Good Gut Bugs

When you really look closely, we are really only just the transport mechanism for water and bacteria. Seriously. The only time we are 100% human cells and DNA is when we are in utero. As soon as we make our way down the birth canal we start to accumulate foreign critters who take up residence in and on our bodies for the rest of our lives, and beyond. Kids are supposed to play in the dirt and taste their world. This is how the gut gets populated with a healthy balance of good bugs to battle the bad ones. New studies have shown that it's actually really beneficial for parents to "clean" off a dropped binky by sucking on it and then popping back into the baby's mouth. This helps transfer some of the parent's good bugs to the child.

If you count up the numbers of cells with “not self” DNA and compare that number to the number of cells that contain actual self DNA you’ll be astounded to discover that we are outnumbered by nearly a factor of ten. We are actually only about 10% human compared to 90% microbial. Now this is NOT a treatise on how to go out and eradicate the 90% “non-human” part of us! Quite the contrary. I want to expand your thinking to include these hitch-hikers as part of what it means to be a healthy human.

Just like a healthy forest, biodiversity is the key. We have seen clearly what happens when we clear-cut a forest and then come back to plant a mono-culture of a single tree species in neat rows ready to harvest at a later date. This mono-culture system hobbles along, never very healthy, always in danger of being over run by a single disease or single pest outbreak, and always in danger of a devastating fire. By contrast, a healthy dynamic, bio-diverse forest is resilient and capable of fending off pests, disease and complete annihilation by fire exactly because it has a wide range of inhabitants that all help maintain the system in their large and small ways.

Western lifestyles, food supplies, medications, toxins and recent obsession with antibacterial soaps has essentially performed a massive clear-cutting of our internal environment. We SHOULD play host to trillions of various microorganisms in as delicate a balance as the exterior environment with similar predator/prey relationships, similar herbivore/omnivore players, and similar toxin removal/recycling systems. When we mess with these internal environments as we have our external ones, we find similar problems of mono-culture and systems out of balance. We need a healthy balance of microbes to help us process foods, maintain a healthy pH (of skin, teeth, mucus membranes, and GI tract), detoxify certain substances, make certain nutrients bioavailable that we can’t liberate from foods, and keep our insides and outsides free from dangerous invaders. Without this symbiosis we become more vulnerable to disease, nutrient deficiency, and toxic overload.

Interestingly enough, these critters that we carry around actually exert a certain amount of mind control over their human hosts. This happens in both balanced and imbalanced systems. That sugar craving you might be having is very possibly the whispers of a virulent bacteria or fungus that thrives on sugar and has patched into the body’s communication systems to tell the brain to find more sugary foods! Because the gut has more neurotransmitter receptor sites than the brain does, our hitch-hikers have direct access to systemic communication.

When the gut flora is out of balance you can experience a panoply of symptoms including anxiety, depression, addictive behavior, ADD/ADHD, IBS/IBD, Crohn’s disease, arthritis flares, food allergies, migraines, and much more. If you have ever been treated with antibiotics and you eat a standard American diet full of easy sugar and low dose antibiotics, it is highly likely that your gut microbes need to be attended to in order to reclaim and maintain your health. Consider a stool test to determine what populations you harbor and work with a qualified healthcare professional to restore a happy belly environment. It’s not as simple as eating yogurt or taking L. acidophilus capsules.




Get populated! Get balanced! Get REAL.

Chronic Inflammation: the smoldering fire within

As the research rolls in, we keep finding that the point of intersection in the genesis of nearly all chronic disease is low-level, systemic, long-term inflammation. This means that the inflammation system that is supposed to be our ally in times of trouble has been left stuck on like a dripping faucet. The chemicals our bodies create to help us close and heal a wound and activate the next stages of our immune system are not kind to other tissues of the body. In acute situations, these chemicals are produced for to quickly seal “holes” and act as the sirens that bring the rest of the immune system components to the scene. In a healthy system, they are then cleared quickly by anti-inflammatory systems to prevent additional damage. When the faucet for the fire hose of inflammation isn’t shut off entirely, damage occurs to healthy tissues.

Diseases directly related to chronic inflammation include asthma, Alzheimer’s, anemia, arthritis, cancers, fibromyalgia, kidney failure, lupus, psoriasis, adult respiratory distress syndrome, heart disease, congestive heart failure, IBS, Crohn’s, obesity, pancreatitis, stroke, and ulcerative colitis. One of the interesting things is that obesity is both a cause and a product of chronic inflammation, and we have a lot of control over it’s development.

Unfortunately, there are quite a few aspects of modern Western life that cause the inflammation faucet to drip. The Standard American Diet (SAD) is one of the biggest culprits. With it’s high sugar content, damaged fats and contaminated proteins, the metabolites from this sort of fueling are constantly activating the inflammation cascade by acting as irritants, toxins and circulating waste products. The immune system then attacks healthy cells in artery walls (atherosclerosis), joints (arthritis), the gut mucosa (as in lactose intolerance or gluten intolerance), as well as organ tissues such as the pancreas (diabetes).

It is thought now that the main reason that low-dose aspirin and statin medications help reduce heart disease is due to their anti-inflammatory actions rather than the original beliefs that blood needed to be thinner or cholesterol needed to be lower. These medications have some serious downsides, however, and you should be extremely careful even with that children’s aspirin. More information on this and other medication side-effects will be discussed here at a later date.

Barry Sears MD has been researching inflammation for years and has developed this list of questions to help you determine if you have a leaking inflammation faucet. If you answer yes to 3 or more, your faucet is on a constant drip:

Are you overweight?
Are you taking cholesterol lowering drugs, beta blockers or diuretics?
Are you groggy upon waking most mornings?
Do you crave refined grains or sugars throughout the day?
Do you feel fatigued more often than not?
Are your fingernails brittle?

If you would like more information on how to fix that leaky faucet, please sign up to attend my free presentation at Gathering Thyme in San Anselmo CA on February 16th at 7pm.
http://www.gatheringthyme.com/events.html#eating

Get Healthy. Get Informed. Get REAL.