Stuff You Should Know - Your Gut Is Also A Brain

Episode Date: December 2, 2021

Your gut – not your spare tire, but your digestive tract – is deceptively smart. Not only does it handle processing food and nutrients, but the hundreds of trillions of bacteria that live in your gut may actually be telling your brain what to do too. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to

believe. You can find in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W. Chuck Brian over there. And it's just the two of us. We're flying solo and that's okay. We're going to do this and this

is Stuff You Should Know. Yeah, you know, before we could go in, we are the worst self-promoters and we consistently forget to tell people that we have a book and a board game for sale for Christmas. Oh, that's a great, great point, Chuck. And every once in a while they'll say things like, you know, if you guys want to mention this. Did they say that? I feel like every now and then we get emails that say, hey, did you forget that you have these things? I don't forget. I just assume like everybody doesn't want to hear about it, you know? Oh, I know. But we're just not good at this. No, we're not. As we stumble through yet another self-promotion. We have a book and a board game and they both make great Christmas gifts. Please stop. This is making me so uncomfortable.

Go buy them, everybody. Yeah, they're actually pretty good. We're proud of both of them. I mean, we like, we wrote a book and we also, with our good buddy Nils Parker, I should say, and we also helped create a board game with our good buddies over at Trivial Pursuit. So yeah, I'm very proud of it. It's a legacy kind of thing, you know? That's right. So we might have a couple of these reminders before Christmas because they do make great gifts for the stuff you should know, friend, in your life. Absolutely. So that was a great idea, Chuck. And it didn't feel so bad after all. That's right. And now on to our probably, I think eighth episode, I think it culminates. It's culminated in this after many, many episodes dealing with this stuff.

Well, that's funny that you say that because I was going to caveat this with like, this, this, we will surely do another episode on this down the road within the next several years, I'm sure. Because you're obsessed with it. I'm obsessed with it, number one. Absolutely. It's one of the most interesting things because this kind of stuff, we're going to talk about the gut brain microbiome axis. And it reveals, Chuck, like how little we actually know about our bodies and how they function. But it also provides these tantalizing clues about how cool the stuff we have left to understand is, you know what I mean? One day, we're going to understand exactly how our bodies function. And it's going to be mind boggling. I'm just very excited about it.

So yes, I'm obsessed with it. But the other reason why we'll surely do it again, is because the stuff that we're going to talk about, we got to disclaim this episode in that it's pioneering, like cutting edge research, not bleeding edge, cutting edge research. So it's going to keep evolving. But that also means, Charles, that you and I can just be like gee whiz and wow at this point, because this is all like just very early study kind of stuff. That's right. And if you want to really get ready for this one, you could listen to episodes on digestion, fecal transplants. Yeah. The microbiome. Human microbiome project, immune system, probiotics, and even our old buddy, fight or flight. Yeah. And then just listen to the one on pyromania for kicks.

Did we do one on pyromania? Of course. Yeah, man. It's funny. I was looking through the list the other day for a very special thing we have coming up that we can't announce yet. It's more self promotion too. Which we're very excited about. But I was looking through all of our episodes and then boy, it's getting more and more around like, huh? What? Really? Yeah. Imagine somebody trying to wade into this stuff and just encountering it now. Yeah. It was at one point though, I was like, was I abducted for a few years? I don't remember a lot of these. Yeah. I have the same thing going on. But also Chuck, now that you mentioned the

list, I want to give a huge hat tip again to our minister of stats, Jill Hurley, who just doggedly and tirelessly chronicles every single episode we've ever done. There's a Google sheet out there that's open access that has every single episode in order, including the selects or when they ran as a select. It's just an amazing thing that she's doing for free for the love of it. I'm guessing she still loves it, I hope. Well, Hurls, if nothing else is stubborn, she won't quit even if she hates it. That's right. Let's talk about the gut brain microbiome access, Chuck, because there's a couple of ways to look at it. The first way is the way that you would expect that you do things

