The Brain-Gut Connection Explained with Dr. Barry Sears (podcast #38)

A person's diet has a massive effect on how they feel and behave, both positively and negatively. This is especially true for children and young adults, who certainly need a healthy diet for their developmental years. Anti-inflammatory diets can also be highly therapeutic for adults & children with ADHD & autism. Whichever way you look at it - there is an undeniable "brain-gut connection" that is constantly overlooked, but shouldn't be!
Article continues below...
Treatment for your Child's ADHD
Download a free tip sheet "Recommended Treatment for ADHD: Medication & Behavior Management" for what's really recommended for your child or teen.
Your Diet Has a Huge Impact On Your Behavior
Find Parenting with Impact on your Favorite Player:
About Dr. Barry Sears
Dr. Barry Sears has dedicated the last 35 years of his research career to studying the links between diet, hormones, and health and is dedicated to restoring a state of health that can be controlled by reducing inflammation in your body. In his research, he studies dietary control of hormonal response and develops innovative approaches to help treat and reverse silent inflammation, the leading cause of cardiovascular disease and Type-2 diabetes. This same anti-inflammatory diet is highly therapeutic for ADHD and Autism.
His research has led to his best-selling books The Zone, Mastering the Zone, Zone Perfect Meals in Minutes, and had additionally penned The Soy Zone, The Anti-Aging Zone, The OmegaRx Zone, Toxic Fat, A Week in the Zone, Zone Meals in Seconds, Top 100 Zone Foods, The Mediterranean Zone, and his newest release, The Resolution Zone.
- How is diet like a drug? Learn the importance of Omega-3 fatty acids and fiber.
- Understand how reducing inflammation is key for any type of neurological condition.
- Learn about how you can track levels of Omega-3s in your child
Barry Sears: Well, the work I do really revolves around understanding the link between metabolism, our diet, and inflammation. We now know that inflammation is the underlying cause of nearly every chronic disease. And much of that inflammation is diet-induced.
What I’ve been studying for the past 40 years is how our diet influences not only the generation of inflammation but also how we can resolve or turn off that inflammation. Will it solve every disease? Of course not, but it’s a foundational step. It’s like building a house—without a solid foundation, the house isn’t going to stand.
It’s been a fascinating and rewarding journey to understand how our diet has such a profound impact on how our body responds, and more importantly, how we can dampen the fires of inflammation that affect every organ, including the brain.
Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Yeah, when I was doing some research on you, I came across something about the Nobel Prize changing the course of your research. What made you realize the value or importance of this?
Barry Sears: Well, that Nobel Prize you mentioned was awarded in 1982, almost 40 years ago. It was for the discovery of how certain fats affect hormones called eicosanoids. These are the hormones that trigger inflammation. And when I learned about that, I had an “Aha!” moment. At the time, I was working on developing drug delivery systems for anti-cancer drugs. But I realized that this was a much more approachable area.
So, I started focusing on how I could control inflammation—not with drugs, but using diet as though it were a drug. That shift led to a fascinating journey, exploring a wide range of disease states, but the most interesting ones have been in the neurological.
Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Yeah, diet as if it’s a drug. I just...
Diane Dempster: Yeah.
Elaine Taylor-Klaus: I love that conversation.
Diane Dempster: And what’s coming to mind as you’re saying that is that so much of the work out there focuses on what not to eat, what to avoid to reduce inflammation. But what you’re suggesting is the opposite—what do you do to manage inflammation with your diet? Is that what you’re saying?
Barry Sears: Exactly. It’s about turning off inflammation. We do need some inflammation; otherwise, we wouldn’t be able to fight off microbes or heal from injuries. But you have to turn it off. If you don’t, bad things happen. Our diet is a really powerful tool—far more complex than any drug—that allows us to modulate inflammation, keeping it within a zone: not too high, but not too low.
The better we’re able to do that, the better we can take care of our future. It’s a powerful concept. But people think they’re experts in nutrition. The truth is, that’s not the case. Nutrition is incredibly complex.
Elaine Taylor-Klaus: It’s complicated. And some doctors don’t get it, because they don’t learn enough about it in medical school. It’s way too much for them to learn.
Diane Dempster: Yeah.
Barry Sears: Right. And much of our knowledge has really only been discovered recently. So what you don’t learn in medical school doesn’t necessarily mean it’s irrelevant. In fact, the way our diet controls and resolves inflammation is, I believe, the real next frontier in 21st-century medicine.
Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Okay, just quickly, in my experience, when we came to this realization, we had this dramatic shift, but the challenge was getting doctors to believe us.
Barry Sears: Yes.
Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Because at that time, there was a lot of dismissal. Thankfully, we had a psychiatrist who looked at the data and I had testing. I was very lucky to have pre- and post-evaluation, because we were doing psychological work.
The psychologist separated the results, and we were able to see the difference. So I had a psychiatrist who was willing to say, “Okay, let’s consider this. Let’s try this.” But that was very rare. And I think it’s still fairly rare.
Barry Sears: I think that has not changed in 40 years.
Diane Dempster: Yeah.
Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Well, and when you add to the fact that so much of our understanding of the brain and neurobiology is so new, you've really got two new modalities coming together. So, this is exciting—to be at a place where we can learn new things that can truly make a difference for our families.
Barry Sears: Well, and again, it cuts across the entire spectrum. Obviously, it’s key for any neurological condition, but it affects every physiological condition. Everything that’s wrong with our healthcare system essentially comes back to disturbances in the dietary control of inflammation and its resolution.
Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Yeah, and so now we have anti-inflammatory restaurants, and all these ways we’re looking at this issue. You mentioned something about diet as a drug and the importance of paying attention to what we put into our system. What do parents need to understand from your perspective about this?
Barry Sears: Well, they need to understand that there’s a little discipline involved. Your grandparents and great-grandparents had a pretty good idea. For example, no child 30 or 40 years ago could leave the house until they had a tablespoon of cod liver oil.
Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Cod liver oil.
Barry Sears: The most disgusting food known to mankind. But it was tough love. Every parent gave their child that tablespoon of cod liver oil, and it turns out cod liver oil is very rich in omega-3 fatty acids. These are key components that have to be in the diet to turn off inflammation. And your grandmother also said, "You can’t leave the table until you eat all your vegetables."
Again, she was giving us valuable insight into how to control our gut, because now we know there’s a very intricate pathway between the gut and the brain. That gut-brain axis is also crucial for controlling various neurological conditions. We’ve had this knowledge for many years, but we’ve let it fall by the wayside. It can’t be that simple, right?
Elaine Taylor-Klaus: So can you speak a little more to that? Because, again, I was a pariah when I started talking about the brain-gut connection. I used to describe my child as having neurological celiac disease because it sounded credible enough for people to take me seriously when I’d go into a restaurant and say, “I need to see the number 10 can on your menu.”
So, talk a little bit about what has happened with the brain-gut connection, because it’s huge.
Barry Sears: Well, we think the gut is really our second brain. Our first brain is up here—it looks really smart, nice and white, very wise. Our second brain, which is our gut, doesn’t look very smart at all. It stinks, it’s slimy. But what does it do? It turns out it’s the communication system that allows our food to go directly to the brain, bypassing the blood completely.
The gut is complex, but as we study it, we’re realizing that our diet—especially the fiber in our diet—is a very integral part because it can directly affect the brain. So now, we go back to the advice from grandma: “Take your cod liver oil, eat your vegetables.” And suddenly, these old pieces of wisdom are making perfect sense at the cutting edge of 21st-century neurobiology.
Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Yeah.
Diane Dempster: So you didn’t mention this earlier, but the cod liver oil provides the omega-3s, and the vegetables provide the fiber. Is that correct?
Barry Sears: Exactly.
Diane Dempster: Okay.
Barry Sears: Exactly. And it’s not the end-all, be-all. But again, it’s foundational.
Diane Dempster: It’s just those two things. It’s very different. I mean, parents come to us all the time trying to get their kids to eat healthy, but to two different people, “healthy” means different things. But if you just said...
Elaine Taylor-Klaus: The power of our struggles is real.
Diane Dempster: Yeah, the power struggles are real. And what you're doing is simplifying it. It’s just about how do you increase the omega-3s? How do you increase the fiber? You’re not talking about taking away a bunch of stuff or depriving kids of things they want to eat. You’re just talking about boosting their diet in a way that makes sense. So, are there easy ways to do this?
Barry Sears: Well, the easiest way to get omega-3 fatty acids is through fish oil. That’s where we started our work, specifically with neurological aspects. Our first studies, published in 2006, involved children with ADHD. We worked with one of the pioneers in the field, Ned Holloway, who really opened the whole area of ADHD. What we did was give these children high levels of omega-3 fatty acids under Ned's supervision.
We measured omega-3 levels in the blood with a simple tool that only required a drop of blood. As we increased the omega-3s, we saw a dramatic reduction in symptoms. More importantly, we found that once the ratio of omega-3 fatty acids to other fatty acids reached a certain level, there was a dramatic improvement in impulsivity and behavioral control. If the omega-3s were stopped, the symptoms returned.
