Emeran Mayer > Quotes

“Many of the gut signals reaching the brain will not only generate gut sensations, such as the fullness after a nice meal, nausea and discomfort, and feelings of well-being, but will also trigger responses of the brain that it sends back to the gut, generating distinct gut reactions. And the brain doesn’t forget about these feelings, either. Gut feelings are stored in vast databases in the brain, which can later be accessed when making decisions.”
― Emeran Mayer, The Mind-Gut Connection: How the Hidden Conversation Within Our Bodies Impacts Our Mood, Our Choices, and Our Overall Health

“The human microbiota is a fundamental component of what it means to be human.”
― Emeran Mayer, The Mind-Gut Connection By Emeran Mayer & How to Build a Healthy Brain By Kimberley Wilson 2 Books Collection Set

“Recent studies suggest that in close interactions with its resident microbes, the gut can influence our basic emotions, our pain sensitivity, and our social interactions, and even guide many of our decisions—and not just those about our food preferences and meal sizes.”
― Emeran Mayer, The Mind-Gut Connection: How the Hidden Conversation Within Our Bodies Impacts Our Mood, Our Choices, and Our Overall Health

“Inside the cells of neglected rat pups, enzymes attached chemical tags called methyl groups to their DNA. This mode of inheritance is called epigenetic, since the tags sit on the DNA, and the prefix epi-, from ancient Greek, means “upon.” It differs from the conventional, genetic mode of heredity because the tagged gene still carries the same information, and makes the same protein. But when it’s tagged, it has a hard time doing so.”
― Emeran Mayer, The Mind-Gut Connection: How the Hidden Conversation Within Our Bodies Impacts Our Mood, Our Choices, and Our Overall Health

“The drugs used most often to treat depression are the so-called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors such as Prozac, Paxil, and Celexa. These drugs boost the activity of the serotonin signaling system, which psychiatry had long thought is exclusively located in the brain. However, we know today that 95 percent of the body’s serotonin is actually contained in specialized cells in the gut, and these serotonin-containing cells are influenced by what we eat, by chemicals released from certain species of gut microbes, and by signals that the brain sends to them, informing them about our emotional state.”
― Emeran Mayer, The Mind-Gut Connection: How the Hidden Conversation Within Our Bodies Impacts Our Mood, Our Choices, and Our Overall Health

“The gut is also the largest storage facility for serotonin in our body. Ninety-five percent of the body’s serotonin is stored in these warehouses. Serotonin is a signaling molecule that plays a crucial role within the gut-brain axis: It is not only essential for normal intestinal functions, such as the coordinated contractions that move food through our digestive system, but it also plays a crucial role in such vital functions as sleep, appetite, pain sensitivity, mood, and overall well-being.”
― Emeran Mayer, The Mind-Gut Connection: How the Hidden Conversation Within Our Bodies Impacts Our Mood, Our Choices, and Our Overall Health

“The immune cells residing in your gut make up the largest component of your body’s immune system; in other words, there are more immune cells living in the wall of your gut than circulating in the blood or residing in your bone marrow.”
― Emeran Mayer, The Mind-Gut Connection: How the Hidden Conversation Within Our Bodies Impacts Our Mood, Our Choices, and Our Overall Health

“Gut microbiota have also been linked to depression, which is the second leading cause of disability in the United States.”
― Emeran Mayer, The Mind-Gut Connection: How the Hidden Conversation Within Our Bodies Impacts Our Mood, Our Choices, and Our Overall Health

“In Chinese philosophy, the concept of yin and yang describes how opposite or contrary forces can be viewed as complementary and interconnected, and how they give rise to a unifying whole by interacting with each other.”
― Emeran Mayer, The Mind-Gut Connection: How the Hidden Conversation Within Our Bodies Impacts Our Mood, Our Choices, and Our Overall Health

“Recent studies have shown that the composition of the nursing mother’s diet has a major influence on the baby’s risk for metabolic disease and obesity later on in life, and much of this is mediated by the early programming of the baby’s gut microbiota.”
― Emeran Mayer, The Mind-Gut Connection: How the Hidden Conversation Within Our Bodies Impacts Our Mood, Our Choices, and Our Overall Health

