From: hounddog23x@gmail.com   
      
   Links between gut and mental health suggest we should squat when going to loo   
      
      
      
   July 29, 2015 - 8:00PM   
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   By ELIZABETH FARRELLY   
   An unhappy gut may make you depressed or even bipolar.   
      
   OK, so in a way this is just another story about arseholes. But not the usual   
   point-scoring, truth-ducking, system-rorting, chopper-flying arsehole variety.   
   No talk of boats or donations. Indeed, if I mention the C-word - corruption -   
   it'll be strictly    
   in the Shakespearean sense: rot. Because the arsehole du jour is the   
   common-or-garden kind, so much more central to our happiness and yet so sadly   
   neglected. Nicknamed for an opera: the ring.   
      
   It's also a story about 20-centimetre heels, family Bibles, cross-dressing and   
   (just maybe) why women live longer than, well, men.   
      
   The university where I teach has signs inside all toilet doors that bear a   
   red-and-yellow cartoon diptych. The left-hand image shows a human seated on a   
   lav in the normal way. This image gets a big black tick. The right-hand image,   
   marked with a red    
   cross, shows someone crouched on the seat with both feet. "Do not stand on the   
   toilet seat or bowl," reads the caption. "The bowl may break and you may hurt   
   yourself."   
      
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   Tautology apart, the sign makes me chuckle, partly because, in my childish   
   Western way, I love that tertiary-level scholars need instruction in toilet   
   method. And partly because the McDonald's colours (red for luck, yellow for   
   imperial nobility) totally    
   undermine the message, giving the bad image greater eye appeal, especially,   
   one imagines, to an Asian eye.   
      
   But the last laugh may come from the other end of the tube. And frankly, tubes   
   are us. As bestselling German microbiologist Giulia Enders notes, humans are   
   basically three knotted tubes. The venous system knots centrally at the heart;   
   the nervous system    
   at the top (brain), while the gut has two main knots - stomach and liver.   
      
   The first two tubes are loved and revered, valorised by poets and scrutinised   
   by science. The gut is, by comparison, neglected. Until now. Now the   
   stomach-mind relationship floods the gut with limelight.   
      
   The developing discipline of neurogastroenterology, as outlined in Enders'   
   very readable Gut: the Inside Story of our Body's Most Underrated Organ, links   
   gut flora and function to mood disorders (anxiety, depression, bipolar),   
   autism and a range of    
   autoimmune diseases including celiac, Crohn's, lupus and type 1 diabetes.   
      
   Enders begins at the end, the sphincter. Few of us know that we have not one   
   but two of these remarkable ring muscles, just centimetres apart. The outer,   
   familiar sphincter is under our conscious control, letting us choose when to   
   open the gate,    
   contextualising and customising according to etiquette. The inner sphincter,   
   however, sphincter ani internus, is controlled by the gut, without   
   consciousness.   
      
   And that's where it gets really interesting. The two sphincters must and do   
   collaborate, each recognising the other's priorities and negotiating a   
   compromise that weighs the "better-out-than-in" imperative of internal health   
   and comfort against external    
   decency. This equilibrium is possible only because the gut, with its three   
   complete jackets of smooth muscle, has its own nervous system, or gut-brain.   
      
   This gut-brain, first popularised in The Second Brain (1998) by Michael   
   Gershon, chairman of anatomy and cell biology at Columbia University Medical   
   Centre, is why we neglect our guts and also why we shouldn't.   
      
   The gut-brain comprises about 100 million neurons arranged in sheaves in the   
   wall of nine-metre tube between oesophagus and anus. It means that gut   
   activity, unlike most muscle movement, can continue even if the brain is   
   severed. And it has a significant    
   impact on our emotional life. You knew it. Gut feeling is real.   
      
   It's not yet clear exactly how this works - in particular, which comes first,   
   the physiology or the psychology. But there are some things we do know. The   
   gut-brain controls 80 per cent of our immune system and 20 unique hormones as   
   well as most of the    
   body's neurotransmitters including dopamine, glutamate and 95 per cent of its   
   serotonin.   
      
   Serotonin is our comfort juice, and also our controller of appetite. It gets   
   the digestive juices flowing and kick-starts the process of peristalsis (the   
   propulsive movement of the gut). This is why eating and relaxing go together:   
   why after-school    
   carers tend to overfeed kids, and also why calm meal times are important,   
   especially for children, whose guts are still being educated.   
      
   We've always known nerves can make you throw up. Hence expressions like   
   "butterflies in the stomach," "gut feeling", "shit scared" and "getting your   
   arse into gear". But perhaps the causality works the other way: a chronically   
   unhappy gut making you    
   depressed and possibly even bipolar.   
      
   Serotonin takes messages from gut-brain to main brain, particularly targeting   
   brain areas responsible for self-awareness, emotion, fear, morality, memory   
   and motivation.   
      
   It is also the basis for most common antidepressants or SSRIs (selective   
   serotonin re-uptake inhibiters), which is why low-dose antidepressant are   
   often prescribed for gut disorders and why scientists are now exploring   
   antidepressants that affect only    
   the gut, not the main brain.   
      
   As to autism, children "on the spectrum" often show both elevated serotonin   
   levels and gastro-intestinal abnormalities. Gershon discovered that the same   
   genes govern synapse formation in both places, speculating that serotonin   
   seeping from the gut-brain    
   might somehow trigger autism.   
      
   But it's not just neurotransmitters. Our gut flora, weighing up to two kilos,   
   also play a part in our happiness. Gershon notes that 90 per cent of people   
   with irritable bowel syndrome and non-ulcerative dyspepsia also suffer some   
   sort of mental anxiety    
   or depression. A Danish study of 92,000 people, reported in Harvard Health in   
   2013, showed that those who had suffered a severe infection or autoimmune   
   disease were up to 62 per cent more likely also to have a mood disorder. There   
   are also gut bacteria    
   thought to generate obesity.   
      
   Obesity and depression are amongst Western culture's big issues. Now we   
   discover we've also been pooing badly for centuries; is there a link? Check it   
   out. The Asian squat position is faster (averaging 30 instead of 50 seconds),   
   cleaner and more thorough.   
      
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)