like digest food, your gut linings produce mucus, you poop things out after you eat them, you even swallow, and your brain has a lot of other stuff to do than to just micromanage that. You have an entirely different secondary central nervous system that's dedicated exclusively to eating, digesting, and harvesting nutrients from your food, and that's called the enteric nervous system. That's right. This is definitely one we hit on in the digestion episode, but they handle it all in the enteric nervous system. The ENS is really similar in a lot of ways to our own central nervous system in that it's made up of nerves and neurons and neurotransmitters. It does its own thing for the most part as far as controlling that stuff without the central nervous system

lording over it saying, you forgot this part, you might want to move this through the intestine a little quicker. It does its own thing, but this gut brain connection that we're talking about is really a connection between the ENS and the CNS because they have figured that these two systems talk to each other. They talk to each other from the gut to the brain, which is the really surprising part. We've always known that the brain talks to the gut, but now we're learning, hey, it looks like the gut is actually sending messages to the brain. A lot of the stuff we thought was a certain way could be actually backwards like IBS. Yeah. We've thought for a very long time that people with IBS, which is basically your lower parts aren't working at full steam.

Either you're pooping too much and you've got really thin watery poops or you're pooping too little, you're constipated. Either way, you have irritable bowel. It's one of the most appropriately named syndromes there is, right? Yeah. Of course, everybody's walking around knowing that anybody who has IBS is suffering from stress or anxiety and so it's bringing on digestive issues. Well, this is why this stuff is so mind-blowing is the field of research that investigates the gut brain microbiome access is saying, actually, it's like Chuck just said, it might go both ways. You might have stress and anxiety not because of your job or there's something stressing you out. The guy down the block keeps looking at you weird. That's not

why you're stressed out or anxious. It's because you have IBS that's causing your stress and anxiety. We may have had it backwards all this time. Yeah. To be specific, you can get anxiety obviously because you have IBS, but what they're saying is it's a chicken and the egg thing, is the origin of this is actually in the gut and not like, oh, I have IBS because I'm anxious. Right. The reason why they're saying that this is even possible is because that crosstalk goes both ways. We're starting to find more and more evidence of just how the gut could possibly speak to the brain and send its own signals. One of the main ones is the vagus nerve, which made a starring appearance in our episode on what happens in the brain during an orgasm.

The vagus nerve is all about that, but the vagus nerve also has a lot to do with connecting the enteric nervous system with the central nervous system as well. Yeah. I mean, we've known for a long time and we talked about this some in our fight or flight episode that let's say you're out in the woods and you're camping and you have to go to the potty and you go and you squat down in the middle of nowhere, you're enjoying your time, you're about to do your business and a bear pops his head up. So what you're doing? Your body, well, the bear's like, I know what that means, but I'm here to interrupt that.

The bear says, I poop in the woods too. That's right. That bear, like you will go on an immediate sphincter lock and it's not just because it's not just a physical reaction you have, like you choose to do like, oh, I better stop what I'm doing because there's a bear, like your body goes into fight or flight and your brain sends a signal to your body saying, whatever else you're doing, shut it down now because the most important thing going on right now is this bear in front of you. Yeah. Like the FBI guy in Die Hard, shut it down now. But that's what, because the brain is saying, we've got much better things to do with the energy

that you're using to digest that food right now. So of course the brain can talk to the enteric nervous system when it's fight or flight time. And at this point, Chuck, I want to give another huge hat tip to our own Dave Ruse who helped us with this one. Bang up job. He came up with an entirely new phrase for fight or flight, battle or skedaddle. It's so good that I wrote an email just calling that one out to him saying, like, this was a priceless term. And he said, that was all mine.

So hopefully he's going to figure out a way to copyright that one. He made up for Bruce Springstein. That's right. So yes, we know that the brain can talk to the ENS, but the ENS can talk to the brain via the vegas nerve as well. And what they're figuring out is that it communicates with the brain communicates in a number of different ways with the vegas nerve, specifically those, and this is why they call it the gut brain microbiota or microbiome axis, because what we're figuring out is, yes, you have cells that line your intestines, your guts, that are neurons, you have neural cells, you have sensory cells, you have a lot of the same cells

