Gut vibrations
THE TINY BUT MIGHTY MICRO-ORGANISMS IN OUR DIGESTIVE TRACT CAN LEAVE US FEELING FLAT OR READY TO BURST INTO SONG. IT ALL DEPENDS ON WHAT WE FEED THEM
GLAMOROUS THE GUT IS NOT. But it’s a pity it doesn’t have better PR since it’s a wonderful feat of biological engineering that affects health in ways we are only now starting to understand.
I like to think of the gut in terms of a country, with distinct physical features, a government and an ever-changing population.
The physical features, or the gastrointestinal tract, comprise a series of hollow organs joined in a long twisting tube from the mouth to the anus. The tract takes in food, digests it to extract and absorb energy and nutrients, then expels the remaining waste as faeces.
The enteric nervous system acts as the government or ‘brain’ of the gut. It’s like a net embedded in the lining of the gastrointestinal tract stretching from the esophagus to the anus. It contains some 500 million neurons, about the same number as the brain of a cat. The gut brain is thought to play a major role in human happiness and misery by messaging back and forth from the brain (in our head) via the vagus nerve. Gastrointestinal disorders such as colitis and irritable bowel syndrome originate from problems within the gut’s brain according to Dr Michael Gershon, professor of anatomy and cell biology at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York. There’s also an interaction between the gut brain and drugs. According to Dr Gershon, “When you make a drug to have psychic effects on the brain, it’s very likely to have an effect on the gut that you didn’t think about.” The population of the gut, the microbiome, is a complicated ecosystem, with hundreds of competing species. Life down in the microbiome is in a state of permanent civil war as tribes compete for space and resources.