Janice Carter
Gut health & your microbiome M
Happy gut - Happy body ore than 2000 years ago Hippocrates said, it all starts in your gut. We're only now coming to understand just
how right he was. Research over the past two decades has revealed that gut health is critical to overall health, and an unhealthy gut can contribute to a wide range of diseases including diabetes, obesity, rheumatoid arthritis, autism spectrum disorder, depression, and chronic fatigue syndrome, to name a few. Research in this field is ever evolving. This is by no means a complete list of conditions attributable to poor gut health. In fact, many researchers - such as Felice Jackman - who studies nutritional psychiatry and the link between anxiety and depression and gut health, believe that supporting intestinal health and restoring the integrity of the gut barrier will be one of the most important goals of medicine in the 21st century. According to Chris Kresser, "there are two closely related variables that determine our gut health: the intestinal microbiota, or “gut flora”, and the “gut barrier". Someone with problems with their gut barrier would experience leaky gut, a condition where the permeability of their gut lining is compromised.
What is gut flora?
Essentially, the gut flora can be explained with the following analogy. A healthy garden needs healthy soil. Our gut is home to approximately 100,000,000,000,000 (100 trillion) microorganisms. Essentially our bodies are more bacteria than anything else! If they aren't working towards our health then we really are in trouble, we are at a disadvantage from the basic building blocks of our body. The human gut contains 10 times more bacteria than all the human cells in the entire body, with over 1,000 known diverse bacterial species. We’ve only recently begun to understand the extent of the gut flora’s role in human health and disease. Among other things, the gut flora promotes normal digestive function, accounts for approximately 80 percent of our body’s immune response, and helps to regulate our metabolism. Dysregulated gut flora has been linked to diseases ranging from autism and depression to autoimmune conditions like Hashimoto’s, inflammatory bowel disease, and metabolic conditions like type 2 diabetes.
What comprises our gut flora?
Several features of modern living directly contribute to unhealthy gut flora: •
Antibiotics and other medications like birth control and NSAIDs (Nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs).
18 wholefoodliving.life | Summer 2021
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Diets high in refined carbohydrates, sugar and processed foods. • Diets low in fermentable fibres, aka not enough veggies • Foods known to cause leaky gut, gluten, oils and refined sugar. • Chronic stress. • Chronic infections. Antibiotics are undoubtedly necessary in some circumstances. I don’t have an issue with them when used correctly. They do however have huge implications on gut health. Doctor Natasha Campbell-McBride is a gut health specialist and founder/author of the GAPS diet. She says it can take up to four years to restore and rebuild the gut biome following a course of antibiotics. If you do require antibiotics, make sure you follow with a course of probiotics and have plenty of whole foods high in fibre – vegetables, fruit, grains and legumes. The diversity of your gut flora following antibiotic use is not recoverable without these interventions. Research also suggests infants that aren’t breastfed, are born by caesarean section or are born to mothers with bad gut flora are more likely to develop unhealthy gut bacteria, and that these early differences in gut flora may predict a person’s chances of being overweight, developing diabetes, eczema/psoriasis, depression and other health problems in the future. We can’t change our own births or how we were fed as infants. Similarly, breastfeeding isn’t always possible for many women and c-sections have their place in ensuring the safety of mothers and babies during childbirth. In these instances, it is helpful to understand gut health can be compromised but equally there are many things you can do to account for these situations.
Leaky gut
The gut barrier is your gatekeeper that decides what gets in and what stays out. When you think about it, our gut is a system that operates entirely on its own. It is a sealed passageway from our mouths to our bottom. Technically, the scope with which it interacts with other organs in our body is somewhat limited. Anything goes in the mouth and isn’t digested will pass right out the other end. This is, in fact, one of the most important functions of the gut: to prevent foreign substances from entering the body. When the intestinal barrier becomes permeable i.e. leaky gut syndrome, large protein molecules ‘leak’ into the bloodstream. Since these proteins don’t belong outside of the gut, the body mounts an immune response and attacks them. The link between leaky gut and autoimmune conditions is huge.
