The Brain & Gut Institute

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The Brain & Gut Institute

Specializing in the Brain & Gut communication via the Vagus nerve for complete healing. BG Mancini, AP, has specialized in Natural Medicine since 1996.

She combines acupuncture, cold laser meridian therapy, dietary consultation and Nutrition Response Testing to achieve optimal results. I love working with patients to both treat and educate they can make simple adjustments to achieve the quality of life they hope for and is truly possible. Life is meant to be filled with joy, vitality and possibility! Doing More Than Treating Symptoms: This is the foundation of my practice, a core belief: Addressing the underlying dysfunction that is causing your unwanted symptoms is of utmost importance to prevent recurrence. By treating the root of the problem we are stopping the constant inflammation cycle in the body that eventually leads to degenerative issues. Remember...the body is always trying to heal...that is it's primary mission!

25/08/2025

🧠AUTOIMMUNE/ANS DYSREGULATION: Vagus Nerve Support: Why this matters for everyone! Cues of safety to the nervous system are changing symptoms! Less self-attacking antibodies in autoimmunity condition = safety in the body and brain = higher quality of life, play, joy. ✨

Article published in the NYT shows: SetPoint, has been approved after rigorous trials and proven to help modulate autoimmune symptoms. See comments for article link

**Autoimmune patients experience a unique additional trauma to those diagnosed with illnesses that aren’t: They are told their own body is attacking them, their “home” their body, is not safe and is the cause of their distress.

Vagus nerve stimulation has been the subject of research for years, including benefits for:
Better sleep, cognition, a calmer mind, and improved mood.
I’ve also seen better digestion, muscle tone relaxed, reduced anxiety and the list goes on.

19/03/2025

Pro Tip below ⬇ WHY children may self-select down to a few foods which further impair their:

💩Gut Health: Limited food variety means limited fuel for good gut bacteria, impacting digestion and nutrient absorption.

🧠Neurology: The gut-brain connection is real! A struggling gut can hinder brain development and function.

😡Behavior: Mood swings, tantrums, and even hyperactivity can sometimes be linked to gut issues.

😃Digestion: A lack of diverse gut bacteria can lead to digestive discomfort and issues like constipation or diarrhea.

🕳Leaky Gut Status:** Constant exposure to the same limited foods may irritate the gut lining, potentially contributing to leaky gut.

😎Here's the surprising twist! Your child's gut is constantly talking to their body, influencing these very things.

Intestinal epithelial cells, like tiny gatekeepers, line your digestive system and chat with your body about the food you eat!

😲💥 WAIT? WHAT'S THAT? 😲💥

The gut microbiome makeup can influence our textural and taste choices!

This explains what I've seen clinically for YEARS. Children with certain 3 & 4 letter diagnoses choose only a few foods that are often similar in texture and taste and always inflammatory, unfortunately. (Think chicken nuggets, soft sugar-based desserts etc.)

These cells deal with a constant flow of food components, good gut bacteria (microbiota), and even foreign invaders. They use this intel to adjust how your body absorbs nutrients, fights off bad stuff, and keeps things balanced.

🏆PRO TIP: Add in a small sprinkle of mixed fibers into any food they are eating or google "microbiome mashup video" and get even a tsp a day into their (and YOUR food) you gut, brain, immune and nervous system will thank you! 🥰

17/03/2025

🥴Where on the pyramid are you, your children, or your Pediatric patients struggling? Tips to strengthen the foundation below. ⬇

📝Please make note, learning is at the very tippy top of the pyramid.🔺

The Central Nervous System (CNS) is the foundation for pediatric and adult wellbeing.

What does this have to do with children and their emotional and neurological development?

Everything! The CNS is directly informing the vagus nerve and our ability to feel safe and connect. 🤗 this is our starting point as humans.

🤿Let’s dive into what impacts a child’s CNS and what we can do with the 5% rule to help them experience things differently which leads to different outcomes and behaviors!

🤨Change what goes in and you WILL change what comes out!

- stress from all sensory input
- 5% change: are there sounds, lights, scents that can be made to be more comfortable and can you add in proprioception- connection to self through body signals.

Reducing overstimulation improves unwanted reactivity in exchange for responsiveness in our body and behavior ✨🤗🚀

- 5% change: add in any vestibular exercise improves the network of communication in the brain 🧠

🔑 🔐 📣
Key is also making sure that food sensitivities, chemical exposures, mold and all of the other big components (Harvard agrees!) are mitigated.

💪🏻 These are STRONGLY increasing overall physical and neurological inflammation and impacting our gut which directly informs our emotional states, resilience and the ability to switch between regulation and dysregulation.

16/03/2025

🚀 Be ahead of the times! ⏰

Eventually, everyone will see the truth: We must stop over-pathologizing children and start addressing their real needs.

(Quick intro if we haven't met: 27 years working with kids, inflammation, neuroplasticity, the gut, and beyond—alongside top experts in each field.)

🍕🍦 Kids are eating the same inflammatory foods as adults—why wouldn’t they develop the same neuroinflammation, brain fog, and discomfort?

📱💡 Add in digital overload, nonstop sensory input, and a sedentary lifestyle, and we have a recipe for impaired neurological, emotional, and physical development. (Harvard research agrees.)

🔎 But we’re missing the signs because we view children through outdated diagnostic lenses.

🙌🏼🎉 The most effective therapies and interventions acknowledge how sensory consumption and microtraumas shape a child’s external expression.

🖊💻 Join the next cohort to dive deeper into the root causes!

Whether you're an LMHC, OT/PT, Social Worker, Pediatrician, Parent, or Educator, learn how to guide families when kids present with:
⚡ Anxiety, tics, learning delays, retained reflexes
⚡ Sleep issues, behavioral challenges, rage, emotional lability
⚡ Non-bilateral movement patterns

Too often, these are labeled as “ADHD, ODD, Tourette’s, or ‘I don’t know.’”

💔 This creates heartbreak for parents, dysregulation at home, and burnout for providers.

👁👂🏼 It all comes down to sensory input + processing—across the five senses, neuroception, vestibular, proprioception, and interoception—shaping external behaviors that get diagnosed.

🙀 At its core, this is an input/output equation:
Too much. Too little. A brain wired in threat due to chronic inflammation (which I see daily in neurological antibodies and blood markers).

💡 Children's health is worse than most realize. Now is the time to shift the narrative and change the tide—together.

🤜🏼🤛🏼 Wondertwin powers, activate!

📚🏃🏼‍♂️ A truly interdisciplinary approach to children’s health makes us ALL more effective in supporting kids and families. Let’s get to work!

15/03/2025

🧠🔬 How does this land for you when you watch it?

Graphic credit: Unknown

😳😶‍🌫️🫤 Makes me want to either stick my head in the sand or throw my devices away.

“The unexamined life is not worth living.” — Socrates

A solid check-in moment:
Where am I putting my attention this week, this month, this year… this life?

We are social animals. Our nervous systems have been tested 17 gazillion ways (as my little ones say), and the results? Always the same.

When we feel safe, we connect. And when we connect to what brings us safety, our brain and body find balance more easily.

When our system is stuck in , we overreact to safe stimuli as if it’s dangerous, creating imbalance, autoimmune issues, and even organ damage. gives us a framework to understand this.

🎶 🌲 ☀️ Whether it’s time in nature, at a concert, with our animals, kids, or partner—when we FEEL the full ✨💃🏻🥰 spectrum of emotions, our anxiety decreases, our immune system strengthens, and our nervous system functions better.

Don’t get me wrong—I’ve made some amazing, meaningful connections online. But this reel reminds me of what I’m NOT doing when I’m online:
🌲 🌞 🏃‍♂️ 🏝️ 🏔️ 🤗 🫂 🧘‍♂️ 😂

A healthy relationship with screen time matters. More than for myself, I model it for my kids. Because unmitigated screen time? It’s a science experiment with their mental, emotional, and physical health.

So, how about the 5% reduce rule this week?
What will you fill that 5% with? 🌿

14/03/2025

It is needs based, it is also reaction to a combination of stimuli overriding choice sometimes.

👦 👧🏾 Children are being unnecessarily pathologized without fully understanding all of the contributing factors to their external expression.

🙈 We can no longer ignore the research supporting the following. Regardless of what field or scope, if we work with children, having the understanding of what we are truly seeing, beneath the diagnosis, the external expressions, the emotional need, there is also

ALWAYS

contributing factors from the following:

🍕 Inflammation and food sensitivities/nutritional deficiencies.

👁️ Sensory overwhelm or misperception through inflammed pathways cuing danger.

🏋🏾 Lack of proprioception cuing disconnection to their body/brain.

No interocepetion from repeated lack of safety signals eminating from INSIDE saying escape, get away.

👂 Vestibular dysregulation where every movement needs accommodation and is exhausting for the child’s brain
🧠

🔬 In my research and clinical practice I see the incredible inflammation, Insulin Resistance, Gut Dysfunction, Blood Brain Barrier impairments and Neurological inflammation occurring in children.

😞 ALL research on mental health through the 🌍 worlds’ most prestigious institutions confirms the following:

1) gut dysbiosis impacts mental and behavioral health and increases Blood Brain Barrier dysfunction.

2) blood brain barrier impairment increases neurological inflammation

3) neurological inflammation changes “behavior,” mental health status, sleep, safety, connection ability, learning, AND through the Brain Gut Axis further dysregulated the gut in an endless feedback loop.

Let’s look together at what’s really happening for children, Brain & Gut Movement
Let’s create therapeutic connections where every child can feel better ❤️‍🩹 in their brain and body, in order to more deeply connect with themselves, their loved ones and the world 🌎 around them.

13/03/2025

🧘 🌞 Polyvagal Theory & Daily Life:
How To Effectively Clear The Road For Deeper Connection To Self & Others = Create More Safety In The ANS In Our Daily Lives. 🌞 🏔️ 🌸

📢 Dr. Stephen Porges, "Trauma compromises our ability to engage with others by replacing patterns of connection with patterns of protection."

🔎 Let's look with curiosity through a different lens, as this is true for Children & Adults & Neuroscientists at agree!

🔥 We are constantly experiencing Microtraumas on a moment-to-moment basis that are eroding our potential to find balance and recover from the patterns of protection.

Essentially, we are always being cued for threat in our modern world, however! We CAN learn how our body truly digests our inner and outer environment in order to help shift ourselves into more comfortable physiological states.

😖Our bodies were not designed to find homeostasis in the face of the following:

👎🏼 Constant Fight/Flight
👎🏼Loss of to self & others (How can we stay present in our body to connect with others, when it is constantly cuing us that we are unsafe?)
👎🏼A Firehose of Daily Information
👎🏼
👎🏼 to screens and substances for coping techniques
👎🏼Barraging Stimuli
👎🏼Late Night Schedules disturbing cortisol
👎🏼Ultra Processed Foods
👎🏼Sedentary Lifestyle which creates reduced which brain needs for safety
👎🏼Increasing Challenges
👎🏼Chemicals in the Air & Water
👎🏼Lack of Sunshine & Fresh Air

Whether for ourselves, our children or patients/clients, we need to understand what is presenting to us through ALL of our sensory systems in order to truly support the needs of anyone.

12/03/2025

🤗Connection with ourselves begins with inward sensing and feeling the interoceptive cues our body is always sending us.

💡Having a relationship WITH ourselves:
📍This means experiencing the deeply rooted felt sense.
A tuning inward, staying present and engaged, which requires safety in our physiology AND our brain story about what we are feeling.

💡Having a relationship ABOUT ourselves:
📍When we are doing anything that takes us out of our body and leaves us checked out. That IS a type of coping and out-of-body dissociated state or auto-pilot. Lights on, nobody home.

It is tuning out instead of tuning in.
Excessive anything: Scrolling, watching, Addictions, Anxiety/ OCD are both symptoms of internal discomfort and coping tools for some people.

When we tune in, are quiet, or even “unbusy” for a few minutes, we start to sense what our gut, senses, body, emotions, and thoughts are telling us. If we cannot stay there with our cues that are meant to guide us to balance, health and safety; we are having a relationship ABOUT ourselves. An intellectual analysis.

🌎Looking at this relationship
with ourselves is the first step to deepening our sense of self and being able to attune / connect more fully with our children, loved ones, and the world around us.

💃🏼🕺🏼Attunement to self usually happens before we can attune to our children; however, allowing ourselves to meet their 100% PRESENT(ness) can also calm an adult system and bring us into the moment again in the beautiful feedback dance between our nervous systems.

🧠Without this, their brains FORM differently.

They are at a disadvantage emotionally with lifelong nervous system patterns that reflect the trauma of separation from a parent/caregiver.

What works for you and your nervous system to want to stay present and FEELS safe and nourishing?
🧘🏼‍♂️Yoga
🚶🏿‍♂️Walking
🕺🏾Dancing
🎶Music
🌳Nature
🤗A hug
🐶😻Furry Friend

11/03/2025

💯 🙌🏻“Safety is not the absence of threat.” Dr. Stephen Porges

Who likes to talk about how to access safety in our nervous system and how to help children find safety in theirs from a 360-degree viewpoint: 🙋‍♀️👶🏽🧒

The first thing is to reduce the threats that our physiology is responding to:

I call these Microtraumas:

They have a cumulative effect on every end organ (gut, brain, skin, etc) and the nervous systems response to them create more stress and trauma.

♾️ It is a loop, our physiological state:

💡 Polyvagal Theory illuminates that
Ventral, Fight/Flight, Dorsal
Determines our reactions to stressors, and then we experience more stress, inflammation, damage through the reaction to the stimuli (these can be both internal and external!)

And, combining this with functional medicine, sensory integration, and the understanding of how the enteric nervous system in our gut are sensing and affecting every thought and feeling we have.
😊😞🥰🤪🥵🤕🤣

If we can reduce the number of triggers, stressors, and unsupportive stimuli that we are exposing our sensory organs to, we can create an easier pathway to state shift towards SAFETY and social engagement. 🚀🤗

Our senses Include:
5 Senses 👁️ 👂 👅 🤚 👃

Plus

✅Enteric Nervous System (our Gut)
✅Vestibular
✅Proprioceptive
✅Interoceptive (Cues from our organs)
✅Neuroception (Sensing from outside cues)

10/03/2025

✨ 📣 Public Service Announcement for therapists, clinicians, educators and parents.

👀 FROM THE BOTTOM UP

“Our story about our safety, and the world, is being created in real time by our sensory input and it’s processing.”
This means what we are eating 🍕 , taking in through every sense 👃 👁️ 👂 👅 🖐️ including proprioception, interoceptions, neuroception and vestibular. These inform our nervous system, brain 🧠 and behavior in every moment.

❤️‍🩹children are presenting with increasing complexities

💯Their diagnosis which occurs at the end of the story which is the behavior, is starting from the bottom.

📚 The Enteric nervous system in our gut is reacting to the environment, our feedback loop of stress/ and microtraumas and these include what children are eating that is causing inflammation———> alters brain chemistry, ———> lowers immunity———> allows pathogens 🦠 virus/bacteria and epigenetic factors to take over and increase threat in the brain and body.

Inflammation——-> alters sensory input perception——> creates a lens of threat through which we experience the world 🌎

Tools 🧰

1 : join the Brain Gut Movement to learn how to help .

2: connect with other providers who are looking to help children in a comprehensive way, we are all . We are building an amazing community of those working with children. Join us!

3: Explore with me through my individually tailored cohorts HOW to recognize when the behavior is less pathological in need of diagnosis and more biomedical in need of support. The results are life changing for the whole Family.
————————————————————————————————-

📢
Follow me here and Brain & Gut Movement for tips and tools.

09/03/2025

I've worked with every diet you can imagine for 28 years. 🥩🍎🥕🥬🍗

Time and time again, the body's resilience shows up—when the RIGHT diet meets the individual's needs. Eliminating inflammatory foods is always key.

30 years ago, I was Macrobiotic for 14 years—seasonal eating, proper chewing, fermented foods, no gluten/dairy, and minimal animal protein. It worked then. Now, we know gluten reliably creates leaky gut—some recover fast, others don’t.

I've seen 1,000s with cancer improve, autoimmune conditions reverse, and mental health thrive—because their diet matched their needs at that time. 🔑

Hippocrates Center has healed 1,000s with raw food alone. It’s all about genetics, toxic load, mental state, sleep, and connections.

NIH is finally funding studies on diet & health. A recent study found:
🥬 Vegan activates TH-1 innate immunity
🥓 Keto activates TH-2 adaptive immunity

Your diet shapes your immune system. If a diet isn’t working—adjust.

Cut the ultra-processed, inflammatory oils & fake food. Kids improve when we do this. Adults too.

Food matters. Science is catching up.

08/03/2025

🙌 Functional Mental Health & Polyvagal Theory work beautifully together—our parts are not separate!

🌳 Functional Medicine looks for root causes but often misses the full system.

📡 Neuroception (our gut feeling) picks up safety or threat cues in our organs before we even feel them.

💕 If we're safe but feel threatened, every moment is filtered through stress, tearing us apart inside.

🧠 Leaky gut, brain inflammation, heart damage, blood sugar issues—how can we feel safe in a reactive body?

➡ Stressed organs signal the brain 🚨
➡ Brain preps for danger 💥
➡ Stress hormones flood the body 💢
➡ Brain creates a story to justify the fear 😱
➡ We may not actually be in danger! 🤦‍♀️

♾ This cycle repeats—daily, in adults & children.

🐣 Kids today face sensory overload, disconnection, toxins—yet their reactions are pathologized as "behaviors."

🔥 Pro Tips to Ease the Load:
✔ Proprioceptive exercises
✔ SSP Program (Dr. Porges)
✔ Felt Sense Polyvagal Model (Jan Winhall)
✔ Soft lighting (harsh lights trigger threat!)
✔ Blue light filters (for screens)
✔ Ear plugs (for sensory overwhelm)
✔ NATURE! 🌿🌊🏔 (proven to regulate the nervous system)
✔ Functional water filter (removes hormonal burdens)

🚀 Grateful for those leading with a 360° perspective!

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Thursday	10:00 - 18:00

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http://www.braingutinstitute.com/

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