Welcome to the Dr. Gundry podcast. The weekly podcast where Dr. G gives you the tools you need to boost your health and live your healthiest life.

I'm back with another knowledge-filled episode where I reveal the latest health transforming tips to help you live your longest most fulfilled life.

I'm around. I'm saving you time by condensing all these facts into one short concise episode. You won't want to miss this one.

Foods that surprisingly help reduce stress.

All right, stress is something we all deal with. And when it comes to stress management strategies, you've probably heard it all.

From meditation, to exercise, to yoga, to journaling, and doing more of what you love.

But I'm not going to talk about any of that today. Today I'm going to share a stress management strategy that very few people know about taking care of your gut microbiome.

Now, your gut microbiome is really the largest important organ in your body that finally is getting the love and attention it requires.

For years, we literally didn't know that the gut microbiome existed. Number one, the number two, we didn't know that there was such a thing as the gut brain connection.

And number three, we didn't know that a lot of our food choices and the way our food is prepared and treated was actually negatively impacting our gut microbiome function.

So I want to take you step by step where we can maximize what's going on with our gut microbiome.

All right, what is the gut brain connection? Well, we've expanded that. We've known for years that the gut makes neurochemicals, important neurotransmitters that affect mood. We've known that for years.

But the revelation of the gut microbiome is the great amount of these neurotransmitters feel good hormones like serotonin are actually manufactured by the gut microbiome and then absorbed through our gut wall and transmitted to our brain.

We also know that there's a whole host of other neurotransmitters that are called gaseo messengers or gaseo transmitters that are manufactured by the gut microbiome that impact our anxiety or depression and that most of the things that are anti-depressants that circulate in our bloodstream,

in anti-anxiety agents, we now realize are coming from the gut microbiome itself as a messaging system.

So imagine if your gut microbiome is all out of whack that you got a lot of gang members in there and not a lot of gut buddies.

It's no wonder that we could have increased anxiety and depression just because the messages have become changed from, if you will, aggressive messages from calming messages.

So getting that balance and check is incredibly important in our stressful lifestyle.

Now, the other interesting thing, it goes both ways. Not only can leaky gut, porosity of the gut, cause actual bacteria to get into us, and quite frankly, if we're under attack by bacteria, your body takes that as one of the most stressful events that it can possibly deal with.

Imagine that that is happening 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, and you get an idea of how underlying stressful leaky gut is.

The other thing that's important to realize is incredibly life-changing stressful events can have the effect of causing leaky gut in and of itself.

I have a number of patients with leaky gut and autoimmune diseases who can literally trace the day that their problems started.

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