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1. How Gut Bacteria Regulates Stress Responses
2. The Microbiome and Your Arteries
3. Why Alcohol Is The Hardest Drug to Quit
4. Neuropathy (nerve damage) Caused by Alcohol Use
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How Gut Bacteria Regulates Stress Responses
Gut bacteria play a role in regulating stress hormones and circadian rhythms, with specific bacteria that helps maintain proper stress responses. When gut bacteria are depleted or imbalanced, it disrupts brain regions involved in stress management, leading to heightened "anxiety" and poor stress adaptation
Highly resilient individuals show distinct gut bacteria patterns that support anti-inflammatory responses suggesting resilience. Chronic stress creates a damaging cycle by weakening your gut barrier, reducing beneficial bacteria and triggering inflammation that travels to your brain and worsens your anxiety
Restoring gut health requires addressing cellular energy production and reducing processed food consumption, rather than simply taking probiotics that may not survive to reach your colon.
The interplay between your stress response and circadian rhythms — the natural 24-hour cycles governing your body — rely heavily on your gut microbiota. Researchers revealed that the bacteria residing in your gut play a key role in regulating the diurnal rhythm of corticosterone, a hormone for stress response and circadian signaling.
When your gut microbiota is depleted, this rhythm becomes disrupted, leading to altered stress responsivity and imbalances in your hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, which is central to stress management and your whole hormonal system.
In healthy gut environments, certain bacteria like "Lactobacillus reuteri" peak during specific phases of the day, coinciding with the natural rhythm of corticosterone. Without these microbial cues, your brain's central circadian clock loses its precision. This disruption cascades into impaired stress responses, especially during key transitions like waking up or falling asleep.
Microbiota and Your Brain Are Intricately Connected
Your gut and brain maintain constant communication, which are involved in stress responses. Depleting your gut microbiota alters gene expression in these regions, disrupting pathways linked to stress and circadian systems. This impairs your brain's ability to respond effectively to stress at different times of the day.
For example, in germ-free mice, or those treated with antibiotics to reduce gut bacteria, researchers found significant disruptions in stress-related genes and metabolic pathways. These changes impaired the brain's ability to regulate stress-sensitive behaviors, such as social interactions or coping with new environments.
Key neurotransmitters like glutamate also showed altered patterns in these animals. Further, the study found that gut microbial depletion leads to exaggerated corticosterone levels during specific periods, such as the transition from sleep to wakefulness.
This over-activation disrupts the rhythm of stress-related hormones and creates vulnerabilities to stress during these periods. For instance, when animals with depleted microbiota faced stress at the peak of their circadian rhythm, their bodies failed to mount an appropriate corticosterone response.
This blunting effect impaired their ability to adapt to stress and led to heightened anxiety-like behaviors in specific contexts. Such disruptions were less evident during other times of the day, underscoring the importance of maintaining a healthy gut microbiome to support your body's natural stress adaptation mechanisms.
By restoring the microbiota, researchers observed a return to normal corticosterone patterns and improvements in stress-sensitive behaviors.
Your Brain's Resilience Pathways
Stress-resilient brains are also less likely to overactivate the fight-or-flight response, which hijacks your mental clarity. Instead, resilient individuals leverage strong emotional regulation networks to navigate challenges with mindfulness and adaptability, showcasing the profound connection between brain structure, function, and resilience.
How Stress Disrupts Your Gut Homeostasis (stable internal environment)
While gut bacteria are involved in regulating your stress response, chronic stress also disrupts your gut microbiota and weakens the intestinal barrier. This damage increases gut permeability, a condition commonly referred to as "leaky gut," allowing harmful bacteria and toxins to pass into your bloodstream.
Stress also alters the composition of your gut microbiota, reducing beneficial strains like Bifidobacterium and Lactobacillus. This imbalance impairs your body's ability to produce short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs), metabolites that maintain gut barrier integrity and regulate inflammation.
Additionally, chronic stress stimulates mast cells in your gut to release inflammatory mediators, which heighten gut sensitivity, disrupt motility and worsen conditions like irritable bowel syndrome (IBS).
If you've noticed digestive problems during stressful periods, this is your body signaling the need for gut healing.
This inflammatory signaling increases anxiety, depression and brain fog.
At the same time, gut damage caused by stress reduces your ability to absorb nutrients that your brain relies on, such as magnesium and omega-3 fatty acids.
Strengthening Your Gut-Brain Axis to Build Resilience
Maintaining a diverse and balanced gut microbiome is key to achieving these stress-relief and resilience benefits, plus much more.
Your mitochondria are the energy powerhouses of your cells, generating the energy source your cells need to function and repair themselves. Without sufficient energy, your cells lose their ability to regenerate and repair, which lies at the root of many chronic diseases.
Enhancing mitochondrial function gives your body the cellular energy it needs to support a healthy gut environment, leading to optimal health.
Dietary Strategies to Restore Gut Health
Tackling the intricate dynamics of gut health requires more than simply adding probiotics to your routine. Even high-quality probiotics often fail to reach your colon intact. If the probiotic capsule breaks down in your small intestine, the oxygen present in that environment will destroy the probiotics before they reach their destination — your colon.
