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Stress is linked to all sorts of poor health outcomes, from our brains all the way to our

guts.

If you think about stress, it's almost equal to smoking five cigarettes per day.

It's Wednesday, October 9th, better known as Science Friday.

I'm Cyfry producer Kathleen Davis. There's a growing body of research that connects

what happens in our gut to what happens in our brain. In recent research shows

another clear distinction.

People resilient to stress have different

microbions than they're more stressed out counterparts.

Knowing this information could change the way that we treat stress into the future. Here's

Ira Flato. Joining me to talk about this work, published in the journal

Nature Mental Health is the lead author of the study, Dr. Apna Church, co-director of UCLA's Goodman-Luskin Microbiome Center based in Los Angeles.

Dr. Church, welcome to Science Friday.

Oh, thank you for having me on here.

How did you get involved in this?

So I was actually, you know, my path to poop was actually from the top versus, you know know top down versus bottom up.

Very nice very nicely put.

So I am actually a psychologist with

neuroscience expertise and I started in the psychology world and when I came to

UCLA started working in the division of digestive diseases and just

realizing like you know we we're just so interconnected as a

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