So, right from the start, we had a link between omega-3 fatty acids and neural transmission. Since then, we’ve done more studies on major childhood depression, and we saw the same dose-response curves, where high levels of omega-3s dramatically reduced symptoms. We’ve also conducted initial studies with autism, which is probably one of the most difficult neurological conditions, and we see the same results. As the ratio of omega-3 fatty acids increases in the blood, the child’s ability to respond improves dramatically.
We’re opening up an area that addresses virtually every aspect of neurological conditions, whether they’re childhood disorders or adult ones like Alzheimer’s. What they all share are disturbances in brain metabolism. One important step is to rebalance the fatty acids in the brain, and that can only be done through diet.
Elaine Taylor-Klaus: So, I want to bring this home for people who are listening and make this really real, because, again, I was really fortunate to have a nutritionist who had been a chemist and really understood what you’re talking about.
What she said to me back then was, "We’re going to borrow from autism." We put my child on what I would describe, less technically, as massive doses of fish oil. Probably about 3,600 milligrams—about six times the recommended amount on the bottle.
Barry Sears: I would call that a low dose.
Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Well, this was 20 years ago.
Barry Sears: Yes.
Elaine Taylor-Klaus: And this was under the supervision of healthcare professionals. I want to be really clear—I didn’t do this independently. But it was so dramatic that we were able to treat my child’s childhood depression and anxiety for about four years before they hit puberty. And it helped quite a bit. But it took not only the supervision and focus, but also the buy-in from my child.
The only reason I was able to do it was because I worked with my kid to take six massive horse pills a day. And so, I don’t want to lose that piece: if you're talking now, there are a lot more mechanisms for delivering fish oil than there were 20 years ago.
Barry Sears: And again, it’s all about the old saying, “You’re sick from the observer’s data point.” That’s one very important data point.
Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Exactly.
Barry Sears: Your child says, “Something happened here.” Now, how can I get this into my child on a consistent basis? And you’re quite right, there are new ways of doing this in terms of emulsification. But again, like any drug, it’s a dose-response curve. So, this is why the studies I talked about for ADHD used about three and a half grams of omega-3 fatty acids—we used 15 because we can speed the process up.
Elaine Taylor-Klaus: We can see it.
Elaine Taylor-Klaus: So, it’s all about saying, first, the buy-in to the science—and it’s very complex science. Second, the buy-in to saying, “How can I make it easy for my child to take the levels I need?” And more importantly, “How can I measure? Am I giving the right dose? Can I give too much?” Of course, you can.
Can I give too little? Of course, you can. That’s why the blood will tell us. The blood gives you unique aspects that say, “I can titrate the dose for the child,” because every child will be genetically different. So, it’s likely to say, “What’s the ideal dose?” The blood will tell me how I can adjust the ratio of these fatty acids. And now, basically, nature takes its course.
Diane Dempster: So when you say that, Dr. Sears, one of the things that comes to mind immediately is, the supervision—and who are the kinds of people to go to? Because, parents, what you’re describing, we can’t test our kids' blood, we can’t tell whether it’s too much or too little.
What are the kinds of providers, what are the kinds of resources out there for parents who are interested in exploring this to connect with?
Barry Sears: Well, actually, we have a windmill test, and we use it now in our studies, but we also sell it to individuals. They can take a proper blood sample, and within seven days, get back lab results showing the ratios. And this is true for every disease state. If the ratio of two fatty acids in the blood is high, your future is bleak.
But as you bring it down, your future is much brighter. So, these tests are out there. They’re fingerstick tests available to the general public, and they do not require a prescription. But you want to find a practitioner who understands what you’re dealing with. That’s the real difficulty. Because I wasn’t taught this in medical school. You’re quite right. Much of these discoveries were made after I left medical school.
Elaine Taylor-Klaus: And a teaching at a middle school yet?
Barry Sears: No.
Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Not yet. It takes about 20 years for research to get into practice. So...
Barry Sears: You usually have to wait for all the old people to die, and then the new generation says, "I can use this brand new idea that nobody else has ever thought of."
Elaine Taylor-Klaus: So, we’ll put the information in the show notes for people who are interested. And I want to reiterate that if you decide this is something you want to do with your kid, I want to let us support you in figuring out how to get your kid’s buy-in before you start breaking their knee, their hand.
Because if you start the process without them being on board with you, you’re going to get that resistance that’s going to make it really hard to get their adherence and compliance.
Barry Sears: Well...
Elaine Taylor-Klaus: I really want to partner with your kid in this process, not completely push them away.
Barry Sears: You have to be a coach.
Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Yeah.
Barry Sears: You're the coach, you can’t play the game for the athlete. You say, "Here’s what to do, and here are the benefits if you listen to what I’m telling you to do." So again, this all ties into parenting, how to get children, who tend to be developing their independence, to buy into the solution.
Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Yeah.
