Depression Has NOTHING to Do With Your Brain
Dr. Berg’s Healthy Keto and Intermittent Fasting Podcast
Dr. Eric Berg
4.6 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 12 May 2025
⏱️ 6 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What causes depression? Surprisingly, depression has nothing to do with your brain and everything to do with your gut microbiome. In this video, we’ll take an in-depth look at the brain-gut connection and the often overlooked relationship between depression and gut health.
0:00 Introduction: Depression explained
1:17 Side effects of SSRIs
1:32 St. John’s wort and depression
2:27 The brain-gut connection
3:22 Depression and gut health
3:40 Depression and gut inflammation
3:51 Antibiotics and depression
4:33 L. reuteri and mental health
Depression has consistently been viewed as a chemical imbalance, but it's actually related to a problem with the gut.
Depression is often treated with SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors), but many studies show normal serotonin levels in people with depression.
SSRIs do not fix depression and have even been called placebos by some medical professionals. They also come with serious side effects, including sexual dysfunction, decreased libido, inability to experience emotion, and worsening depression.
St. John’s wort affects both serotonin and dopamine. It’s an anti-inflammatory and reduces cortisol, but doctors and the medical world often recommend against it despite its very few side effects.
Serotonin and oxytocin are made in the gut. Oxytocin is a powerful hormone that can help with depression and stress, so gut health is at the core of mental health. The vagus nerve works as a highway that orchestrates the brain and gut connection.
If you have a problem with your gut microbes, this can lead to depression. Studies have found serious microbes missing in depressed people! Gut inflammation can also alter your mood.
One of the side effects of antibiotics is depression. Antibiotics erase the good bacteria that control your mood chemicals. Once wiped away, microbes don't always come back, and you could be left with an imbalance.
L. reuteri is an amazing microbe that many people are missing. Dr. William Davis has shared an expert technique for cultivating L. reuteri using half and half to increase its potency. People have consumed this probiotic mixture and experienced significant health benefits such as improved sleep, muscle tone, and reduced stress.
L. reuteri acts as a natural antibiotic without side effects and is found naturally in breast milk.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Depression has absolutely nothing to do with your brain and has everything to do with your gut. |
| 0:06.7 | So many people have been operating off of this idea. Depression is a chemical imbalance |
| 0:12.5 | that you need to fix with SSRI's selective serotonin, re-uptake inhibitors. Well, this chemical |
| 0:20.4 | imbalance theory has never been proven. In fact, |
| 0:24.2 | in some studies, it shows that people that are depressed have normal serotonin or even higher amounts |
| 0:31.3 | of serotonin. In your nervous system, you have all these different hormonal-like communications. |
| 0:37.0 | One of them is serotonin. And serotonin does have an |
| 0:40.0 | effect over your mood, just like dopamine has an effect of motivating you. But what an SSRI does |
| 0:47.4 | is it blocks the uptake of serotonin. Let's say, for example, we have a marriage, right? We have a |
| 0:53.4 | husband and a wife, |
| 0:54.6 | and they're communicating. And the husband sends a communication over to the wife, but she's wearing |
| 0:59.1 | earplugs. That's the SSRI effect, right? You wear ear plugs, and so then the husband starts |
| 1:04.9 | shouting. Is that going to fix the marriage? No. Dr. Peter Gosch wrote several books on this topic and he basically said SSRIs are basically |
| 1:14.8 | placebo's. Hey, well, you know what? At least they're getting some benefit, right? Yeah, but what about the side |
| 1:19.8 | effects? Okay. Because in his book, he talks about the massive serious side effects of SSRIs. Sexual |
| 1:25.9 | dysfunction. No orgasm. Dec, decreased libido, you don't |
| 1:29.5 | experience emotion anymore, worsening of the depression. Let's just compare that with something |
| 1:34.1 | like St. John's Wart. St. John's Wart doesn't just deal with serotonin. It deals with dopamine. |
| 1:40.1 | It's an anti-inflammatory. It even reduces cortisol. And what does the medical profession say about |
| 1:44.9 | St. John's Ward? They say, well, you have to be careful not to take it because if you're taking that |
| 1:49.0 | and a psych drug and you might increase serotonin. St. John's Wort has very little side effects and it actually |
| 1:55.6 | works better than the placebo because it's a natural thing and it does a lot of different things. |
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