The Gut-Brain Axis: How Your Digestive System Shapes Your Mood, Energy, and Well-being

Most people think of the brain as the body’s command center, the organ responsible for thought, emotion, and physical sensation. What the emerging science of neurogastroenterology is making increasingly clear is that there is a second intelligence operating quietly in the body, one that runs along a communication highway known as the gut-brain axis. The relationship between these two systems is so profound and so bidirectional that researchers have begun calling the gut the “second brain,” not as a metaphor, but as a description of what is actually happening on a neurological level.