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During digestion, the physical process—movement, stretching, and pressure on the intestinal tissues—can communicate directly with the brain through spinal nerves as well as the vagus nerve, the cranial nerve that connects the brain to the body. Some examples of this communication are hunger and satiety hormones that are secreted based on ingested foods. Other examples are possible behavior changes, emotions, and memory formation based on microbial activity in the gut. The gut can also affect the decision-making process. These gut feelings or intuitive decisions could be a result of emotions created around memories and experiences of food, hunger, cravings, and nausea, and they form links to regions of the brain. The gut may know more than you think, so take the gut-to-brain connection into consideration. Knowing yourself a bit more in this way can make considerable differences in athletic performance and longevity. One strategy for knowing yourself better is to journal, especially right around the time you eat or around the time you make a decision. What emotions come up? What cravings do you have? What are the feelings in your gut? Slowing down during this process can help you be more aware.

BIG BRAINS

Humans have super-big brains compared to other mammals. This is because a few million years ago, during the Ice Age, humans became hunters and gatherers, invented tools for digging and cooking, and found fire! All of this together enabled humans to eat a lot of high-quality fats and carbohydrates without the extra caloric cost of preparing it. Humans evolved to store all of this extra energy as fat so that they would have enough energy to survive during a famine. Humans are also some of the fattest mammals, and this is because of our big brains. Brains use about 20 to 25 percent of resting energy consumption, so humans must have the storage in the body to supply this energy. That is why it’s essential to have a wide variety of high-quality fats and carbohydrates in the diet.

Another theory about the big brains of humans is that they doubled in size within a two-million-year span because of the consumption of psychedelic mushrooms that sprouted from animal poop. Consuming these mushrooms over thousands of years enabled early humans to become more “intelligent.” Magic mushrooms create more courage and reduce fear; they also cause people to become highly empathetic. These traits together helped the early humans to defeat large prey and keep a tribal mentality, enabling them to become leaders in their environments. You can geek out more on this by watching and reading Paul Stamets (see Resources). If you love to nerd out about human evolution, read The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease by Daniel Lieberman.