Beyond Digestion (eBook)

How GUT Health Connects to Your Mind, Body, and Soul

Laura M. Brown (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2021 | 1. Auflage
298 Seiten
Lioncrest Publishing (Verlag)
978-1-5445-1845-9 (ISBN)

Infos

Do you have trouble digesting the world around you? The onset of digestive and gastrointestinal issues often begins in times of grief, abuse, or other major negative life events. When the mind can't digest its reality, the body stops digesting its food-literally. In Beyond Digestion, Dr. Laura M. Brown, ND, exposes the many ways in which your gut health relates to the overall health of your mind, body, and soul. Even your mood can be a reflection of, or reaction to, what's going on in your gut. Now, Beyond Digestion offers a clear path to break the negative cycle of many chronic health issues. Learn how to: Get to the root cause of your health problems Detoxify your gut Harmonize your sleep and body rhythms Strengthen your immune system Balance your hormones Regulate your emotions Tune in to your body's inner wisdom Connect to your primal source of energy transformation

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Chapter 1

1. It’s Not Your Fault

Here’s what you’ll learn in this chapter:

• You didn’t know: how food affects the microbiome
• It’s not your fault: how North American culture makes gut health difficult
• You didn’t know: you have a toxic bucket
• You can’t control everything: how you can influence the expression of your genes and how you age
• How to create a timeline to track your health

You Didn’t Know

Daphne was on leave from the city for six months. While away, she let her sister use her car. When she came back to reclaim her vehicle, it wasn’t in the same shape she left it. Her sister just doesn’t care for things the way she does. Upon cleaning it out, she found a sandwich from a nationwide food chain under the driver’s seat. Her sister claimed she hadn’t been at that food chain in over four months. You’d think it would be stinky and full of mold. It wasn’t.

“Disgusting as it may sound,” Daphne comments, “it still looked so good you could eat it.”

Of course she didn’t! But how can this be? The answer is that there are so many preservatives in processed food that it can’t even break down after spending four hot months under the seat of a car. That says a lot about whether it can break down in your digestive tract into usable blocks of nutrients. How many meals a day do you eat that are like this sandwich?

Cheese should get moldy. Meat should rot and stink. That’s natural. Sometimes bad is good, if you get what I mean.

It’s Not Your Fault

It’s not your fault. Our culture does not help here. You try to work, raise a family, and look after a home, exercise, and have some time with family and friends. Most people do their best to get to the grocery store to buy some food and maybe cook it. Many just use the drive-through or convenience shopping to pick up a quick snack. You trust that these big chains give you the nourishment you need to get through your day.

These places are businesses, motivated by profit. They make the food as cheap and tasty as they can to keep you coming back for more. What you don’t know is that processed and packaged foods (even the packages bought in the grocery store) often contain preservatives to extend shelf life, colouring agents to make it look appealing, and sugar, salt, and bad fats to make you crave it. Trouble is, if a food isn’t healthy, fresh, and vibrant, neither are you when you consume it.

I’m guessing you have much more difficult things to digest in your life than a fast food wrap. You are still in the right place. Read on.

Food Changes the Microbiome

Food affects the gut. Not only does food feed you; it also feeds your microbiome. Food matters: food type, food timing, food quality, food quantity. Foods have enzymes, which are natural body chemicals that take one substance and convert it to another. They help with digestion and nutrient breakdown. Diet is a particular factor in the balance of your gut flora. There are even clear microbiome differences between vegetarians, vegans, and omnivores.7

Even food timing makes a difference. Did you know your rhythm and routines can impact your gut health? Hint: it’s not just your body that has a biorhythm. Your gut microbes do, too. We will talk about this more in chapter 8.

Food quantity. Did you know that overeating can impact the landscape of the microbiome? It takes most people’s guts about six weeks to return to normal after Christmas vacation. Throw in alcohol and too much sugar, and it’s a triple whammy.

Organic or Nonorganic?

To be or not to be? Organic and non-GMO make a difference. Otherwise, you may ingest glyphosate,8 herbicides (Roundup®), or pesticides and insecticides that kill the bugs that eat the plants your food grows on. Think of that for a second. If these poisons kill those bugs, will they also kill the bugs in us? Is that a good thing?

