Safeguard Your Brain with the Microbe Most People Have Never Heard Of...

A meta-analysis of 74 clinical trials found that antidepressants are even less effective for adults over age 65 than other age groups.⁴ 

Even worse, these ineffective drugs can cause serious side effects — especially in older adults.  

Those include:^5,6,7,8,9 

Now combine those terrifying outcomes with the fact that the drugs simply don’t work. 

If you or someone you love has been struggling with mental health issues they can’t seem to shake, you need to make a better plan. One that involves the gut. 

Most people — and many doctors — don’t realize that your mood and mental health depend on your gut health. That’s because your brain and your gut share a direct connection called the gut brain axis (GBA).

It makes sense when you think about it. You’ve had gut feelings. Anxiety can make you feel nauseous. Excitement puts butterflies in your stomach. Those kinds of signals go in both directions because your GBA is a two-way street.¹⁰ 

Your enteric nervous system (ENS) is located in your gut. It communicates with your brain through the vagus nerve. And your gut microbiome heavily influences your entire GBA system. The gut microbiome contains trillions of bacteria. 

And those bacteria play an important role in regulating your mood. 

Beneficial probiotic bacteria play a huge part in keeping your mood bright and warding off depression.  

You see, probiotic bacteria produce the feel-good neurotransmitters like serotonin, GABA, and dopamine.¹¹ They also produce short chain fatty acids (SCFAs) like propionate and butyrate that help protect against depression.¹² 

But when your gut microbiome gets out of balance, pathogens — sometimes referred to as bad bacteria — stop that from happening. 

It doesn’t take much to knock your gut microbiome out of balance.  

This includes taking antibiotics, certain medications including proton pump inhibitors and NSAIDs, systemic inflammation, chronic stress, and poor diet choices.¹³

When that happens, the pathogens in your gut grow and multiply out of control, outnumbering beneficial probiotic bacteria — a condition called dysbiosis. And research shows a straight line between dysbiosis and depression.  

Pathogens don’t produce those feel-good neurotransmitters like serotonin. At the same time, they crowd out all the probiotic bacteria that do. That leads to a sharp drop off in those mood-boosting natural antidepressant compounds.¹⁴ 

Pathogen overload also reduces SCFA levels, further increasing the risk of depression.¹⁵  

Restoring positive balance to your gut microbiome keeps probiotic bacteria in charge while pathogens beg for scraps. And that can do a lot to help you move out of depression. 

But you need enough of the right probiotic bacteria in your gut to keep depression from taking over. 

One that most people have never heard of… 

When it comes to probiotic mood management, one strain stands out among the rest: L reuteri. 

This strain is supposed to be in your gut microbiome — it’s a native strain. But millions of us have lost it. Back in the 1960s, about up to 40% of people had L reuteri in their guts. 

Now, we’re lucky if 10-20% do.16 And without this protective probiotic, your risk of depression soars. 

Research shows that this powerful psychobiotic — a probiotic with that directly influences mood — fights depression in several ways:^{17,18,19,20,21} 

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