Is Your Gut Quietly Affecting Your Entire Health?
Gut Health
How’s your gut health? Digestion is so crucial for our health, but millions of people live with gut
inflammation and poor digestion. They don’t get and absorb enough nutrients, and their overall
health suffers.
Why do so many Americans have impaired gut health? I firmly believe it’s the food we eat,
stress and toxins. There are other factors like insufficient sleep, but I think it’s mostly that our
gut just isn’t being fed optimally.
Much has been written about good nutrition, and we know most of it. We need to be eating
real food, not processed food filled with unnatural additives. Meat, whole grains, legumes,
nuts, fruits and vegetables. Not fast food, frozen dinners or chips! That’s not real food. When
you eat processed food, it’s unnatural for your gut to digest. Your stomach and intestines need
to work hard to try to break it down and then absorb it. But when you eat real, whole food,
your gut knows exactly what to do. You should also try to eat clean as much as possible: organic
produce and meats sourced cleanly.
A special note about refined flour: it’s just not healthy! American wheat is typically exposed to
glyphosate (weed killer) near harvest, so the wheat that is harvested often contains a significant
amount. Then when you eat it, it affects your gut. While the makers of this pesticide contend
that there is no human risk to consuming small amounts, they definitely have misrepresented
the data. Glyphosate in your gut is very toxic to the microbiome, or the healthy bacteria that
live in your intestine and are a crucial part of digestion. So the glyphosate may not directly kill
you, but it kills off some of your microbiome, wreaking havoc. Many of us now think the gluten
in American wheat may actually not be the thing in wheat creating the problem: it may be the
glyphosate! If you’re going to eat wheat, either choose products made in Europe (their wheat is
much healthier to eat) or even better, source good organic wheat and mill your own flour. Or
just switch to gluten free flour.
There are many other toxins that can affect your gut health other than glyphosate. There are
other herbicides and pesticides and a long list of other chemicals that get into our ecosystem.
We ingest them in our water and food, and breathe them in our air. Check out my book, “Dare
to Detox” for more information and helpful tips for how to reduce your exposure.
So what can we do to improve our gut? There are 4 steps to better digestion:
1. REMOVE. This means remove unhealthy foods, toxins, and any infection. If you have
significant symptoms of an intestinal infection, your doctor can do a stool test for this.
2. REPAIR. Heal the gut inflammation with a good product that includes herbs and
botanicals to reduce inflammation. Most products include some of the following:
a. Turmeric/curcumin
b. L-glutamine
c. EGCG
d. Aloe vera
e. Ginger
f. Arabinogalactan
This will typically be a big tub of powder, and you make a shake with it and have it every
day for a week or two. My all-time favorite is “Inflammacore” from Ortho Molecular
Products, but there are other similar, good products out there from other
pharmaceutical grade supplements companies.
3. REPLACE. Add back in gastric acid and digestive enzymes. Most people produce less
stomach acid and less enzymes from the pancreas as they age. Interestingly, a very
common cause of acid reflux isn’t the tomatoes or high acid in the stomach: it’s a lack of
stomach acid. So you need to take enzymes with each meal to get the predigestion
process going. Many brands include a bit of betaine HCl in the product, which boosts
stomach acid levels. My favorite products are “Digestzymes” from Designs for Health
and “OrthoDigestzyme” from Ortho Molecular Products.
4. REINOCULATE. This means adding back in a probiotic to replace the good bacteria that
probably have decreased. Make sure you’re buying a high-quality product, preferably
from a pharmaceutical grade supplement company, and not something cheap on the
drug store shelf. Look for a product that has a blend of bacterial strains, and not just one
strain. You also want at least 20 billion CFU per capsule, and if you have high levels of
gut inflammation, the doses required are often much higher (100-200 billion CFU).
So work on nutrition, but at the same time, consider some of the supplement approaches
above. If you can’t figure it out on your own, see a practitioner who is trained in a functional
medicine approach to gut health. He or she can do further testing to look for food sensitivities
or issues with infection and inflammation, which can help refine your treatment strategy. If you
want a great source for supplement shopping, you can sign up for a free account on Fullscript:
https://us.fullscript.com/welcome/greis
Fullscript is like the “Amazon for supplements”. They carry hundreds of high quality supplement
brands, and they are set up for pharmaceutical quality warehousing (unlike Amazon). You need
to be invited by a practitioner to get an account, so click the link above you can easily register.
So dive in and start working on your gut health. Eat healthy, clean foods, and add supplements
if needed. If you get stuck, see a functional practitioner