To effectively restore your gut health, removing mitochondrial toxins that impair energy production is needed. By restoring cellular energy and creating a healthy environment for beneficial, oxygen-intolerant bacteria to thrive, you enable these microbes to reestablish a natural balance in your gut.
Your diet plays a central role in this process. A key intervention is significantly reducing your intake of processed foods. This step also helps lower your consumption of LA in seed oils, which are inflammatory and harmful to your microbiome.
Carbohydrates also play a role in supporting mitochondrial function since glucose is the preferred fuel for energy production at the cellular level.
These dietary shifts support a sustainable recovery process, helping your gut restore balance over time.
What is the microbiota? Learn more to Understand Metabolism
The Microbiome and Your Arteries
The microbiome is the community of microorganisms that can usually be found living together in any given habitat.
There is an interesting connection between your microbiome and your arteries. In mice studies, when the mice lack a healthy gut microbiome, they tend to develop a lot of inflammation.
Inflammation in the arteries triggers a cascade of damaging effects. An overall imbalance of the microorganisms in the body can also lead to various problems in the arteries.
One of the most important vitamins for the arteries is vitamin K2. Vitamin K2 helps keep calcium buildup out of the arteries.
The microbes in your gut have the ability to make vitamin K2, but fermented foods and fatty foods are also rich in vitamin K2.
Keep in mind that vitamin K2 works better when taken with vitamin D3. For every 100 mcg of vitamin K2, consider taking 10,000 IU of vitamin D3.
Probiotics are crucial to support healthy arteries, and your friendly microbes are your natural probiotics. It’s important to support your microbiome and avoid sterile foods like pasteurized and over-processed foods.
The best meal to clean out the arteries:
• Brie cheese
• Fatty pork sausage
• Sauerkraut
Each of these foods is fermented and loaded with vitamin K2. Give them a try, and start adding other alive and fermented foods to your diet.
Why Alcohol Is The Hardest Drug to Quit
With alcohol so freely available in nearly every town in America, it’s easy to forget how harmful and addictive this drug is. The fact is that alcohol kills 2.6 million people around the world each year, vastly more deaths than those caused by illegal drugs. A person who desperately wants to quit drinking has a difficult task ahead; that’s because of alcohol’s intense addictiveness, the challenge of finding an effective recovery program, and the necessity of creating a new, sober lifestyle.
For someone starting on this journey or for the family supporting them, it’s extremely helpful to get an understanding of what is required to break from this addiction. Learn about the physical, mental, and social changes that occur after long-term and heavy drinking. Then, find out about the changes that must occur for a person to stop drinking and build a new sober life for themselves.
Understanding Alcohol Addiction
To Keep Reading The Hardest Drug to Quit
Neuropathy (nerve damage) Caused by Alcohol Use
There are many different problems created in the body with the use of alcohol, as it is toxic to the body.
Most people have heard of alcohol damaging your liver, but it also creates a lot of nutritional deficiencies and thus problems. One of the problems created is damage to the nervous system.
The buzz gotten from drinking comes from the alcohol burning vitamin B1 (thiamine). Drinking alcohol can thus cause a thiamine (B1) deficiency. Alcohol also significantly impairs the body’s ability to absorb more vitamin B1 and interferes with its necessary chemical reactions in the body.
Thiamine deficiency can cause a painful neuropathy of the extremities, it is nerve damage. Some researchers believe that alcohol consumption may, in itself, contribute directly to nerve damage. Alcohol has a toxic effect on nerve tissue
Alcohol is attracted to the membranes of the nerve cells. This membrane is called the myelin sheath. The myelin sheath surrounds each nerve cell. The alcohol thus affects their function.
When a sensory nerve is damaged in this way, you get the tingling, pain and numbness. When a motor nerve is damaged, it impairs the motor functions as motor nerves tell the muscles what to do.
This disorder is termed “alcohol-induced neuropathy”.
Treatment for the Alcohol Induced Neuropathy
There are many medications, and other remedies that can bring you relief, you can read about them in this article Neuropathy treatment
What can you do?
Lasting Relief
None of the various neuropathy treatments will build healthy nerves. You can cover up the symptoms and you can increase circulation and you can make a person feel less pain, etc., but if you build healthy nerves, there will not be any symptoms (healthy nerves don’t hurt, tingle, burn, are not numb, etc.) and the relief will be lasting.
Building Healthy Nerves*
Healthy sensory nerves mean that they are not painful. Healthy nerves mean that they communicate and don’t send wrong signals such as burning, hot and cold, tingling when there is no reason for it. Healthy motor nerves mean that they relay messages from the brain to the muscle so that they move correctly. Nerves need to be healthy to function properly.
The body needs specific nutrients (vitamins) to be able to build healthy nerves.
It may not give immediate relief (although many do feel changes in the first week) as the vitamins are working at a cellular level, but it does address the actual problem, builds healthy nerves and brings lasting relief.
(For temporary relief while building healthy nerves, go to Pain Relief Formula )
What can be done for lasting relief?
Relief from Neuropathy Get Your Quality of Life back
*Studies & Research on Nerve Health
What about help for the liver? One of the problems with alcohol use it damage to the liver.
Learn more – What is a Fatty Liver? includes what can be done to help your liver.
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