Digestive Intelligence

Book excerpt: Digestive Intelligence tells the fascinating story of how our digestive systems are the centre of our bodies’ second brain and how we think and live our emotions via our stomachs. Not surprising when you consider there is something equivalent to the size of a village football pitch hiding inside our bellies--that’s the incredible magnitude of our digestive systems. Dr Matveikova answers the obvious questions: “How?” and “Why can this be so?” by explaining, in straight forward layman’s language, that the digestive system contains more than one million neurones, identical to those in the brain and is responsible for producing 90% of the body’s hormone, serotonin, the all-important hormone which makes us feel happy and full of wellbeing. It follows that, if our stomach is “out of sorts” we feel irritable and lacking in energy; and those feelings block our intellectual productivity, disorientate us and completely change our thought patterns and physical processes.