BOOK REVIEW: BRAIN MAKER - The Power of Gut Microbes to Heal and Protect your Brain for Life
By Dr David Perlmutter
In this book, Dr Perlmutter explains how bacteria make up the majority of our gut microbes, alongside yeast, viruses protozoans, and eukaryotic parasites that also serve important, healthful roles. By and large it’s the bacteria that are your body’s key players in collaborating with your physiology – especially your neurology.
Collected together, the bacteria in your gut would weigh about three to four pounds, about the same weight as your brain. Fully half of your stool weight is made up of discarded bacteria.
Dr Perlmutter breaks down the importance of having good gut health, and gives us insight into how a healthy gut not only affects how we digest and eliminate food, but how we feel, live, think and look throughout our lives.
7 REASONS WHY A HEALTHY GUT IS SO IMPORTANT
1. It aids in digestion and the absorption of nutrients.
2. It creates a physical barrier against potential invaders such as bad bacteria (pathogenic flora), harmful viruses, and injurious parasites. Some types of bacteria have hair-like threads that help them swim; the ‘flagella', as these threads are called, have recently been shows to stop a deadly stomach rotavirus in its tracks.
3. Act as a detoxification machine. The Gut's bugs have a role in preventing infections and serving as a line of defence against many toxins that make it down into your intestines. In fact, because they neutralize many toxins found in your food, they can be viewed as a second liver. So when you decrease the good bacteria in your gut, you increase the workload of your liver.
4. Profoundly influences the immune system’s response. The gut is your biggest immune system organ. Moreover bacteria can educate and support the immune system by controlling certain immune cells, preventing autoimmunity (a state in which the body attacks its own tissues).
5. Help you handle stress through the flora's effects on your endocrine hormonal system.
6. Assist you in getting a good nights sleep.
7. Helps control the body’s inflammatory pathways, which in turn affect risk for virtually all manner of chronic disease.
