You are what you eat?

For decades, researchers have tried in vain to answer the question: What causes schizophrenia?

At the same time, we've developed a growing understanding of how intimately linked the bacteria in our gut and our brains are. New research shows that schizophrenics have vastly different microbiomes, potentially uncovering a cause of — and maybe a future cure to — schizophrenia.

  Big Think

Is this related to why we have the saying "trust your gut"?

We've known for some time that the gut and brain are deeply connected — so much so, your gut is often called your second brain.

Well, to be sure, mine's probably not any worse at decision making than the primary one.

And, out of all the nerve cells distributed throughout the body in our peripheral nervous system, the gut is particularly dense with 100 million neurons.

[...]

The bacteria in our gut, collectively known as our microbiomes, do a lot of work for us. They help digest food and fend off disease, and, in return, we give them a home in our dark, warm, and damp interior — perfect for bacteria. So, if we want to be healthy, our microbiome needs to be healthy. When things are going well in our microbiome, we feel normal. The bacteria species in our guts pump out neuroactive chemicals, among them serotonin and dopamine, that get picked up by our peripheral nervous system and sent to our brains. When there's something wrong in our guts, we feel it in our brains.

I suppose you could say that about any part of the body, couldn't you?

Prior research has shown that anxiety and depression in our brains also have a corresponding change in our guts: anxious and depressed people have different microbiomes. Now, researchers have shown similar findings for schizophrenics.

During the study, Peng Zheng and colleagues examined the fecal matter from a sample of schizophrenics and compared them with those from healthy controls.

This was a fun study to work on.

[The[ difference is so stark, in fact, that the fecal matter samples alone could be used to predict whether a person was schizophrenic or not.

No doubt there are lots of things affected by what we're eating. Or not eating.