Hello friends,
Long before anyone had seen a bacterium, almost every culture had already decided that the belly was where the truth lived.
The Japanese word hara means the abdomen, and it also means your character and your nerve, the part of you that does not lie. To speak hara to hara is to talk honestly, with nothing held back. Ayurveda puts agni, the digestive fire, at the centre of health, and taught that when the fire goes weak everything above it dims. English does the same thing without noticing. You get a gut feeling. You cannot stomach someone. Something turns your stomach.
All of those languages arrived in the same place independently, which is usually a sign that people were noticing something real.
And an astonishing part ….Your gut is not a fixed thing you inherited. It moves with your life.
In 2018 researchers followed Hmong and Karen people who moved from Thailand to the United States. Their gut diversity began dropping almost immediately. The bacteria that break down plant fibre were among the first to go, and the loss deepened with every generation born in America.
Meanwhile, the Hadza in Tanzania, who still eat with the seasons, carry a microbiome that swings with them. Whole groups of bacteria vanish in the wet season and return in the dry one, year after year, on schedule.
So your gut is less like your genes and more like a diary. It is a running record of where you live, what surrounds you, and what you have been putting into it.
Which brings me to the powder.
Every morning, millions of people stir a spoonful of something into their coffee believing they are feeding the good bacteria. If those bacteria have drifted into the wrong part of the gut, that powder may well be feeding the wrong thing in the wrong place.
I know how that sounds. Stay with me, because the order these nine things go in decides whether any of them work, and almost nobody hands you the order.
Start with the line everybody repeats.
You have heard that your gut makes around ninety percent of your serotonin, so a happy gut means a happy brain. The gut does make most of the body’s serotonin. But that serotonin stays in the gut. It cannot cross into your brain in any meaningful amount. So the tidy version, eat more yogurt and your mood lifts, rests on a mechanism that does not exist.
What is actually going on is stranger and far more useful.
Your gut talks to your brain through three real channels.
The vagus nerve runs from your abdomen up to your brainstem, and the traffic on it mostly goes upward. Your gut reports to your brain far more than your brain instructs your gut.
Butyrate, a fat your bacteria make when they ferment fibre, does cross into the brain, and it settles inflammation at both ends of the line.
Your immune system sits mostly in the wall of your gut, and it floods your body with inflammatory signals the moment that wall is breached.
So your gut sends status reports. When those reports say the perimeter is broken, your brain does what any sensible system does. It raises the alarm, narrows your focus, holds on to energy, and wakes you at three in the morning to check the doors.
That is the fog. That is the mood dip. That is the afternoon where you lose an hour.
Before we go further, go and get your own baseline. It takes ten minutes, and it is free.
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