In this Expert Insight Interview, Hally Brooke discusses anxiety and depression as gut rather than brain problems. Hally Brooke is a nationally board-certified nutrition counselor and health coach at Nourished Coaching.
This Expert Insight Interview discusses:
- The reasons why depression and anxiety should be considered gut problems
- How the Standard American Diet contributes to inflammation
- What the Standard American Diet entails and why it is so dangerous
Anxiety and Depression Start in the Gut
Most people would immediately associate anxiety and depression with mental health, and that is how we treat these disorders. We use counseling, anti-depressants, and anti-anxiety medications. However, Hally Brooke posits that there are two reasons why depression and anxiety are gut problems rather than brain problems.
The first reason is that 95% of your serotonin is created in your gut, not in your brain. So, if your digestive tract is not functioning correctly, your body is not producing the serotonin it needs. Secondly, we’re now starting to rename depression as brain inflammation, and brain inflammation is caused by inflammation in our bodies in general.
Body and Brain Inflammation
We now know that the gut epithelial lining is only one cell thick. To put that into perspective, the skin on the thinnest part of your hand is about 30 cells wide. We also know that most foods in the Standard American Diet (SAD) cause significant inflammation, resulting in these cells splitting apart.
This leads to bacteria and food particles leaking out into your body. Your body responds to this by attacking these particles like it would a virus, which results in a raging inflammation in our bodies that spills onto our brains.
Standard American Diet
The standard American diet consists of everything we love, including burgers, French fries, chips, and other highly processed, sugary foods cooked in low-quality oils high in inflammatory Omega 6 fats.
Many people don’t know that food companies like Kellogg’s, Heinz, and others have chemists on payroll whose sole job is to figure out how to make the food addicting. Pasta sauce does not need to have sugar in it, but it does because that makes it addicting and makes you go back and buy that brand again.
Our Host
John is the Amazon bestselling author of Winning the Battle for Sales: Lessons on Closing Every Deal from the World’s Greatest Military Victories and Social Upheaval: How to Win at Social Selling. A globally acknowledged Sales & Marketing thought leader, speaker, and strategist, he has conducted over 1500 video interviews of thought leaders for Sales POP! online sales magazine & YouTube Channel and for audio podcast channels where Sales POP! is rated in the top 2% of most popular shows out of 3,320,580 podcasts globally, ranked by Listen Score. He is CSMO at Pipeliner CRM. In his spare time, John is an avid Martial Artist.
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