Treating Depression by Dealing with Intestinal Bacteria

Have you ever wondered why we tend to get very moody?  Have you ever wondered why we can get depressed for a long stretch and some of us are perpetually depressed?  I’m sure some of us have noticed that more and more people are taking antidepressants all the time.

Today we are talking about a serious and common illness, Depression, and new research regarding how the gastrointestinal tract may be involved with this condition.  Though Depression is a complicated disorder with many neurologic, genetic, and exogenous factors involved, today we will be discussing exciting research regarding the effects the gut can have on the brain function in depressed patients.

A recent review has pointed out several mechanisms by which gastrointestinal inflammation may play a critical role in the development of depression.

Among them:

1 – Depression is often found in patients with gut inflammations and autoimmune diseases as well as in patients with cardiovascular diseases, neurodegenerative diseases, type 2-diabetes and cancer, in which chronic low-grade inflammation is a significant triggering factor. Thus researchers suggested “depression is a neuropsychiatric reaction by a chronic gastrointestinal inflammatory syndrome.”

2 – Research suggests the primary cause of inflammation is dysfunction of the “gut-brain axis.” Your gut is literally your second brain — created from the identical tissue as your brain — and contains nine times more serotonin than in the brain:  Seratonin is associated with mood control.

It’s important to understand that your gut bacteria are an active and integrated part of your body, and are heavily dependent on your diet and vulnerable to your lifestyle. If you consume a lot of processed foods and sweetened drinks, for instance, it will destroy healthy bacteria and sugars of all kinds feeds bad bacteria and yeast that promote gut inflammation.

3 – An increasing number of clinical studies have shown that treating gut inflammation with probiotics, vitamin B, vitamin D and omega-3 fats also improve depression symptoms and quality of life by restoring proper gut-brain axis with to your brain.

What this all boils down to is that chronic inflammation in your body disrupts the normal functioning of many bodily systems, and can wreak havoc on your brain. But it appears inflammation may be more than just another risk factor for

This is why you need to eat a healthy balanced diet and supplementation to ensure that we keep at least 80% good bacteria in our body to keep healthy.