Brain Fact Friday Review on ”A Deeper Dive into Understanding the Gut-Brain Axis for Improving Our Mental and Physical Heath”

“No magic fairy or superhero is going to arrive at your door with a kit to make you healthy now and forever. We will have to be proactive in taking care of our biology and our psychology.” That’s from Dr. Andrew Huberman, promoting Inside Tracker,[i] a personal health and data-driven wellness guide, designed to help us to live healthier, and longer.   While I don’t use Inside Tracker, I support Dr. Huberman’s work enough to put his link to this service below in the show notes because the time is NOW to look after our health and wellness at the highest level possible, and that means with ALL the tools that help us to take control of our own health. Guessing about our health, is a now thing of the past. Welcome back to The Neuroscience Meets Social and Emotional Learning Podcast, where we connect the science-based evidence behind social and emotional learning (that’s finally being taught in our schools today) and emotional intelligence training (used in our modern workplaces) for improved well-being, achievement, productivity and results—using what I saw as the missing link (since we weren’t taught this when we were growing up in school), the application of practical neuroscience. I’m Andrea Samadi, an author, and an educator with a passion for learning and launched this podcast 5 years ago with the goal of bringing ALL the leading experts together (in one place) to uncover the most current research that would back up how the brain learns best, taking us ALL to new, and often unimaginable heights.    For today’s episode #304, and preparing for our interview next week with returning guest Dr. Gregory Kelly from NeuroHacker.com while also keeping with our Season Theme of Going Back to the Basics, we are going back to a series of episodes we did on “Boosting Our Immunity by Optimizing Our Gut Microbiome”[ii]  that began with Dr. Vuyisich on EP #93[iii] back in October 2020, when our podcast took the turn towards health and wellness.  This was the first time I became aware of how important it was to understand our gut microbiome for our health. Many things Dr. Vuyisich said in that interview stayed with me over the years, but one was something I couldn’t forget.  He warned listeners that if they take away one thing from our interview that it be this. He said “today, we have 100% of the science and technology needed to prevent every chronic disease and every cancer.” (Momo Vuyisich).   REVIEWING THE GUT-BRAIN CONNECTION Dr. Vuyishic’s episode (along with many of the other interviews we did at that time) helped me to create the vision for our Top Health Staples and Alzheimer’s Prevention Strategies[iv] that we covered on a BONUS EP 3 years ago.   We started with five, and after reviewing them with the top experts in the health and wellness industry, over the years, we added a sixth. What’s interesting while revisiting this episode we recorded 3 years ago with Dr. Vuyisich, is that I told him back then that while I understood the importance of taking probotics (friendly gut bacteria that keeps my digestion running well) to balance my gut microbiome, and I knew of the importance of prebiotics (or the superfoods that help them to flourish from Dr. Amen’s[v] work) giving me more energy and focus. But while watching Dr. Vuyisich’s interview again, I realized that 3 years later, I still don’t completely understand the gut-brain axis, and I know that I’m not as focused as I could be on optimizing my own gut microbiome. This is also coming from someone who discovered during a regular colonoscopy screening that I’m high risk for colon cancer, so I go back for these checkups more often than most people. This brings me back to why I’m doing these podcast episodes in the first place. If I’m not implementing the ideas that I’m learning from each expert, there’s not much point in me preparing questions, conducting these interviews, highlighting their expert suggestions that we edit, and put out to the world. I realized how importan