that your brain uses to make sense of the world where your gut has those same cells too. But we're figuring out that the bacteria that lives in your gut is actually communicating to your brain and saying, hey, change this behavior. Hey, try this instead. Hey, have you considered a red sweater? Green's just not your color. Like the bacteria that live in our gut are telling our brains what to do in some ways. It's pretty remarkable. This is why we keep talking about this, Chuck. I know. The bacteria, in addition to doing all the other great things they do, they produce metabolites. And these metabolites actually do function as neurotransmitters. And one of the big examples that Dave dug up, and it's a big part of kind of one of the cruxes

of this communication with the gut in the brain are these short chain fatty acids, SFCA's. They are byproducts or natural byproducts of fermentation when you're digesting this dietary fiber. If you're hopefully eating enough dietary fiber, something I've had to do a lot more of lately. It's so good for you. It's crazy. It seems like the key to health. It is. And I don't want to get too gross here, but I've been on a lot of high fiber, and I've been more gassy than I've ever been in my life. And it's not even stinky gassy. It's almost just like air. Very lucky. Yeah. I'm not saying my toots don't stink anymore at all ever, but these fiber toots don't really stink.

That is really bizarre because cruciferous vegetable toots can really clear room, I guess, is a way to put it. You're blessed, Chuck. Your hashtag, blessed. Well, my family's blessed, I guess. Because I don't really care. You're like, I kind of miss it. But where were we? Short chain fatty acids. They are, like I said, natural byproducts, and they play a really, really big role in the digestive tract, and they're sending, one of the things sending these signals to your ENS, and they're saying, hey, maybe you should make more mucus. Maybe I can get the gut a little less inflamed. Maybe I can stop a little

leakage from happening. And so the short chain fatty acids themselves, they're involved in neurotransmitters, but apparently they can talk to the brain themselves too, right? They don't have to convert it into anything else. I think so. Just through the vagus nerve, right? Yes. And so here's where we're at. Yes, they go through the vagus nerve. That's the key here. And we've recently found a new kind of cell that line the gut that are actually connected. They connect the gut to the vagus nerve. They're called neuropod cells, and that's how they think that the gut is actually communicating with the brain through the vagus nerve. They think they found kind of like the smoking gun or the missing link or whatever. But that's how these short chain

fatty acids would travel up the nerve. They would send their signal up the nerve, or they would travel through the circulatory system, which is another way that they figured out the gut can actually impact the brain. So you get the vagus nerve, and then you have the circulatory system, and if all of those metabolites that are being produced by your bacteria that are fermenting, and different bacteria ferment, create different metabolites as they ferment your food and your dietary fiber, and those metabolites, like you said, sometimes they're short chain fatty acids, sometimes, which can be like a precursor to neurotransmitters or possibly a neurotransmitter itself. They actually build actual neurotransmitters too, like serotonin, dopamine, GABA, noradrenaline.

All of these things are actually constructed by the bacteria in your gut as well, and we know for a fact that those things can make it through the circulatory system to the brain, and they definitely have an impact on the brain and what the brain does. All right, maybe we should take a break. All right. Take a pause for the call. I'm just going to keep talking through the ad break. I'm too excited. All right, we'll be back right after this. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from

the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get second hand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention, because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think

your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right. So when we left, we were talking about a lot of stuff that sounds pretty amazing. And that we're just figuring out one of which is that the short chain fatty acids are actually able to stimulate that vagus nerve that we were talking about that stimulates the production of neurotransmitters. But here's sort of the headline, is some of these neurotransmitters can actually play a role in mood disorders. So we're not just talking about a two way street with things like fight or flight. We're talking about potentially autism, Parkinson's, depression, anxiety, like we were talking about with IBS. And they know this

because they took in these poor little mice. They're always doing the hard work on mice. But they've taken mice, they've severed the vagus nerve in mice to see what happened. And what they observed was that this gut bacteria had a real effect on brain chemistry because when they shut it down, they found big time reduction in stress hormone levels. Like they completely went away in these mice. Right. Which you would think their stress hormones would go up having their vagus nerves sever that that would be a really stressful thing. But no. So that's really like a good illustration of the point that we're at in research. There's not been a thing where it's like, oh, this is exactly how this happens. This is how your gut microbiota affects your brain

