Brain Power

a healthy brain is about feeling good

Dieting in this way seems to be particularly beneficial for the brain, in other animals at least.

One approach that’s garnered a lot of attention is calorie restriction, otherwise known as fasting.

In fact, until relatively recently, the ability to grow new brain cells was considered to be exclusive to the young, with adults stuck with those they acquired in childhood and their teenage years.

Neurogenesis – the growth of new brain cells – has been linked to increased cognition and better mood, but unfortunately it naturally decreases with age.

Adding to the idea that our gut microbes influence our emotions, investigations of healthy women using brain scans have shown that the levels of certain bacteria in their guts influences the way they respond to emotional pictures – so much so that researchers could use the brain images to predict which kind of gut bacteria the women had.

It resulted in an epidemic of bacterial dysentery, which infected half of the population and tragically killed seven.

One piece of evidence starts with a tragedy in 2000 in the Canadian town of Walkerton, Ontario, when heavy rains caused the water supply to become infected with E. coli and campylobacter from cattle excrement.

On the whole, antibiotics seem to be bad news for your microbiome, messing with the balance of microbes in your gut (of course they are also an incredibly important treatment for bacterial infections, so you should still follow doctor’s orders where needed).

Pioneering research in 2004 by a team of Japanese researchers found that these microbiome-free mice had underdeveloped brains, an exaggerated stress response, and seemed to act as though they were depressed.9 Tellingly, after the mice were fed a mix of bacteria, their stress response quickly became normal.