Our second brain

Let me make an assumption about you. You’ve had a stomach ache in your life, at least once. And when that happened, or when it was at its worst, you couldn’t do anything, right? It was hard to sit or stand. It was hard to focus. Your whole day was ruined, even though the rest of your body was perfectly fine, because your stomach was hurting so much.

Our stomach has a very strong connection with our brain. It also has many neurons just like our brain, regulating what happens there. This most likely developed because …

• Digesting food is important, so let’s devote a good chunk of resources to it.
• The brain doesn’t want to busy itself with that stuff. Let’s offload it to another system that can make decisions for us.

Our brain is still the boss. You need it for rational thinking, creative thinking, etcetera. But your stomach is called “the second brain”. Because it also does a lot of thinking and decision making, without involving you and your first brain, and it has the power to do so well.

What does this mean? A large part of feeling well, both physically and mentally, is about keeping your stomach happy. Any way you can. You should prioritize nurturing your second brain over many other health advice. Because, as I said, troubles with the tummy will subconsciously lead to troubles absolutely everywhere. You can’t really fight that. When I have a (severe) stomach ache, I really can’t stand or walk, and I really can’t do complex work, no matter how hard I try.

Similarly, if your stomach isn’t working well, the food you eat isn’t digested properly. It might be stored inefficiently. It might not be stored at all, but immediately pass through your stomach and out of your body.

And so the main question becomes: how do you care for your second brain?

Grain & Fiber

I mentioned the importance of fiber, usually found in grains. This is why. Those fibers help digestion and keep your stomach happy.

This is, again, why bread is such a powerhouse food around the world. It provides energy (carbohydrates) very efficiently (just a few slices needed for your day), you can add other nutrients as topping, and it has loads of fiber.

So yes, people are correct when they say “bread is basically a lot of sugar”. But they aren’t correct when they conclude that “bread is bad and you should never eat it anymore”.

In an earlier example, I explained a period in which I ate yoghurt as almost 80% of my diet. I didn’t really get fat. Yoghurt is quite nutritional. But I did have a lot of issues with my digestion.

I had many stomach aches. I had trouble going to the toilet. (It feels weird to write this, but it’s just such a good example.)

• First, I started adding muesli, cornflakes, lots of things with fiber to my yoghurt. This already helped a lot.
• Then I started eating more bread. This helped even more.
• Finally, I prefer eating a pasta for dinner now.

These simple changes—adding more fiber—solved a lot of issues for me. Because of the stomach aches, I usually had to lay down for 30 minutes when I came home from school. I often felt heavy, slow, unhealthy, because my stomach just wasn’t working right and slowing down my whole system.

Fiber keeps your stomach happy. Eat it a lot.

Easy food

What else keeps your stomach happy? Food that’s easy to digest!

This is why we cook. This is why we eat warm meals. Because they are warm, our body does not need to put in that much effort to digest them. (Similarly, eating bread from the fridge that’s still frozen is a bad idea. It takes your body a lot of effort to digest that. Instead, immediately pull bread out of the freezer when you think you’ll need it soon.)

This comes back to the chapter on fasting. Try to make your biggest meal of the day a warm meal. Otherwise, you are merely forcing your stomach to work harder. And our second brain does not like working harder than it should.

But don’t cook everything. As I said before, cooking means you do lose some of the nutrients. After warming up a dish for two or three times, it has almost no nutritional value anymore.

Food that isn’t solid—food that is “light”—also counts. But there are some caveats.

• Sugary foods are often very light. Because they do not contain any nutritional value. So, of course, your stomach is not going to feel full. But these are still a bad idea!
• This explains why we have good fats and bad fats. The good fats are _un_saturated, which means they can be immediately digested. The bad fats are saturated, which means our body needs to break through layers of artificially added stuff to digest it. (Same is true for unrefined and refined grains.)
• Do not eat too much food that is easy to chew. The act of chewing is very beneficial for the strength of our facial muscles and the functioning of our brain. (In a similar way, small teeth issues can affect your overall physical and mental healthy in significant ways.)

Again, we come back to my yoghurt example. Yoghurt needs no chewing. Once a doctor taught me how important it is to eat “hard” food, and to chew properly, I also improved my overall health.

This is another simple change with huge results. Our stomach is our “second brain”. If you overwork your stomach, you will feel the same consequences as overworking your brain. You’ll be sluggish, slow, less efficient, etcetera.

To prevent overworking,

• Eat “easy” food
• Don’t eat the whole day
• Don’t eat to much

Bacteria & Fermentation

What about food that’s less easy to eat? Well, we can make that easy to eat!

Most people know that our stomach runs on bacteria. They actually digest the food, they ensure it breaks down as it should and ends up where it belongs.

How do you get more bacteria? (And the right kind?)

By eating fermented products.

Dairy products are usually fermented, to different degrees. The yoghurt packaging, at least here in the Netherlands, often proudly proclaims it has some great bacteria cultures inside!

But I warned you about eating too much dairy. (I mean, with all those examples on yoghurt, this guide starts to read like an anti-yoghurt campaign at this point.) It is filled with carbohydrates, more than you think. Adults often can’t digest many of the nutrients or even react badly to it.

So, the crown goes to actually fully fermented products.

• Sauerkraut
• Pure chocolate. (Like, really pure.)
• Kefir
• Many Asian dishes, especially Japanese

Research shows that building your diet around these products has significant health benefits. It’s what led to the discovery of our stomach being our second brain in the first place. It’s why studies repeatedly show people in Japan being more slim, healthy and living longer.

Why? Fermentation means that bacteria has been allowed to modify a food over a long period of time. In other words, what you eat is full of nutrients and bacteria that our stomach adores.

Conclusion

If your stomach is unhappy, it’s not something to be annoyed about and ignore. It’s something to investigate.

Make the majority of your diet unrefined, easy, warm food. Don’t eat the whole day long, as you’re constantly triggering your stomach to start working again. Eat enough fibers and grains, they are crucial here. And look for fermented foods or dairy products with good bacteria cultures.

Keeping your second brain happy, will keep your first brain and body happy. And most of it comes down to simple changes with huge effects.