Psychobiotics and the Gut-Brain Axis with Scott Anderson

Do the bugs in your gut influence whether you are anxious, depressed, clear-headed, or distracted?  Well, it turns out quite possibly. Future depression prescriptions may be custom probiotics rather then Prozac.  I invited Scott Anderson the author of the The Psychobiotic Revolution to speak with us today about this most interesting topic. We dive into this and the gut-brain axis, how diet influences the microbiota,  fecal transplants, measuring the microbiota,  anxiety, depression, and more.   About our guest: Scott is a scientist and a science writer who was drawn from the wine country in California to work with horses in Ohio. There, Scott set up a laboratory to help develop equine prebiotics. He found that a less diverse microbiota was associated with colonic ulcers and poor performance. That ultimately led him to John Cryan and Ted Dinan, two pioneers of the gut-brain axis who found that gut microbes can affect the behavior of mice. Scott ended up writing a book with Cryan and Dinan called The Psychobiotic Revolution, from National Geographic. It is now going into the second printing. resources from the episode: Dinan, Melancholic microbes: a link between gut microbiota and depression? Tillisch study. Brain Structure and Response to Emotional Stimuli as Related to Gut Microbial Profiles in Healthy Women