Essential Amino Acids: the Superstars of a Healthy Gut

By now, it’s been well established that the gut and brain are well connected and are essential to your overall health. For the sports fans, like Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal, or Tom Brady and Rob Gronkowski, or Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce; when they work together, good things happen. But they can’t carry a whole team by themselves; just like how Kobe and Shaq can’t single handedly win against a basketball team just by themselves. They need teammates, and a key player vital to maintaining a healthy brain-gut axis are essential amino acids.

What are essential amino acids?

Essential amino acids are important building blocks to proteins that your body can’t produce by themselves. Think of it like this: for the Los Angeles Dodgers, Mookie Betts can hit great, but he can’t pitch, so the team must sign pitchers like Shohei Ohtani to function. In your body’s case, the essential amino acids don’t come from free agency, but your diet. There are 9 amino acids in total, including important ones like tryptophan, valine, leucine, and isoleucine, which help repair muscles, make hormones, fight off disease, and more. The “essential” in essential amino acids isn’t for show, and your body needs these to survive.

How does it affect the brain-gut axis?

So what role do these essential amino acids play in the brain-gut axis? For starters, it has been discovered that your gut microbiota are able to produce and catalyze some of the essential amino acids you need. In particular, gut microbes are able to synthesize essential branched chain amino acids such as tryptophan, which help produce vital molecules for the central nervous system, gastrointestinal tract, and more.

Speaking of tryptophan, this amino acid utilized by the gut microbiome to modulate brain activity, producing important molecules like serotonin (a neurotransmitter), kynurenine (used in energy metabolism), and more. It doesn’t just benefit the brain: essential amino acids were found to boost microbiome diversity and suppress potential pathogens.

What happens when you don’t get these amino acids?

It’s not pretty. Dysbiosis and dysregulation of microbial amino acid metabolism is linked to conditions such as IBD, obesity, metabolic syndrome, and kidney disease. These acids are vital to running many important processes in your body. Thus, having a healthy, diverse gut-microbiome ensures that you can process these and be in good health. Here at ABiome, we have a vast variety of resources on how to maintain a healthy diet full of essential amino acids to keep your gut-microbiome functioning. Your body is just like a sports team: you need all players on board for the whole team to succeed.