and your brain chemistry. We're not there yet. We just know that there is a definite correlation, not just in mice studies, Chuck, but also in human studies, which we'll talk about later. Like there's plenty of human diseases that we've long known. If you have this disease, you also have like irritable bowel syndrome or constipation is a hallmark of this neurological disorder that you wouldn't expect. We've known that they're connected and that's all kind of correlative. Now we're trying to figure out the causes of it. That's right. And it's not just like this communication isn't only happening through the vagus nerve. Right. You kind of briefly mentioned before the break, but there are all

kinds of ways that they're communicating that we're founding out. One of them is through the circulatory system. We used to think that the brain was just sort of shut down from behind the blood brain barrier. But now they're they're showing that like hormones are getting through there. Other things are passing through. We've known about ghrelin. We've talked about ghrelin for a while, the hunger hormone that basically the stomach produces it, sends a message to the brain that says, I'm hungry. So we've known that can pass through. But now they're learning things like you mentioned serotonin. To me, this is one of the facts of the show. 95% of our serotonin is actually produced by gut bacteria. Yes. Yeah. And I mean, the brain also can produce serotonin.

It can produce its own, but it appears that gets just 5%. Right. The serotonin, a lot of the serotonin that the brain uses comes from the gut, comes from bacteria fermenting food and producing as a byproduct of metabolism. It just so happens to produce this neurotransmitter. And I don't think, I don't think anybody who's looking into this is saying it just so happens. Like we appear to have co-evolved to take advantage of this. Like these bacteria started colonizing our guts, producing serotonin so much that our bodies found a way to really use serotonin in all sorts of different ways, including our brain to regulate mood and stuff like that. And this like one of the, one of the huge underlying messages of this

is that our microbiome, the bacteria that live inside of us, they have way more genes than we have. We have something like 20,000 genes in the human genome, but our microbiome typically has something like 2 million combined genes. And with those genes, with all those extra genes that we don't have, all that bacteria can produce stuff that we can't even produce, like vitamins and neurotransmitters that we wouldn't necessarily be able to produce on our own. And yet we rely on to function correctly. That's the most amazing example of symbiosis I've ever heard in my life. But the idea that bacteria fermenting food in your gut, Chuck, affects your mood or your outlook, or whether you have a cognitive disorder, like that's really substantial.

It's super substantial. I know. I feel like I could have come up with a better descriptor than really substantial, but I'm just too agog. Should we talk about the study of college students? Yeah. As far as trying to provide a link between, like a two-way street between stress and our gut, they said, well, there's no better place to go than to college students who are prepping for exams. And they said, if we're going to find out what's going on down there,

we need to look at their stools. And they tested the stools during exam week and found that their feces had a lot less lactobacilli, which is one of the good bacteria, than during the first week of class when they're just getting to know each other and partying and stuff like that. The same when they studied monkeys, little infant monkeys. And this is one of those tests that's a little bit sad. No one's dying here, but they're stressing out mama monkeys on purpose. Mm-hmm. So they've got these mama monkeys and they'll play these loud noises while they're pregnant to kind of like shock them. And with the mothers who had the, say what?

I got to stop you. I'm sorry. You just made a shock the monkey joke without even intending to. I did say shock and did not. Yes. I could not let that walk by. Congratulations on that. Monkey. Monkey. Great song. Did she know I got to shock the monkey? I wonder if they just walk around singing that constantly.

He was probably, there's no way they don't. And then they get home at night and they're like, oh, and they feel a little guilty about it because they remember why they're singing shock the monkey because they're actually shocking monkeys for a living. Or, and we mean shocking with loud noises, not shocking with electricity. Right. Well, yeah, that's what I guess Peter Gabriel meant too. But now I think about, I don't know, maybe he was talking about with electricity. Or I wonder if there's just one person, like the person who runs the lab on their way out says, you know, because they probably do it in their sleep though.

So you remember, you got to shock the monkey tonight. And they, everyone else just rolls their eyes. Yeah. And they have to, they have to put up with Marty who runs the lab. Yeah. And wears a piano keyboard tie every day. But there's different ones too, because some of them have red backgrounds. You can tell they're a little different. All right. So, so they make these loud noises.

And then the monkey, the mama monkeys who were shocked by the sounds, they had gut microbiomes with a lot lower levels of this good bacteria of lactobacilli and boy, bifidobacteria, epidobacteria. Yeah. That's like stuff in yogurt, I think both of those. Which we'll get to. All right. We'll get to the yogurt. But they had a dysbiotic microbiome as the upshot of it, right?

Yeah. Things get unbalanced basically because of these stress noises that they hear. Right. So, but it goes the other way too, that they're figuring out that if your gut microbiome gets out of balance, then that can make you stressed out, right? That can, that can actually lead to mood disorders, that they're, they're connecting like a really poor diet that's very low in like dietary fiber, because again, that's what your microbiome likes to crunch on and produces really important things like serotonin and dopamine from, that if you don't eat very well, it's possible your mood might not be as great or your outlook on life or your mental health might not be as great as it could be

if you actually did have a much healthier diet. That is very substantial. It is. And I think that kind of stuff kind of feeds on each other. It becomes this circular loop. Yeah. Well, that was something that Dave pointed out too, that they're starting to realize that your CNS, your central nervous system and your enteric nervous system are probably in communication constantly. They're just sharing information back and forth because there's no, it doesn't make any evolutionary sense for your bacteria to just be running the show and telling your brain what to do. That's one of the grimmest things I can possibly imagine is that we're actually just puppets for bacteria in our gut.

But at the same time, it doesn't make sense for your brain to be controlling your ENS. Your ENS is a semi-autonomous nervous system, so they're not bossing each other around. They're just sharing information and then making adjustments accordingly, but they can also affect one another and impact one another negatively when things are out of whack, whether you're stressed out, it can affect your gut or if your gut's not doing well, it can stress you out. That's what we're finding. That's right. And that is so substantial. Is that the second time you said that? Third, third. Third, okay. I don't think you picked up the second one. That's all right. And this is like, the reason this is big stuff and if you're wondering

like, yeah, but where's this all leading, we're about to tell you because if you have, I mean, it's not just IBS, if you have Parkinson's or if you or a family member is on the autism spectrum disorder, they're not saying that they can cure this stuff, but they are finding out very promising tests and studies that things like Parkinson's and autism can be mitigated somewhat with the use of certain probiotics and maybe in the future fecal transplants. Yeah. I don't think anybody credible is saying like, oh, we can cure autism spectrum disorder with probiotics or something like that, but there's a lot of mounting evidence that you can alleviate a lot of the symptoms, including things like behavior that like social avoidance or not being interested in social

novelty. A lot of the classic symptoms that are associated with autism spectrum disorder that in my studies, at least, they clear up a little bit. They adjust, they actually kind of go away in some cases when you adjust the gut microbiota of these mice who have the mice analogy of autism. Yeah. And GI problems are not always, but pretty much synonymous with autism spectrum disorder. If you have Parkinson's, you probably also have constipation. This has been true from the very first patients that were diagnosed by Dr. Parkinson himself. He realized that you also have constipation. Back then, this was sort of in the age where, I can't remember one of the recent episodes where we used to sort of have colonics and enemas for almost everything.

Well, that was probably the Kellogg's episode. No, we referenced the Kellogg's. It was like a couple of weeks ago. We talked about colonics and enemas a lot in this show. I think it was, maybe we're talking about the bleeders, the barbers. Yeah, that was it because they used to give people enemas for everything, but they may have been on to something a little bit. It's like kind of quacky as it sounded back in the day where if you had Parkinson's and constipation, they would give you a colonic or something or an enema and it would kind of help your Parkinson's out and people dismissed that a long time ago, but they may have actually been on to something a little bit there. Yeah, the idea is that this is the current understanding of why Parkinson's

and gut issues may be related is that they actually think it might start with gut issues, that you have a certain type of E. coli that's producing a protein called Curly, C-U-R-L-I, and that Curly has an effect in causing other proteins to misfold, which makes it a prion, remember those? Oh yeah. So this prion Curly causes misfolding of proteins in your gut. They end up clumping, which ends up constipating you, and this process starts a good 20 years before you show the classic symptoms of Parkinson's. This is amazing. Right, but the point is, is that by this time after 20 years, your Curly production has gotten so good that it starts to travel up to the brain where it starts misfolding proteins up there, and then you start to have the classic

symptoms of Parkinson's like tremors and shaking, and eventually possibly even hallucinations and things like that, but that it all starts in your gut with the E. coli that has colonized your gut, creating this Curly protein prion. Yeah, and this is one of those where research is going to help hopefully yield some, if not cure, some things that can help mitigate some of the effects of Parkinson's, but what it really could do is serve as an early warning system. That's not to say that if you have constipation, you're going to get Parkinson's in 20 years, but if you have chronic constipation, and it could be one of those things that they then look out and say, hey, this is something we might need to watch out for. Right, and that's actually, I've seen somebody

propose in a paper from I think this year that you use the biomarkers of what's called leaky gut as a early diagnosis of autism, because autism is usually diagnosed after a few years of age. I think maybe three or five or something like that, that they don't typically diagnose it before then, but that you would have leaky gut like long before this, and you could find it and possibly treat it, because so leaky gut is this idea where your gut lining is meant to be semi-permeable, where only the stuff your gut wants to make it through, like nutrients and neurotransmitters and stuff like that, are able to pass through. Leaky gut is where you have basically holes and cracks in that lining, and so unwanted stuff like toxins and bugs and partially digestive food

can make it through your gut and causes inflammation, and then there's this whole cascading problem, and that that is why leaky gut is associated with things like autism and I think even rheumatoid arthritis and a whole host of other diseases. So they're saying, if we look for leaky gut and we find it, there's a good chance, I think like 90% of people on the autism spectrum have leaky gut as well, that that would be a pretty good indication of autism diagnosis later in life. Yeah, I talked to one of my really good friends has a son with autism, and I was texting him about this, and it's like, man, there's a lot of really interesting research and asked him about his son having GI issues, and he said since day one, literally. And I was like, you're

going to really dig this, he's a listener too, so it's like, you're going to really dig this episode. I said, they've come a long way, I said, and the future looks bright for helping to mitigate maybe some symptoms. Yeah, it seems to be treatable. Leaky gut seems to be a treatable thing where it's probably the result of dysbiotic microbiota, and that if you introduce certain kinds of bacteria that you want that's missing, it may actually alleviate symptoms. Again, I don't think anybody's saying like you can cure autism just with probiotics, but it's possible that probiotics could really change somebody with autism's life for the better in a lot of ways, just from a probiotic supplement. For sure. And so there's a bunch of companies,

apparently, they're just throwing, venture capitalists are just throwing money at any company working on this right now, they're called Psychobiotics. This idea that you can create like a probiotic cocktail to treat something like autism or multiple sclerosis or rheumatoid arthritis, and that you don't have to use pharmaceuticals or drugs that function in ways we don't really understand, that what you're doing is going to the bacteria and saying, here, live here and do your natural thing and produce the stuff that this patient isn't producing on their own, won't you? And that's just the most substantial way you can think of to treat something like that. Super substantial?

Yeah, super substantial. All right, well, let's take our second break and we will come back and wrap this puppy up right after this. To turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that Michael and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you

through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids relationships life in general can get messy. You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye bye bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikulur. And to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life in India. It's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention.

Because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change, too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. So back to the autism spectrum disorder. They have found that this is about 10 years ago.

They found a correlation between mothers who had a high sort of long-term prolonged fever during pregnancy, that they were seven times more likely to give birth to a baby who had symptoms of ASD. Again, correlation. And then, again, the mice come into play. They got these pregnant mice. They infected them with a flu virus. It's just a poor mice. And they caused a spiking fever. And they gave birth to babies. And they can't test baby mice for autism. But what they can do is study their patterns and their behaviors. And they did find that they had limited social interactions. They had decreased vocalizations. They were doing repeated behaviors. They had leaky bowels, some of the things that you might experience on the autism spectrum disorder.

Right. So they kind of traced that to this idea, this theory. And there's a bunch of theories about how people might develop autism. But this idea that when the mom has a fever, an immune response is activated by a gut microbe, a particular one called segmented filamentous bacteria. And that it gets T cells and cytokines active. Remember, we talked about cytokines in the mRNA episode. And they want to store. They are helpful, but they can also overblow things quite a bit because they run around activating all sorts of other immune cells and basically say, go, go, go. And so the idea is that this triggers inflammation. And inflammation seems to be a huge problem for all sorts of things. Everything from neurological disorders to arthritis,

to irritable bowel syndrome, to basically anything that can be wrong with you seems to have some sort of basis in inflammation, like your body's mounting an immune response and you're suffering as a result. And so that's what the idea is with this, that these cytokines actually travel through the placenta and have an impact on the neurodevelopment of the fetus and that that is what causes autism. So that it's traced back to this, to the guts ability to trigger the immune system, which is another whole thing that has, you know, it has even wider implications than autism spectrum disorder too, like it can trigger all sorts of other problems. It might not even have to do with the developing fetus. It can happen within you, like it can cause cytokines to travel up to

your brain and produce neurological disorders in you as well, mental health issues in you as well, that the gut and inflammation happening in a bad combo is as good for the average human they're finding. That's right. You mentioned psychobiotics before the break. This is the idea that you can again use something like probiotics to treat anxiety or depression. And they have had a little bit of good fortune with the results here. And it looks like, I mean, they're doing some of this on humans. A lot of it was in rats. I think in 2011, they studied both rats and humans. And they gave them strains of bacteria for about 30 days, lactobacillus helveticus and bifidob, that's the same one from before, bifidobacterium longum. They should just name these. Yeah, exactly. Just call them by their

pet names. Like lacto and bif. Those two old friends. That's right. They really are too. They seem to, they pop up a lot where it's like, no, this is what you want. Like if you look at probiotic supplements, almost across the board, you're going to find lacto and bif in there. Yeah, lacto and bif. The two we love to eat. But they then put these people and mice through stress tests and found a quote, significant reduction in the anxiety like behavior in the rats. And actual psychological distress was being alleviated in humans as well. Yeah. I mean, there's that. This is where we're moving toward now is treating mood disorders, neurological disorders, mental health issues, a whole host of physical maladies, chronic diseases

with probiotics. If you can figure out what's missing in these patients, then you can grow that bacteria and put them in the person through like pills and it's possible they'll clear it up. Another theory of where autism comes from is that there's a depleted gut where there's bacteria that's missing from the person and they found in mice studies, they are able to produce germ-free mice, Chuck. And those germ-free mice tend to exhibit the autistic symptoms, that when they treat them with probiotics, that those autistic symptoms tend to clear up, which is pretty amazing. Yeah, it almost, it doesn't almost seem like like what is definitely happening as science has progressed over the years, it feels like it's become way, way less

segmented. It's like, here's your brain and here's your nervous system and here's your organs and here's this stuff and it's all compartmentalized and it just seems like through our own research over the years, everything is linked together, it seems like. Yeah, there's a whole field called functional medicine that's developing that gets super poo pooed by skeptics and it's understandable. It's a very early field and there are plenty of practitioners who overdo it in what they say that can be accomplished, but the whole idea behind it is integrative. Another name for it is integrative medicine where you don't, like one of the first things you would do when somebody came in with a problem, no matter what it was, is adjust their

diet to a healthier diet and start there. Because of this idea of like, you're part of a big interconnected whole that that's how our bodies function. It seems intuitive to me now, you know. Yeah, I mean, Emily goes to a functional medicine doctor in addition to our regular MD. It's sort of, it doesn't have to be one or the other thing. Right. Ideally, I don't know, ideally they work together, not together together, but. Oh, they won't even speak to one another. No, but as a patient, ideally they work, you can work with both is what I'm saying. Yeah, you just don't tell them about each other. She is, as you know, is suffering through lime right now. I didn't know that. Oh, no. Oh, I didn't tell you that. No, man, that's terrible.

