Inflammation in the gut is encoded by neurons in the brain
nature.com
nature.com
Likewise finding incredible links for liver (potentially Alzheimer's [3]) and pulmonary health (air quality, heart disease [4]).
Who knew? But it seems obvious in retrospect. We're truly dynamical, vastly interlinked systems.
[1] https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s1291...
[2] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/02/190219080742.h...
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29393937
[4] https://www.epa.gov/sciencematters/linking-air-pollution-and...
But that's somewhat tempered by reports of reproducibility crises in scientific / academic research.
I wish I had a better sense of the extent to which that matters for stories like this.
Luckily this effect only lasts a few days for me but it's made me wonder if our bodies find ways around malfunctioning and then can't adjust quickly enough if the malfunction is reduced or removed.
Really I couldn't have asked for a better problem to deal with. The correlation between mind/gut health is so instantaneous and powerful, my child brain got Pavlovian-conditioned to deal with mental stress. I couldn't just dissociate from mental pain, I really had to understand and deal with causes of stress in a healthy way, otherwise I would be forced to the floor in the fetal position from all the cramps. Platitudes about always listening to your gut are funny, taken both literally and figuratively that's my life!
When I was a kid I used hate using school toilets. And I was a highly anxious kid which would present as stomach butterflies. I dealt with constipation as a kid, which further made me nervous because I'd experience it AT school and be too afraid to sit down a while at school.
Fast forward 20 years, the most stressful time of my life (moving cities, dealing with depression, mom got cancer, ...) and I developed IBS-C. My intestines don't move thing along, need to stimulate with drugs. Unfortunately it hasn't gone away.
Different people with different biology react differently but my bodily reaction to stress happened to be a lot like the one in the video.
As someone with a bowel disease, I can thank medicine for giving me my life back.
Controlling stress and smoking have been the best fixes (the latter works but smoking is still bad for you).
Maybe, but at the end of the day it is your decision. You absolutely can read a pile of papers on your specific issue and invest hours into it. It will without a shadow of a doubt be more attention than the GP has for you (at ~10 minutes per appointment), or even a specialist who might invest an hour into you if you're lucky. Unless you're dying, in which case it's still not certain.
For me, being prescribed increasingly higher doses of steroids in the beginning of the lockdown we had here because of my asthma was not nice. After about a year of this, I realised it got a lot worse after staying indoors for 1.5 years. It sounds obvious and in hindsight it was, but my doctor knew all of this and never ever addressed the fact that maybe I should spend more time outside (with absolutely 0 mention of testing for vitamin levels or prescribing something along those lines). Doctors come in widely varying qualities and some of them are really bad.
Even if they 'solve' it by rewriting query y, they'll not claim that query y was the problem, and may even leave a comment or commit log saying they didn't understand why writing it like har fixed it.
On a system as incredibly simple as, say, an old carbureted motorcycle you don't just look at the spark plugs if there is poor ignition. You look at the carb, air filter, rings, valves, top dead center sensor, timing chains, the cdi/tdi, the coils, and the battery (although probably not in that order).
If the problem is the battery no sensible home mechanic (and no ethical professional mechanic) stops there, you check the voltage regulator and the stator or you're going to find yourself replacing a lot of $100 batteries for want of a $30 IC or a piece of $2 copper wire with a break in the insulation.
The exact same process applies in debugging or designing a physics experiment or making a pcb or repairing a house or therapy, or...just life. Like, you're never going to keep your room clean if your wardrobe is too small to hold all your clothes....
I can't even begin to comprehend a mindset which claims to be part of STEM (or even as professional as a tradesman) in which this concept is foreign or novel.
A whole systems health model would involve essentially a debugging process for injuries and maladies in order to find root causes and treat them. It would require a totally different (transdisciplinary) approach to health though, and institutions don't really change.
In reality it's all systemic pressures everywhere and nobody, not even institutional administrators, likely have much in the way of free choice over anything that matters.
[1] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ontology-of-psychiatri...
Have you looked at the impact of diet?
When I first learned about diet the advice was terrible. It didn’t work.
Now that I have a good conceptual model for my GI track and food it all makes more sense.
I'm glad to see this mindset start to change.
Incidentally, my current diet is extremely high in a subset of FODMAPs and has helped dramatically.
I'm sorry about your relative. I had a terrible reaction too. Corticosteroids caused downregulation of androgen receptors and for a few months, I was in a desperate place.
I found Tribulus could upregulate androgen receptors (and seemingly, a few non-androgen ones) and it saved me.
Brain-gut Axis and Pentadecapeptide BPC 157: Theoretical and Practical Implications
At some point he said ’fuck it, if I going to die it’s going to be in the sun’ (he lived in cold Canada.)
He went to Mexico and completely recover without any drugs, eating anything he wanted. I later found there is a strong connection with vitamin D deficiency and autoimmune diseases.
