Your gut microbes aren’t just digesting food—they’re scripting your emotions, filtering your thoughts, and rewriting your mental health playbook. Cutting-edge 2024 research reveals how to hack this system.
“The Living Supercomputer in Your Gut.”
Alisha Lehmann
Your gastrointestinal tract houses over 100 trillion microorganisms—outnumbering your human cells 10:1. This ecosystem, your microbiome, communicates with your brain through a 24/7 biochemical dialogue called the gut-brain axis (GBA). Three major highways enable this conversation:
- The Vagus Nerve
1. The Vagus Nerve
- Direct neural pathway transmitting signals in <100 milliseconds
- 90% of traffic flows gut→brain (not brain→gut)
- Severing it in mice blocks microbiome’s mood effects
2. Neurochemical Production
| Compound | % Produced in Gut | Role |
|---|---|---|
| Serotonin | 90% | Mood regulation |
| GABA | 50% | Anxiety reduction |
| Dopamine | 30% | Motivation & pleasure |
3. Immune Signaling
- Gut bacteria release SCFAs (short-chain fatty acids) that:
✓ Reduce brain inflammation
✓ Strengthen blood-brain barrier
✓ Activate BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor)
Without website navigation, your visitors can’t figure out how to find your blog, your email signup page, your product listings, pricing, contact information, or help docs.
Quick and easy access to the content they’re after is more important for your website users than a… visually-stunning design.
Website navigation allows visitors to flow from one page to another without frustration. If you’ve done your job well, visitors leave your site with the intention to return and might even buy something from you or sign up for your email list.
Bad navigation is an especially common problem. We’ve all struggled to find things on disorganized websites without any logical structure. It feels hopeless.
Why Eat Root Vegetables?
In design, rhythm is created by simply repeating in predictable patterns. This repetition is a natural thing that occurs everywhere in our world. As people, we are driven everyday by predictable, timed events.
One of the best ways to use repetition and rhythm in web design is in the site’s navigation menu. A consistent, easy-to-follow pattern—in color, layout, etc. Gives users an intuitive roadmap to everything you want to share on your site.
How to Cook & Use Root Vegetables
Nobody enjoys looking at an ugly web page. Garish colors, cluttered images and distracting animation can all turn customers “off” and send them shopping “somewhere else”. Basic composition rules to create more effective:
- Direct the Eye With Leading Lines
- Balance Out Your Elements
- Use Elements That Complement Each Other
- Be clear about your “focal points” and where you place them
The size and position of elements in a composition will determine its balance. An unbalanced design generates tension, which may be the goal in many design projects, but for web apps that demand repeated comfortable use, tension is not a desirable trait.
Healthy Ways to Prepare Root Vegetables
UX and UI: Two terms that are often used interchangeably, but actually mean very different things. So what exactly is the difference?
“He who is not courageous enough to take risks will accomplish nothing in life.”
Muhammad Ali
UX design refers to the term “user experience design”, while UI stands for “user interface design”. Both elements are crucial to a product and work closely together. But despite their relationship, the roles themselves are quite different.
Using “complex large pictures”. Because a carousel generally carries a lot of picture messages, complex large pictures result in low performance and “slow loading rate” of the sites, especially those whose first homepages are occupied by high-resolution carousels.
How to Use Root Vegetables
Good design guides the user by communicating purpose and priority. For that reason, every part of the design should be based on an “informed decision” rather than an arbitrary result of personal taste or the current trend.
Provide distinct styles for interactive elements, such as links and buttons, to make them easy to identify. For example, “change the appearance of links” on mouse hover, “keyboard focus”, and “touch-screen activation”.
Root Vegetable Recipes
Design is not the end all solution to all of the worlds problems — but with the right thinking and application, it can definitely be a good beginning to start tackling them.
