How Your Gut Causes Brain Fog and How to Fix It

Brain fog is one of the most frustrating symptoms, and one I have dealt with personally.  Many people notice that when they improve their gut health, brain fog goes away.  Let’s discuss some recent research that shows why this happens and how this information can help you get better results with clearing brain fog.

Dr. Michael Ruscio, DC: Hi, this is Dr. Ruscio, and let’s discuss how your gut can contribute to brain fog and, more importantly, how healing your gut can help to fix brain fog. Brain fog can be a very unpleasant symptom. It’s something that I suffered with myself. It’s a feeling of feeling like you have slurred speech, like you can’t think, you can’t remember, you can’t speak clearly. Sometimes people can feel a little bit uncoordinated.

DrMR: It’s a very, very unpleasant feeling. And the gut can contribute to brain fog. And improving the health of the gut can help with reversing that. But how does this all work? So one of the things that may happen—it was actually shown recently in a study that we’ll put up on the screen here.

It was shown that when patients underwent a low FODMAP diet, they actually saw an improvement in their brain fog. Now, what is a low FODMAP diet? And we’ll also put a link accompanying the transcript for this video for a low FODMAP diet guide. But essentially, a low FODMAP diet is a diet that restricts certain types of carbohydrates that feed bacterial growth.

And why this can be relevant is regarding something that we’ve talked much about, which is small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. High FODMAP foods can feed bacteria and worsen a condition known as SIBO, or small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. So, a low FODMAP diet can help starve these bacteria and help with this SIBO.

But how does this tie back into brain fog? Well, here is the interesting finding that brings us to this most recent study that showed that when putting a group of patients with IBS, gas, bloating, constipation, diarrhea, abdominal pain, on a low FODMAP diet, these patients actually saw an improvement in histamine, or a decrease in histamine.

Now, histamine is a compound that’s released by bacteria, and that can cause the feelings of brain fog. In fact, there are many patients that find relief from brain fog from going on a low histamine diet. And we’ll also put a link to a low histamine diet guide along with this transcript.

Without getting too complicated, if you have digestive problems—gas, bloating, loose stools, constipation, diarrhea, abdominal pain, any of these—and you also have brain fog, then improving the health of your gut can be a great way to see your brain fog alleviated. And going on a low FODMAP diet can be a good step in that direction, because the low FODMAP diet does not provide a lot of food for bacteria. And if you have too much bacteria, those bacteria can release a lot of histamine. That histamine can cause brain fog.

So a low FODMAP diet starves the bacteria. Less bacteria, less histamine, less brain fog. So if you’re suffering with brain fog and digestive symptoms, trying a healthy diet would be a great idea. There are many different types of healthy diets. A low FODMAP diet in this case, and especially a low FODMAP diet that’s of high-quality, non-processed foods as the food list we will provide is, then this may be a really great step toward balancing your gut to help heal your brain fog.

So this is a nice iteration of how the gut connects to the brain. So this is Dr. Ruscio, and I hope you find this helpful. Thanks.