Barry Sears: And say, "We think we have a way out; let’s work together as a team."
Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Right? And what’s in it for them? Not just, "I want you to eat your vegetables, that makes me a good mom." I want you to eat your vegetables so you don’t have a tummy ache—it's a whole different conversation.
Diane Dempster: Can we answer... I was just going to say, you were just saying vegetables, and it reminded me—we've been talking about the omega-3s. What’s the short answer about the fiber piece of it as well?
Barry Sears: Well, the fiber is that we can’t digest fiber, but the bacteria in our gut can. Their by-products, which are called metabolites, are the ones that can strongly affect behavior because they can travel directly from the gut to the brain. And now these metabolites, they are very powerful activators of ancient pathways in every cell in the body. But if you don’t have the fiber in the diet, the bacteria in the gut can’t break it down.
And all of a sudden, you’ve cut off a very long-standing relationship between our diet and brain function. So again, these are all so complex that, again, our scientists are still almost primitive in understanding them. But the implications are massive.
Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Yeah, indeed. So it’s hard to believe, but we’re at that point where we want to ask you, if you can let us, excuse me, tell people how they can get in touch with you and find out more information.
Barry Sears: My website is drsears.com. And this is just a really informational website that talks about inflammation and its resolution. And then, if they’d like to leave messages, I’d be more than happy to address their concerns. Because if you’re a parent who has a child with these neurological problems, you’re at wit’s end, all of a sudden, you’ll do a Google search and say, "Stop, stop, you’re killing me."
But you do need information. And what we’ve had in the last 20 years is really basically abdicating dietary control to pharmacological control. And this is basically not getting to the basis saying, we have to understand the problem is real. And basically, there’s data.
And that’s why the key thing is saying, "Show me the published data that this type of intervention can have a benefit." And so that’s where we fall science. But if we follow just basically, I think that’s not science, and therefore we get in a rabbit hole, that’s very hard to get out of.
Elaine Taylor-Klaus: That’s really helpful.
Diane Dempster: So we’ve been talking a lot about a variety of different things. Dr. Sears, is there anything that we’ve missed? Kind of a last check-in with you to say, was there anything that we want to make sure that parents hear about this connection between diet and the brain?
Barry Sears: Two things. One is very complex. It says, you're basically the commander of the army, you control the diet of your child. Now, you have to apply every parenting skill, using stealth technology to make the tools work. And that's really the problem. All parents say, "How can I get my child to do the right thing?" So I basically use my stealth parenting skills. It’s difficult, but the outcome is well worth all the effort.
Elaine Taylor-Klaus: I remember sneaking spinach into meatballs. So...
Barry Sears: That's it—stealth technology.
Elaine Taylor-Klaus: And packing contests for kale to get them to compete with each other for who could eat the most kale without going sour. All kinds of creative things to get them to love their vegetables, but it takes effort. And to the parents out there who are listening, we know you're exhausted, we know you're beleaguered. So take a couple of breaths. You don’t have to do it all at once.
Diane Dempster: The baby steps.
Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Baby steps. Use the model to help you begin to get the buy-in. And as Dr. Sears says, it’s a coach approach. Over time, you will coach your child to really see what they want for themselves and get their buy-in too.
Barry Sears: And the most important aspect is that the science supports it.
Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Yeah.
Barry Sears: It does not say "I guess" or "I think." The science tells us that nutrients, especially omega-3 fatty acids, are incredibly powerful drugs with no toxicity. But the fact is, I have to get them into the body. That’s why they’re called essential fatty acids—the body cannot make them.
Elaine Taylor-Klaus: What you said earlier—that you can take too much—can you explain that a bit more?
Barry Sears: Exactly, that’s why you always use the blood test. So, we titrate to the goal. Each person is different, so we figure out the amount they need to achieve the appropriate ratio, where the science shows things begin to happen.
Diane Dempster: Awesome. Thank you so much, Dr. Sears! Can we wrap up with just a fun quote or a motto you’d like to leave with parents today?
Barry Sears: One I always like is, "Discipline will set you free."
Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Discipline will set you free. Love it.
Diane Dempster: Awesome.
Elaine Taylor-Klaus: After all, thank you very much for being with us, for sharing your wisdom, and really for the body of work you've done over the course of your career. You've made a huge difference for thousands, millions of families. So thank you for your work.
Barry Sears: Thank you for the opportunity of being on your show.
Elaine Taylor-Klaus: We enjoyed it very much.
Diane Dempster: Thank you, parents, for being here. Remember, at the end of the day, whether it’s about you or about your kids, you’re the one that can make the difference.
Elaine Taylor-Klaus: Take care, everyone.
Find Parenting with Impact on your Favorite Player:
