There are many different theories about what causes Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), says gastroenterologist Dr Brennan Spiegel of Cedars-Sinai hospital in Los Angeles.
“It’s such a common condition that clearly, we want to get to the bottom of it...there are many theories from diet to the role of bacteria in the body to the neuropsychology of living with chronic stress and anxiety and how that might contribute to abdominal discomfort or pain.”
Spiegel says he’s been struggling to align these theories.
Photo: Cedars-Sinai hospital
In The American Journal of Gastroenterology, he argues that gravity may be at play.
“It just so happens that a family member has had some cognitive decline and she found herself in an assisted living facility and she started to develop significant pain and bloating and constipation at about the same time as she was lying down flat on her back for prolonged periods, which was unlike her usual lifestyle.
“I started wondering, what is it about lying flat that is promoting all of these new symptoms?”
As human’s we’re not really designed to be lying on our back for extended periods, he says.
“We evolved to be on two feet and the Earth pulls all of our body systems down. So, the hypothesis is that gravity is actually at the bottom, literally, of IBS and maybe many other chronic conditions.”
We spent about two thirds of our life standing upright, he says, and we've evolved a number of mechanical and possibly neurophysiological systems to suspend the gut.
“The gut, and everything in our abdominal cavity is like a sack of potatoes that we are destined to port around our entire lives,”
Some people are better evolved to hoist the load more than others, he argues.
Ligaments and tendons that hold up the intestine system are called the mesentery.
For some people, Speigel says, this is rather stretchy and causes the bowels to fall down further into the abdominal sacks.
“Also, our spine is like a chassis that holds up our entire body naturally, but it also supports that load and if you have problems with your back it becomes more and more difficult to hold up that load and it can compress the load, cause kinking, bacterial overgrowth, gas formation.”
If the system is thickened and full of fat, it can change the way the intestines are hanging and responding, he says.
“It’s like a garden hose, if there’s kinking, the water won’t go through well.”
Gravity is a fundamental force that has effects everything on the planet and the most common medical conditions are forms of gravity intolerance, he says.
“What is lower back pain, for example, if not a difficultly of managing the force of gravity across the muscular skeletal system?”
Spiegel says our gut microbiome can change depending on different co-morbidities we may have.
“Anything that changes the motility or movement of the gut will change the bacteria within it. There can be stasis that occurs secondarily as a result of kinking or compression, or dilation.
“That leads to a whole host of effects, for serotonin production changes in the gut.”
He believes serotonin may have evolved to help us manage gravity.
“It may be, this is speculative, but 90 percent of serotonin is created in the gut and it’s a hormone, or rather neurotransmitter that affects every body system.
“If the microbiome co-evolved with us to manage gravity, which may sound a little ludicrous, but on the other hand is sort of makes sense, then it sort of makes sense why when the gut goes down, the rest of the body can go down with it.”
Serotonin is a very complicated substance with many functions across many organ systems, he says, but it absolutely has something to do with IBS.
The gut feeling you get when you’re on a roller coaster may be related to serotonin, he says.
“It may be that we sort of evolved a G-force accelerometer in our gut that tells us when we’re having a threatening fall that could kill us and overtime, we evolved to feel that not only when we’re falling but when we think we’re going to fall, and we become hyper vigilant about falling down,’ he says.
Altering serotonin, like through SSRI medications, may be altering our relationship to gravity in a more productive and adapted way, he speculates.
“That’s sort of the notion behind this hypothesis.”
“I don’t think it’s so controversial to think that gravity has something to do with our health, it's been there long before we were, and it’ll be there long after we’re gone.”
