Hey, how’s it going everybody? Dr. Shane here at the specific chiropractic center. We get asked all the time by our patients, what is this thing called Brain gut access, or what is the brain gut connection? We get asked that all the time because we focus with our upper cervical chiropractic clinic here on the nervous system.
See the nervous system is it’s composed of all kinds of things, but your brain stem down right here, spinal cord, and then all the nerves that come out of your spinal cord. The reason we want to focus on that through the chiropractic adjustment is because we find that a lot of people, because the stresses and traumas and stuff that we all endure they tend to push the human.
Into a what’s called a fight or flight state, or it’s called sympathetic ation. See, I can’t even say it right? It’s a big word. Sympathetic dis airation. And what that simply means is that we’ve got two modes that our brain tends to want to operate in. It’s either gonna, it’s either gonna operate in a rest and digest mode, a calm, cool, and collected mode, or it’s gonna operate in a fight or flight response.
That’s more of an emergency. There’s a threat. There’s your sensing danger. Those kinds of things when we’re under stress, and so what can happen is through various mechanisms, but through what can happen is the brain will actually begin to start to perceive everything through that kind of stress window where the sympathetics the fight or flight part of our brainstem and nervous system begins to override everything.
So that means that all. Coming into your brain is perceived as a potential threat, and that is what they mean by sympathetic dis fermentation. It, it basically means the fight or flight mechanism is interpreting all inbound information into your brain as a potential and probable threat. And that’s how we get stuck and locked into that fight or flight mechanism.
And the thing is, That part of our brain. It’s not conscious. It’s what they call autonomic, meaning it’s the stuff inside of our body that happens without us thinking about it. Some of the newer science that’s out there they’re estimating right now that the brain stem itself, so where your brain exits the skull turns into the brainstem and then it becomes the spinal cord, that little junction box, if you.
They’re estimating has own 4 trillion nerve fibers inside of it. So if you can imagine that, and it’s only, on the average of built, it’s about this big a round, it’s maybe the size of a quarter at the bottom of it. So it’s a pretty astonishing amount of a wires that go through there.
And they’re also estimating that we’re we send and receive anywhere from say, 10 to 11 trillion bits of information per. So in terms of let’s say internet speed, it’d be like having your internet. How fast is your internet? Oh, it’s 11 terabytes per second. That doesn’t exist because it’s so fast. So our brains are a remarkable thing, and the vast majority of all those.
Signals traveling up and down the cord. We don’t even know that they’re happening, right? Like we’re focused on getting to work on time and we’re focused on what’s for lunch. We’re focused on do I put the kids to bed, right? So we’re focused on those things. We are busy, but we’re not focusing on 11 trillion things per second busy.
So that system. Is a remarkably dense and very utilized system. It keeps all of our parts and pieces moving. It keeps all of our cells talking to one another. It makes your pancreas make insulin. It makes you breathe when you don’t, when you’re not thinking about it, it controls your muscle tone, your balance.
The fact that I’m even standing up right now, I don’t have to think about it. It just is happening. I don’t have to think about blink. All of these millions and millions of things that our body does every second is regulated by that center of control. It sits right here. So now how that pertains to the gut you have to think of it this way.
The scientists now are estimating that 90% of all the information that’s traveling up and down the spinal cord, 90% of. 11 trillion bits of information is afferent. That means it’s input in, that’s how much information is traveling up through the body, into the cord, up to the brain, and then the brain has to make decisions based off that information.
And then about 10% of the data that’s traveling is outbound messaging where the brain says, okay, we’ve made a decision. Pancreas, I want you to do this, liver. I need you to do that, colon, I need you to do this, and so on. So it’s a tremendous amount of information coming up into the brain. What makes the gut so special is that the, is the sheer density of neurological tissue that’s involved.
Some people will call it the enteric nervous system that, or the e n s, and there’s hundreds of millions of cells that are of nerve endings. I’m sorry, that line. Our tube. So from mouth down to esophagus, stomach, intestine, colon, and then out the other end it’s all lined with very sensitive nerve endings that have to give the brain instant information on what’s going on.
Cause if you think about it, the gut, even though it sounds funny, but think about this, the gut is still, it’s out, it’s still outside. It’s a, where it’s a. Inside of our bodies, right from one end to the other. It’s about 20 to 25 feet long of tubing that when you’re taking the piece of food, you’re eating it, but it’s still, it’s now it’s inside the tube and it’s got direct access.
Whatever goes down your mouth and into your intestine in directly then can leach in through the intestinal wall right into your blood. It’s really important to keep that area safe and clean, cuz you can imagine if you ate something that you weren’t supposed to, it could kill you. And so that part of your nervous system, the e n s is very particular and it’s very dense and it must be so that it can let the brain know, Hey, something’s coming through here that shouldn’t be coming through here.
It’s really powerful. It’s a tremendous amount of information that your gut has to give your brain so that the brain can act accordingly. That’s why this brain gut connection is so intimate, it’s so important and one can affect the other. So let’s walk through that real quick in your gut.
So when I say gut, I’m talking about the entire set of tube. So we’ve got esophagus as a tube. The stomach is like a little a. Bag. And then the intestine is another part of the tube, and then the colon is yet another part, but it’s all connected. It’s one giant piece with a few different chambers inside of it.
So as we eat, our food comes down the esophagus, the stomach preps it it reifies your food. So if you had a bite of an apple and a. And a piece of meat. Let’s say you had a Fuji apple salad or something, all that lettuce and little bit of blue cheese and some, maybe you had added some steak or whatever.
All that stuff, you chew it up, hopefully you chew really good. You’re chewing it up you’re saliva and the enzymes in your mouth are breaking that down. It turns kind of mushy. Swallow it down the eso. Stomach then chemically gets in there. It’s hydrochloric acid. It starts to erode that food.
You, you secrete enzymes and then it liquefies, it turns it into a very runny, like a smoothie almost. It drops out the bottom of the stomach through a special little little valve drops into the intestine. Your pancreas fires in. The more enzymes to balance it out, cuz you don’t want hydrochloric acid going into your intestine.
That’d be really. And then it starts to become absorbed as it travels through the intestine. Again, there’s probably in, in an average intestine, maybe 15 feet of tubing where it goes back and forth in your belly, looks like a radiator, just back and forth. And as the food is passing through that liquidy, that liquid food, there’s certain areas of the intestine that want to absorb certain things.
So food gets absorbed through various parts. It’s gonna if my hand is the intes. And this is the liquid food here, and on this side is blood. That’s your bloodstream. So my liquid food docks, it gets absorbed like a leach line, and it absorbs through. And then on this side, you’ve got little carrier mechanisms in your bloodstream that pick up those nutrients and whisk ’em away and take ’em off to wherever they need to go.
It’s a pretty fascinating concept. So what happens is inside of the intestine if there’s bad bacteria that have grown in there. Let’s say you have a high sugar diet and you’ve got a bunch of yeast living inside of your intestines or a whole myriad of things that could happen, but essentially what begins to happen, where the problem comes is that intestinal wall, the integrity of it begins to decrease.
And so now you’ve got this food that’s sitting. That isn’t supposed to necessarily leech through at that particular point. Maybe it’s supposed to go down further and enter somewhere else, but the wall has been damaged over time. From a bad diet or a lot of prescription drugs can cause harm to the lining.
Maybe you had a surgery, let you know. Who knows? There’s a whole bunch of reasons as to why it could have happened. But that food now is leeching through at the wrong place, at the wrong time. It also a lot of people. Stomach issues where they’re just simply not digesting as well as they used to.
So now, instead of being really liquidy, it might be a little bit chunky. I know it sounds gross, but microscopically it’s a little chunky. And so some of those food particles are going through and they’re just not the right shape as they’re supposed to be. So now on this side your bloodstream is freaking out.
It’s saying, wait a minute. I see what that is. But that’s not how we want it. Like we. We order, two by twos and you’re giving us two by fours, that’s not gonna work for us. That flares up in your immune system, they get all bent outta shape. They have to come flooding into the area, and we have a huge issue, and it happens every single time you eat.
So brain gut access is a really critical thing to get dialed in. And it’s not just a, it’s not a, we can go round and argue back and forth about what’s first. It’s like the chicken to the egg thing. I don’t. But the brain central nervous system and the gut, the enteric nervous system, they need to work in tandem.
They need to work together. And so I’m a huge proponent of tackling both. At the same time, cuz it’s not a one or the other, one won’t do the other you’ve gotta pay attention to both of them. And so that’s why with our care plans, we really, we focused on the nervous system. That’s the day-to-day visits and checkups and whatnot through our chiropractic care.
And then through the gut system we actually have multiple other doctors that we work with both in town and out of. That we run blood panels. We look to see the culture inside of the intestine, and we have a full program put together to make sure that the lining of the intestinal wall the mucosa it’s called becomes we get its integrity back.
And if we can do that and increase the communication between the two systems, and they begin to work together like they’re supposed to, it is astonishing what begins to happen inside the human body. That in a nutshell is what the brain gut access is. It’s two very important organ and communication systems that keep us alive.
Speaking together, back and forth. They have to communicate efficiently, they have to communicate effectively, and they really have to communicate accurately. If we can get all of those pieces put back together, the human body by default will begin to operate as it was intended. And life gets really good for the folks that we can do all of that with.
So if you’re struggling with any of these things, if this, if you want to speak more to us about this, feel free. There’s a button somewhere, just click. And schedule a consultation. We never charge for those, and we’ll see if we can point you in the right direction. We’ll talk soon. Bye-bye.