Look into functional medicine if you haven’t, basically the idea of giving what a normal body need to function properly ( good food, sleep, friends, family, sun, etc, probiotics) and mostly get out of the way.
What I'd like to know - even though it's an anecdotal data point from one guy only - what does anything he wants actually mean?
I.e. did he somehow eat his regular Canadian diet in Mexico or did he eat more local?
Asking because IBS is a bowel disease and gut micro biome I would gather can play a large role as well.
Take cabbage. Eating cabbage will allow certain microbes in your gut to thrive. But only if they are there in the first place.
Different experiment: Let cabbage sit in salt in an anaerobic environment for some time. Then eat it. Now the cabbage brings the beneficial microbes to the gut and helps them thrive there.
Cabbage with salt in an anaerobic environment makes Sauerkraut. Salt let's certain microbes survive but not others. The final lactobacillus that do survive themselves produce an acidic environment that further results in many non beneficial microbes dying.
Many cultures have similar food preparation techniques that turn out to be beneficial. Kimchi being similar - and part of the health craze nowadays.
I asked because I would associate lots of beans and such with foods in Mexico and beans make for a very different gut micro biome than the regular western diet. That's why someone on a western diet will pass a lot of gas when eating beans from time to time, as the bacterial makeup changes while eating lots of beans will have the opposite effect when eating a western carb diet from time to time. Been there. Done both :)
And, it makes sense that beans makes people pass more gas only if they are not used to eat it regularly.
I found in research paper the link with vitamin D and ibs and most autoimmune diseases.
From what I remember he ate a lot of local fresh fruits and other local food.
I don't have IBS but more like a colitis and I was really good for months but it came back strong after one of my dogs passed away and I got terribly sad.
What I'm getting at is that more than a vitamin D, I suspect a strong link to happiness and life satisfaction.
First trying lots of medications. Sometimes this goes well. Sometimes not.
Then supplements.
Then eventually people get serious about diet. Turns out there is a diet built around autoimmune conditions. Autoimmune Protocol Diet. Many people have great success with it. Not all.
Would love so see some studies on it.
Ok, so there are gut/vagal interoceptors for inflammation. Their ascending fibers land in the insula, which is, of course, the primary interoceptive cortex. What's new here?
So, if I may ask you, or the larger thread—
this is implying the the inflammation will repeat if the neurons are activated [in such a way]?
Could/would this impact one-time sufferers of SIRS and/or acute pancreatitis (being an inflammatory disease)?
Would it match the original severity?
What is strange is that I can literally eat any food like pizza and it does not matter.
Before I had non-stop diarrhea, bloating, diagnosed allergies to almost every food, bad whole body eczema…
It’s not placebo since I started this diet for longevity and not for the reasons above. So when my symptoms went away I was genuinely surprised.
Summary of article on related research: More than a century later, in a paper published today in Cell, the neuroimmunologist Asya Rolls has shown that a similar kind of conditioning extends to immune responses. Using state-of-the-art genetic tools in mice, her team at the Technion in Haifa, Israel, identified brain neurons that became active during experimentally induced inflammation in the abdomen. Later, the researchers showed that restimulating those neurons could trigger the same types of inflammation again.
I was diagnosed with Ulceritive Colitis about 2 years ago. Took all sorts of medication. All the docs I consulted told me diet has nothing to do it and its just my body developing auto-immune symptoms. My symptoms be came severe to the point I was having bloody stools (lots of blood) few times a day and I could not walk more than few mins.
Decided to quit my work. Took few courses on Biology. Specifically on or related to: Physiology, Brain, Harmones, Cell and Gut. Read about 20 or so books on Gut, Food and Pharma (trying to understand how it evolved and the ecomonic models, how the FDA is the single boss of both the cop (Health Industry) and the con (Food Industry)). Started experimenting with foods and logging results in a food diary. Got the tests done for Food Intolerances. Avoided foods that are causing food intolerances. Avoided too spicey foods and non-veg food: Mutton, Chicken, Fish and Eggs. Taking a lot of fiber rich foods: Gourds and switched to millets (its traditional indian grains). Taking Marshmellow root and ginger tea two times a day. Eating Millet Porridge for almost two months now. Taking help from a nutrionist and functional medicine expert to make sure I am eating a balanced diet and meeting the nutrition requirements of my body.
Happy to let you all know, after what it felt like an endless suffering, I am back to healthy life and have not noticed blood in stools for past 3 weeks. I am getting better and better. Time between my flare ups has been increasing gradually. can walk for hours at a stretch. I see a path to beating my gut problems.
Functional Medicine and gut expert: http://www.makeingut.com/ Traditional Food Expert: Dr. Khader Valli (aka the Millet Man of India) https://manavata.org/khadervali/
Instead of commenting speculatively, I'm going to wait for someone to post more of the article, or a link to the full article.