Nutrition is a hot topic these days and with just cause. Nutrition is more than just the food that you eat, it is also the body's ability to digest and absorb that food in order to derive the nutrients it needs to build and grow. We are all born with or without the ability to digest certain foods because of the health of our parents and grandparents before us. It’s called epigenetics--the modification of how a gene expresses itself. The DNA makeup received from our fore-parents is the same, but the genes might act a little differently for you than they did for your great-great-grandparent based on lifestyle factors, nutrition, and what toxins those before you were exposed to over their lifetime before you were created.
Because of your own body’s particular epigenetic code, what you eat plays a crucial role in the management of chronic disease, including many autoimmune diseases. Even the most perfect diet is seen as toxic if the integrity of your digestive tract is compromised.
Hippocrates said, “All disease begins in the gut.” From my clinical experience, I would have to agree. The gut is not only responsible for digestion and absorption of food, but our intestines also play a major role in our immunity.
If the absorptive surface of the gastrointestinal tract was taken and laid out flat, it would span the size of a tennis court, but it doesn’t end there. The gastrointestinal system is covered with a protective thick band of beneficial bacteria, virus, fungus, and other organisms. Microorganisms are inhabitants of our body, and they outnumber our own cells ten to one. We carry two to six pounds of bacteria in our gut.
These very microbes play a vital role in our health because they are our immunity, digestion and absorption, and neurotransmitter synthesis. It is estimated that 85 percent of our immune system is housed in our intestines. The beneficial bacteria of the gastrointestinal tract produce antibacterial, antifungal, and antiviral substances and protect us from illness. Moreover our gut bacteria have ongoing communication with the rest of our immune system, and it is the microorganisms in our intestine that keep it in balance.
A gut ecosystem should consist of 85 percent beneficial microbes and 15 percent opportunistic or bad. This gut flora also serves as a protective barrier for what can leave the gut--nothing is able to get through the gut wall unless it is accompanied by an enzymatic escort, which packages it up and takes it through the intestinal wall out into the bloodstream. When beneficial gut flora is damaged (by a round of antibiotics, pharmaceutical grade drugs, over consumption of processed foods, or pesticides), bad gut flora can overgrow leaving the gut wall unprotected, striped and bare with the potential to dissolve. Thus the wall of the intestine becomes permeable—a condition known as
“leaky gut”
or intestinal permeability. This leaves the door open for an
autoimmune disease
to sneak in and take up residence.
Many food particles look similar to our own body tissue in their molecular structure (known as a molecular mimicry), specifically foods with a protein component like wheat (gluten and gliadin). While I'm a proponent of removing inflammatory foods like gluten from a person’s diet while they heal, it is not the end all be all: healing and sealing the gut and re-inoculating the intestinal tract with good gut flora is.
How to Heal Your Gut
Healing and re-inoculation of the gut is possible, and there is a method to it, starting with what you eat and what you absorb or digest. Your diet would consist of namely homemade bone broth (to heal and seal your gut lining) and probiotics in the form of fermented foods. While probiotics purchased in capsule form can be a great supplement, the best place to get your probiotic is from your diet—it is more economical, and fermented foods contain 100 times more probiotic than a supplement.
Fermented foods need to be introduced slowly. As mentioned above, good gut flora's job is to keep invaders out, and bad bacteria is seen as an invader. When the opportunistic gut flora starts to die off, part of its survival is to emit a gaseous toxic substance. These toxins are what cause health issues. If you have never eaten fermented foods before, you need to start very slowly and gradually, adding only teaspoons of the food into your diet at a time. If you experience “die off,” don’t stop, simply back off.
Eliminate Inflammatory Foods:
- All grains and anything made out of them: wheat, rye, rice, oats, corn for example.
- All starchy vegetables.
- Sugar and anything that contains it.
- All beans, including soy and garbanzo beans (chickpeas).
- Lactose found in dairy products, and anything that contains it.
Consume Broth and Meat:
- Bone broth (the real stuff, not bullion from the store that is artificial and nothing but a chemical). Find a grass-fed cow, bison, or free-range chicken farmer and get long bones and knuckles from them. Slow cook them in a crockpot for 24 to 72 hours. This is just like your mom or grandmother used to do when she made homemade soup from a soup bone. This broth is loaded with amino acids, gelatin, glucosamine, fats, vitamins, and minerals that are beneficial to the gut wall and will heal and seal your gut.
- Meats from pasture-raised animals such as beef, chicken, and pork and line caught fish cooked in the bone broth.
If you are experiencing symptoms of autoimmune disease (fatigue, unexplained hair loss, skin rashes, digestive issues, unexplained weight gain or weight loss, achy and feverish, etc) healing your gut would be a great place to start. You can follow the guidelines laid out in this article, but if you really want to dig deeper and get a plan that is specific to your individual body’s needs, I offer a
20-minute health discovery session for $49 through my website.
Contact me today and we’ll get you on the path back to health.
References:
Alessio fasano m.d.. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://medschool.umaryland.edu/FACULTYRESEARCHPROFILE/viewprofile.aspx?id=1891
Campbell-McBride, N (2012). Put Your Heart in Your Mouth. United Kingdom: Mediform Publishing.
NIH human microbiome project defines normal bacterial makeup of the body. (2012, June 13). Retrieved from www.nih.gov/news/health/jun2012/nhgri-13.htm.
The human gastrointestinal (gi) tract. (2012, October 20). Retrieved from http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/G/GITract.html.
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih-human-microbiome-project-defines-normal-bacterial-makeup-body