Hello and welcome to Zoe Recap, where each week we find the best bits from one of our podcast episodes to help you improve your health.

Today we're looking at a novel way to improve our mental health.

If I've learned anything from hosting this podcast, it's just how interconnected all the systems in our body are.

Nothing works in isolation, which means

we often have to step back and look at the bigger picture if we want to improve a particular

aspect of our health. With this in mind, let's shift our focus on mental health. Can we

approach it from a different angle? Harvard nutritional psychiatrist Dr. Uma Naidu is here to explain the science behind the gut brain axis

and how you can help one to help the other.

Nutritional psychiatry and certainly when I practice nutritional lifestyle and metabolic

psychiatry is an evolving size. It's nascent and there's new evolving evidence every single day.

But what we do know is that the trillions of microbes that live in our microbiome, in our gut,

as they're helping with the process of digesting our food,

their breakdown products are also in the same environment as 90 to 95% of serotonin

receptors. Now, serotonin is often called the happiness hormone. There are serotonin the brain

and other parts, but there's 90 to 95% of the receptors in serotonin production happens in the gut.

So the linkage that I make that's been backed up by science is that as our food is being

digested, it's also in the same environment as where these neurotransmitters are being produced,

where the receptors are located.

So we are therefore really understanding more and more that mental health is not this impact of just the brain.

It's the brain in connection with the gut and other parts of the body.

And can you explain a little bit more like what is a serotonin receptor?

And if it's in my gut, how's that linked to my brain? And how does that then make me

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