Yeah, it's been a bad scene. I'll bear the house for a while. But her diet is one of the big, she's on this crazy, weird, awful diet. Nothing but goat milk. No, but lots of weird, like, forest floor tea and just stuff that, you know, not able to eat. I mean, you name it, man, so many things that she can't have right now to try and help it out because, you know, the antibiotics they put her on were wrecking her. Well, yeah, that's another thing too, is they're figuring out that antibiotics to treat just, you know, rando stuff or like the flu or something like that. That can have a huge, terrible effect on your gut chemistry and can have cascading effects down the road. That's another thing that they're just kind of in the initial studies of. And it's

not any shade on antibiotics. They basically have saved more lives than can be possibly counted. But we have tended to kind of lean toward prescribing them willy nilly and people don't finish their prescription anyway. So there's all sorts of problems with it. But they're finding like there's a lot of less than obvious problems that can come about from killing off your gut microbiome. Totally. So there's one last thing I want to end with real quick. Chuck, one of the guys, the guy who actually, along with a guy named Ted Deenan, coined the term psychobiotics and psychobiome, which is a description of how your microbiome produces neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine and all that. His name is John Cryan. And he has a theory of why we would

have evolved to have a microbiome that would impact whether we're social or not. Because it's weird if you think about it. Why would your gut microbiome being off, like dysbiotic, have any impact on socialization, right? Yeah. I mean, this is super interesting. And the Ted talk is, it's a Ted med. It's awesome if you have time to go watch it. A little heady, but good stuff. His theory, he basically studied the same germ free mice that you were talking about that have, they basically don't have a microbiome of their own. Very sad. And he found out that these germ free mice showed a lot of social impairment, especially the male mice. And he compared that to the germ free mice to symptoms of ASD and found that it also affected males. So

again, that got him thinking kind of like what's going on with this stuff. So he said, I wonder if like having a healthy sociable human is dependent on that gut bacteria with the idea being that we're all hanging out together in groups, you know, tuk-tuk in the gang. And we're trading bacteria with one another. We're in close contact with one another and swap and spit with one another. So our bacteria is more varied basically. And that's how it's selecting that as a positive trait. Yeah. And from the bacteria standpoint, the more humans there are around, the more hosts you have to colonize, the more the bacteria species thrives, right? So it's like a, it's beneficial either way. Like we actually get a lot out of being social.

Like we have longer lifespans, we have a better outlook on life, the more like close friends and support network we have, it's just been documented over and over again. And it seems to be like the more we look into the microbiome and the psychobiome that that is driven by bacteria that seem to make us more social through their byproducts that they make that travel to our brain. Is that circular loop again? Yeah. Yeah. So win-win is another way to put it. And I love that. You got anything else for now? Nothing that's super significant. Okay. Well, if you want to know more about the psychobiome, go watch John Crian's Ted Med Talk and also check out Science, the journal Science's website, Meet the Psychobiome. It's a really good

introduction too. And since I said it's a really good introduction too, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this from listeners in their 70s. We'd love to hear from our listeners that are even older than me. It makes me feel good. Hey guys, my wife and I love your podcast and this I think is just a bit of a reminder for us. I've been listening for years now every afternoon while playing Spite and Malice. Do you know what that is? It sounded really familiar and I didn't have time to look it up because that email just came in, right? Yeah, this is hot off the presses. Okay. We're both in our 70s and love learning things we still don't know. But this email is to mention to both of you, lately that your childhood folklore religious vocabulary

is uptick some. Just reminding you that young people around the world are listening and the word use brain framing is occurring bigly. We suggest for your consideration to stay with secular language like CE for the current era. We used to default to CE. I guess we kind of have flopped back a little bit, haven't we? I hadn't noticed. I wonder if we didn't in the folklore episode because they just reference folklore and we just ran the folklore select recently. Maybe they're thinking like that's a current episode. Oh, that's my guess. Okay, so your guess is that we're on it? I feel like we're on it. I hadn't noticed anything like that. I feel like we've said BC recently. I think you're talking about the headache powder, which I love. We suggest you secular language

like CE for this current era, for example, and explaining historical timelines and science miracles or humicles, as we call them. And science is miraculous in its own right with all credit to the amazing human beings who discover the actuality of our natural universe. Thanks for what you do. Keep them coming. This is from Andre and Meredith Ryland in Pensacola, Florida. Thanks a lot, Andre and Meredith. We appreciate you guys writing in. And if you want to be like those two and write in yourself, well, we want to hear it. Send us an email to stuffpodcast.ihartradio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular, and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find in major league baseball, international banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.