Although we are busy trying to feed the masses, we, and our microbes, are dying to eat. Glyphosates alter the microbiome and promote the gram-negative bacteria’s release of inflammation-generating toxins. Gram-negative bacteria are disease-generating and can be difficult to control; they have cell walls that are structurally different from gram-positive bacteria, which increase their resistance to the immune system’s response, multiple drugs, and antibiotics. This is one reason why the widespread use of pesticides is linked to chronic inflammation, obesity, and disease.9 The absorption of herbicides like Roundup® is undeniable.10

Toxins and the Microbiome

Toxic bucket. We all have one. You don’t even start with a clean one. At birth, you could have up to 200 environmental chemicals floating around your bloodstream. It’s not your fault. It has accumulated over generations before you. Generally, people don’t take much notice. They ignore the facts. Toxins are an inevitable part of life. They are a part of your interaction with the world. How do you digest them?

Toxins come from myriad sources:

• Pesticides, herbicides, and insecticides on our food
• Mold and mildew
• Chemicals from manufacturing plants and industrial farms in the air and waterways
• Exhaust from vehicles on the road and boats in the water
• Off-gassing from paints, plastics, and other chemicals we might inhale at work or home
• Heavy metals like lead, mercury, and cadmium sneak into our bodies, too. Do you store any food in lead crystal? Do you have mercury tooth fillings?
• Food sensitivities
• Alcohol consumption
• Dust, pollen, animal dander
• Food storage such as plastics, Teflon coating, and lead paint on dishes
• Household cleaners and laundry detergent, dryer sheets
• Personal care products with sodium laureth sulfate, triclosan, fragrance, perfume, BHA, BHT, coal tar dyes, DEA-related ingredients, dibutyl phthalate, formaldehyde- release preservatives, parabens, PEG compounds, petroleum, or siloxanes. Check out https://davidsuzuki.org/queen-of-green/dirty-dozen-cosmetic-chemicals-avoid/ for more information and support.

Emotional stress also builds chemical toxins up in your body. Have you had a major stressor such as abuse, trauma, job change, moving, death, divorce, or a natural disaster hit you in the last six months? Day to day, how do you digest the world around you? Do you find it “tough to swallow”? Do you have trouble finding the “gall” to make decisions? If we are not emotionally digesting our life, our digestive tract takes a direct hit.

I’ll bet you didn’t know there was plastic in your diet. One study examined the levels of plastic in human feces (poop) from people all over the world. What did they find? Higher levels of microplastics than found in the contaminated oceans. Do you store food in plastic? Use plastic wrap? Heat in the microwave in plastic? Leave a plastic water bottle in the hot car or freezer? Drink out of plastic cups? Styrofoam cups? Put a plastic lid on your to-go coffee or tea? Use those cute triangle teabags? Do you have a plastic dental retainer in your mouth? Yep. It’s all plastic. As it turns out, paper, glass, and stainless steel are safer bets for food storage.

Ingestion of plastics can not only come from food storage but also food itself. Discarded plastic waste enters waterways to the tune of eight million metric tons per year.11 Sad for our oceans. Sad for us, too: it comes back to haunt us through consumption of fish, mussels, and even through contamination of watersheds servicing local livestock farms. Regardless of the origin of your plastic exposure, it disrupts your microbiome.12

Plastics are known endocrine disrupters, meaning they mess with your hormones. They also contribute to nerve damage. There is a significant link observed between urine BPA (plastic) levels and both cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes.13

Plastic can contribute to gastrointestinal inflammation, changes in fat and energy metabolism, higher levels of oxidative stress, and less variety of healthy bacteria in the gut, which has been linked to inflammatory bowel disease.

Inflammation has a complex interrelated relationship with hormonal imbalance. A healthy diversity of the gut microbiota is required for the normal development of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) stress axis. When the microbiome is out of order, it contributes to irritability, anxiety, and stress.

What can you do to lessen the impact of toxins on your life?

There is no question we are swimming in a sea of toxins. The bigger questions are: (1) How can you reduce your toxic burden? and...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 23.2.2021
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Medizin / Pharmazie
• ISBN-10: 1-5445-1845-5 / 1544518455
• ISBN-13: 978-1-5445-1845-9 / 9781544518459