“2.6 percent of youths between twelve and seventeen years of age were diagnosed with major depression—a 63 percent increase from 2013. Among young adults of ages eighteen to thirty-four, the report showed a 47 percent increase. Even more unsettling, a recent study predicts that the number of younger people diagnosed with depression will surpass even the number of cardiovascular disorders in adults by 2030. In”
― Emeran Mayer, The Gut-Immune Connection: How Understanding the Connection Between Food and Immunity Can Help Us Regain Our Health

“There are some 8 million microbial genes in the gut—400 times more than in the human genome. Even more astonishing, we humans differ very little from each other genetically, sharing more than 90 percent of our genes, but the assortment of microbial genes in our guts differs dramatically, and only 5 percent of them are shared between any two individuals. The gut microbiome adds a whole new dimension of complexity and possibilities to our brain-gut emotion-generating machinery.”
― Emeran Mayer, The Mind-Gut Connection: How the Hidden Conversation Within Our Bodies Impacts Our Mood, Our Choices, and Our Overall Health

“recent studies have shown that our gut microbes, in response to the food we eat, can influence the synthesis and secretion of serotonin in the gut, so these microbial actions may have important implications for the brain and many of our vital functions, such as pain sensitivity, sleep, and appetite.”
― Emeran Mayer, The Mind-Gut-Immune Connection: Understanding How Food Impacts Our Mind, Our Microbiome, and Our Immunity

“In order to develop novel therapies aimed to reverse this early programming in patients, we needed to know how our earliest experiences alter specific neural circuits in our brains that underlie our response to a variety of stressful situations.”
― Emeran Mayer, The Mind-Gut Connection: How the Hidden Conversation Within Our Bodies Impacts Our Mood, Our Choices, and Our Overall Health

“Studies are currently under way to determine if gut microbial changes are associated with positive mind-based interventions, such as hypnosis and meditation, and if these changes lead to symptom improvements in such disorders as irritable bowel syndrome.”
― Emeran Mayer, The Mind-Gut Connection: How the Hidden Conversation Within Our Bodies Impacts Our Mood, Our Choices, and Our Overall Health

“As a result of these soaring rates of metabolic syndrome, cardiovascular diseases—including high blood pressure, coronary heart disease, heart attack, stroke, congestive heart failure, and atrial fibrillation—have also steadily increased, because metabolic syndrome is a major risk factor for these diseases.”
― Emeran Mayer, The Gut-Immune Connection: How Understanding the Connection Between Food and Immunity Can Help Us Regain Our Health

“Who would have ever believed that simply transferring fecal pellets containing gut microbiota from an “extrovert” mouse could change the behavior of a “timid” mouse, making it behave more like the gregarious donor mouse?”
― Emeran Mayer, The Mind-Gut Connection: How the Hidden Conversation Within Our Bodies Impacts Our Mood, Our Choices, and Our Overall Health

“In landmark experiments that began in the late 1980s, Michael Meaney, a neuroscientist at McGill University, in Montreal, studied how the interactions between rat moms and pups played out in the lives of the pups. His research team took genetically identical rat mothers and videotaped and analyzed their behaviors while the pups were infants. Then they let the pups grow up, and checked how the pups of nurturing rat moms fared compared with the offspring of stressed-out moms. The pampered pups grew into adults that were more laid-back, less reactive to stress, and less prone to addictive behaviors, such as overdoing it when given a free supply of alcohol or cocaine. They were also more social with other rats, more daring, and more willing to explore new places. Pups of stressed, negligent moms grew into loners prone to the rat equivalents of anxiety, depression, and addictive behaviors. Studies of monkey moms and their infants turned up similar results. Stressed macaque infants whose moms are inconsistent, erratic, and sometimes dismissive grow up timid, submissive, fearful, less gregarious, and more prone to depression than their better-nurtured peers. These early findings were the beginning of a paradigm shift in our understanding of how experiences in childhood can affect our health and the dialogue between the gut and the brain.”
― Emeran Mayer, The Mind-Gut Connection: How the Hidden Conversation Within Our Bodies Impacts Our Mood, Our Choices, and Our Overall Health

