nerve is the way for the brain to talk to the gut and to kind of tell the gut what to do. Come to find out that for every on fiber, and think of this literally as a cable network or a telephone cable, for every fiber from the brain down to the gut, there are nine fibers coming from the gut up to the brain. And when this was discovered, we realized that there was a gut brain connection.

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It got even more interesting when it was discovered that there were as many neurons, nerve cells in the gut as there were in the entire spinal cord. That’s a lot of nerve cells. Fast forward, we now know that most of the information that comes from the gut to the brain is not from the nerve cells, but actually from the gut microbiome, the bacteria in their gut. So one of the things that I’ve written about in the past is we now know that lectins can actually climb the vagus nerve and go right into your brain. And really cool animal experiments show that among other things, lectins in the gut from leaky gut can cause Parkinson’s disease by destroying the substantia nigra in the brain. I wrote about in gut check, which hopefully got your attention. When I was a general surgeon and you had to be a sur- general surgeon before you became a heart surgeon, ulcer disease, people with gastric ulcers or duodenal ulcers, one of our treatments was to cut the vagus nerve.

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And there’s a lot of people walking around with their vagus nerve cut. So what? As time went on, people who had had their vagus nerve cut had a 30 to 50% less chance of developing Parkinson’s. Huh? Why? Because the cable was cut and these guys couldn’t get up to the brain. Quite remarkable. So this is one way that the gut clearly can get things that you don’t want into your brain up via that cable system, but perhaps more important, the brain has always been known to be a very privileged organ and it’s a privileged organ from what’s called the blood brain barrier. Now we’ve known about this since the dawn of chemotherapy for cancer. And we’ve known that chemotherapeutic dr- drugs can’t get through this wall if you have a brain tumor. We could give you all the chemotherapeutic drugs in your veins and they can’t get through the blood brain barrier.

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It’s that impenetrable. We can’t even get antibiotics into the brain very well. We can’t get most anything. The brain is so protected by this blood brain barrier. Now here’s the bad news. When you have leaky gut, one of the things that I’ve talked about before is your immune system, your white blood cells, tell all of your other cells in your body that there are issues and lectins and other particles like LPSs, lipopolysaccharides can actually begin to make holes in the blood brain barrier. The other problem is that certain foods that we eat, particularly beef, lamb, pork, and milk products, break the blood brain barrier. And so now we have, just like leaky gut, we have leaky brain. So what? Your brain has its own set of white blood cells. They’re called glial cells or microglial cells. Glial cells are the bodyguards to the neurons. Their job is to protect the neurons at all costs.

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Here’s the bad news. When the body, the immune cells in the brain get the message that the bad guys are loose in the gut and they’re coming this way, they do what any great bodyguard would do. They simplistically, here’s a, here’s a neuron. Let’s, he’s the king in a castle. And the bodyguards are the soldiers, the glial cells. And what the bodyguards do, the neuron talks to other neurons with extensions called dendrites and it talks to another neuron and sends its a message. The first thing the glial cells do, and we’ve actually seen these on photography of actual leaky brain, they start just like Pac-Man biting off these dendritic processes. And then to make things worse, let’s suppose this is the castle and there used to be a drawbridge up to the castle. The glial cells pull up the drop bridge. So now the neuron is cut off from talking to other neurons and worst case scenario, the neuron stars to death because the glial cells are trying to protect it.

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So is it any wonder that most of us are now walking around with brain fog? Is it any wonder that Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease and dementia is now an epidemic? And it’s not because of the brain’s fault. It actually all began just like Hipocrate said 2,500 years ago. All disease begins in the gut and with each passing year with research, we’re realizing the mechanisms of how this happens. So it’s not conjecture, it’s not fanciful thinking. We can actually measure antibodies to the blood brain barrier. We can actually measure antibodies to particular neuron cells and the exciting thing is in my practice, we can actually watch these antibodies against the blood-brain barrier go away. We can actually measure the blood-brain barrier resealing and we can watch this attack not only stop but actually reverse. We can watch these connections regrow and that’s why leaky brain is from leaky gut and when you treat leaky gut, leaky brain can be fixed.

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That’s a wrap on today’s episode. And before you go, I wanna leave you with on task. If anything you heard today made you think, made you wanna dig deeper or gave you something you’re going to pass along to someone you care about, please take 15 seconds and leave a five-star rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. I know that sounds small, but those reviews are how Apple and Spotify decide which shows to surface to new listeners and this show only grows when people who’ve never heard of it suddenly find it. That person finding this podcast today could hear something that genuinely improves their life or the life of someone they love, maybe even saves one. Everything I share here comes from my research when writing my next book and my clinics where I’ve been seeing patients six days a week for over 25 years working with nutrition and supplements as the primary treatment.

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This is real world medicine. Help me get it to more people and thank you. Truly thank you. I’m Dr. G and I’m always looking out for you.