What the Soil Knew All Along
Perhaps you have never thought about the soil that your food grows in. That’s completely understandable. Most of us haven’t.
Perhaps you have been eating organically grown food before the relatively new word prebiotic was born. You intuitively knew that the earth, including the soil that grows the food that we eat, is a living ecosystem. If you garden, you see many creatures living in this ecosystem. What may be surprising to find out, however, is that there is invisible life in the soil. This invisible life is made up of microbes. The organisms that we think of as bad, like bacteria and viruses live in soil.
What researchers have been studying recently is that these same invisible microbes live in and on your body, and not just a few, but trillions!
There are actually more microbial cells in your body than human cells. These microbes live predominantly in your gut, and they do far more than help with digestion. Most surprisingly, they talk to your brain.
Hundreds of millions of nerve cells live in your gut. The microbes that live among the nerve cells secrete neurotransmitters, the same chemical messengers your brain uses to regulate mood, thought, and emotion.
These neurotransmitters travel along a direct pathway that runs between your gut and your brain. This pathway is called the vagus nerve. Unbelievably, the conversation goes both ways along this gut-brain axis. Your gut and your brain are in constant communication.
If this information is making your head spin, it should, because it made researchers’ heads spin as well. It wasn’t until 1998 that Michael Gershon coined the term the second brain referring to the neurons in our gut. The cascade of research and new information that has followed is something that we are just beginning to understand.
Here is something wonderful: these microbes in our gut are alive and they need to eat. The food that makes them happiest is the wonderful food that grows in the soil that is a living ecosystem. You may have known this information when you ate those delicious fruits and vegetables that you cook with. This food, anything that grows in the ground, is now called prebiotic food. Everything truly comes full circle. If we eat foods that are these prebiotics, we feed the trillions of microbes, our microbiota, that live happily with us.
And here is where it gets personal. The microbes that live in our gut don’t just respond to what we eat. They respond to how we feel while we’re eating it. They respond to joy, to calm, to the particular quality of attention that arrives when we are being creative.
Because of the constant conversation traveling along the vagus nerve, gut to brain and brain to gut, creativity and nourishment form a loop. When we are joyfully making something with our hands, something shifts in our body’s inner ecosystem. Our microbes notice. And they respond in kind. Something as simple as arranging food on a plate with care and delight is not just an aesthetic act. It is a biological one.
We make a very good team with our microbes. We always have.
Want to go deeper? You might enjoy these resources:
The Mind-Gut Connection, by Emeran Mayer (2016)
How to Enhance Your Gut Microbiome for Brain and Overall Health, Huberman Lab Podcast, Episode 61 (February 28 2022)
Professional Foodie: Fall in Love with Food that Loves You Back, Ella Davar, TEDx Lynn University (June 9, 2023)
I’d love to hear your insights: contact@eatlocalcsra.com