“Recent studies suggest that in close interactions with its resident microbes, the gut can influence our basic emotions, our pain sensitivity, and our social interactions, and even guide many of our decisions—and not just those about our food preferences and meal sizes. Validating the popular expression of “gut-based” decision making in neurobiological terms, the complex communication between the gut and the brain plays a role when we make some of our most important life decisions.”
― Emeran Mayer, The Mind-Gut Connection: How the Hidden Conversation Within Our Bodies Impacts Our Mood, Our Choices, and Our Overall Health

“The ultimate dogma of modern society is to make rational decisions based on the assumption that the world is linear and predictable, and that if you have enough information about the world, you can make the best decisions. I strongly believe that once we gain a better understanding of the biological underpinnings of intuitive decision making and accept it as a worthwhile goal to invest our mental energies in improving these skills, there is a range of strategies we can embark on to improve our ability and inclination for gut-feeling-based decision making later in life.”
― Emeran Mayer

“One explanation of these differences may have to do with the fact that women store memories of physiologically painful or uncomfortable states such as menstruation, pregnancy, and childbirth.”
― Emeran Mayer, The Mind-Gut Connection: How the Hidden Conversation Within Our Bodies Impacts Our Mood, Our Choices, and Our Overall Health

“there are more immune cells living in the wall of your gut than circulating in the blood or residing in your bone marrow.”
― Emeran Mayer, The Mind-Gut Connection: How the Hidden Conversation Within Our Bodies Impacts Our Mood, Our Choices, and Our Overall Health

“the gut is in fact a theater in which the drama of emotion plays out, that drama might be less likely to become a painful melodrama for patients.”
― Emeran Mayer, The Mind-Gut Connection: How the Hidden Conversation Within Our Bodies Impacts Our Mood, Our Choices, and Our Overall Health

“we can define gut health as a state in which the hormone-producing cells produce enough of the ones that make us feel hungry when the body needs energy, and enough of the satiety-signaling molecules after a meal in order to tell the brain that it’s time to stop eating.”
― Emeran Mayer, The Mind-Gut-Immune Connection: Understanding How Food Impacts Our Mind, Our Microbiome, and Our Immunity

“the ingestion of a probiotic-enriched yogurt for four weeks in healthy human females could reduce their brains’ response to negative emotional stimuli?”
― Emeran Mayer, The Mind-Gut Connection: How the Hidden Conversation Within Our Bodies Impacts Our Mood, Our Choices, and Our Overall Health

“manipulating attitudes about food by emphasizing its tastes, aromas, and textures can increase the amount of vegetables people eat, even when the veggies are competing with less healthy options that we’re conditioned to find more appealing.17”
― Emeran Mayer, The Gut-Immune Connection: How Understanding the Connection Between Food and Immunity Can Help Us Regain Our Health

“Despite these limitations, research has pointed to a continuous increase of depression in younger populations and of Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and autism spectrum disorder overall.1”
― Emeran Mayer, The Gut-Immune Connection: How Understanding the Connection Between Food and Immunity Can Help Us Regain Our Health

“your gut microbes are in a prime position to influence your emotions, by generating and modulating signals the gut sends back to the brain.”
― Emeran Mayer, The Mind-Gut Connection: How the Hidden Conversation Within Our Bodies Impacts Our Mood, Our Choices, and Our Overall Health

“Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are,” wrote Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, a French lawyer, physician, and author of an influential nineteenth-century book on the physiology of taste.”
― Emeran Mayer, The Mind-Gut Connection: How the Hidden Conversation Within Our Bodies Impacts Our Mood, Our Choices, and Our Overall Health

“GABA, is one of the most abundant signaling molecules in the nervous system, where it keeps the emotional part of our brain, the limbic system, in check.”
― Emeran Mayer, The Mind-Gut Connection: How the Hidden Conversation Within Our Bodies Impacts Our Mood, Our Choices, and Our Overall Health