Hey there, welcome to the root cause medicine podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Carrie Jones. On this

podcast, we go in depth with leading experts from all walks of life to understand and improve your

health and well-being. Today, I'm talking with Carrie Annania about how your gut microbiome

affects your hormones like estrogen.

Carrie is a board-certified physician's assistant who owns Nebraska Functional Medicine.

She is training by both the Institute for Functional Medicine

and the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine.

She's the assistant director of clinical education at the supplement company Biosidon,

whose toothpaste I love,

and frequently lectures on the topic of functional medicine and gut health. It was an absolute pleasure talking with her today, as understanding how the health of your entire digestive system

relates to the health of your hormones, and more is so crucial to your overall well-being.

Here's a clip from today's conversation. So it starts to drive that down and 80% again an estimate

80% of our serotonin is converted in the gut. So serotonin's that feel good kind of happy

neurotransmitter. And you know our brain sends signals to the gut.

I think a lot of people think our brain has this almighty power, but really brain sends signals

to the gut, but our gut sends 10 times the signals to the brain. And so you're seeing there that

if you're, you've constantly got all these either little fires or one major fire that's creating

this inflammatory response in the microbiome,

how in the world are we going to expect serotonin to do its little magical enzyme reaction to

activate it and get sent to the brain and be like, I'm going to feel good amongst this craziness.

It doesn't. It fits. Generally feel good when you have all that craziness going on. It's harder to

feel positive. It's harder to stay optimistic, and it's easy to get really down.

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