This is not a topic most people want to think about – until you have to. So why am I thinking about it? One of Ellen’s clients was visiting Europe when she was struck with this common traveler’s condition. She texted Ellen and asked what to do. She was planning to fast for a day to stop it, which would work to limit the symptoms. But my advice to Ellen to pass along was that it wouldn’t really solve the problem.
Most of the time diarrhea is caused by a bacterial or viral infection of the colon. This is particularly true for the types that like to hit folks when they are traveling. Other possible causes are eating too many polyol sugar substitutes – such as sorbitol, mannitol, xylitol, but not erythritol. Eating foods you are not able to digest well can also trigger diarrhea. This might mean foods that are simply over cooked or that have too much food coloring in them, both which block proper digestion. It could mean you have simply eaten too much for your system to handle. Some people react to this with a dumping syndrome while other people will do just the opposite.
The other common reason for a spontaneous bout of diarrhea is that you have eaten something poisonous. Your stomach says “yuck, get this stuff out of here.” This might mean it contains actual poison like pesticides, or it might mean it is just poisonous to you, like in allergy or food sensitivity. Many foods contain plant poisons called lectins that the plant creates to discourage insects and mold from attacking them. These plant poisons are usually concentrated around the seeds of the plant. This is why so many people have issues with eating grains – a completely separate issue from gluten sensitivity. This also becomes a concern for eating legumes (beans), and the fruit part of vegetables (like tomatoes or peppers.) Eating something super spicy may irritate the bowel and trigger the dumping response. Understand that in these situations diarrhea is a healthy defense mechanism your body is employing to help you flush something nasty out of your system.
What I am not talking about today is diarrhea caused by an actual disease of the colon, like Crohn’s disease or Irritable Bowel. This produces a chronic loose bowel concern, not the sudden unexpected bout of diarrhea. However the remedy I will discuss may work well for these folks as well.
Being a natural health practitioner, my goal in these situations is to support the body in returning back to homeostasis – metabolic balance; what patients think of as back to normal. The key difference between “normal” and balance is balance is all about healthy while“normal” for most people is simply about suppressing the symptom. Unfortunately suppressing symptoms is usually accomplished by inhibiting the normal functioning of some part of the body, usually by poisoning that body part with a drug. A perfect example of this is the high blood pressure drugs. Most of them work by poisoning the heart so that it can’t work as well. The idea is that if the heart can’t work well, then it can’t pump as hard and that will lower the blood pressure. This is true, but at what cost? You don’t want to blow out a blood vessel and have a stroke, but do you really want to poison your heart to stop this? The drugs do nothing to address the actual cause of the high blood pressure. The docs usually never even figure out the cause.
My interest is in addressing the cause when it can be found. This makes treatment all about playing detective trying to solve the mystery. Trying different remedies is often a part of the diagnostic process. You might be able to narrow down the possible causes and then try one remedy or another to narrow down the possibilities even further. Sometimes we get lucky and nail the remedy the first time. If not, then the trial helps eliminate one possibility.
OK, so what did I suggest to the client in Europe with the bowel distress? Since bacteria or virus is the most common cause and she did not have a medical doctor available to her, some antibiotic was not an easy choice. Plus, she did not want to use antibiotics anyway. She was partially on the right tract with her suggestion of fasting. Fasting would starve out the bacteria as well as reduce the substrates any virus might be using to replicate itself. This works temporarily as long as the bacteria is not actually attacking the gut lining and eating that tissue. If that happens blood usually appears in the stool and that would be a sign to find a hospital and get on some serious intervention. She did not report any blood. The limitation to fasting is that the bacteria are still there when you start eating again – they just stop growing and wait for more food to come along.
The approach I suggested was instead to feed the gut with foods that specifically support good guy bacteria and eliminate any foods that support the bad guy bacteria. The idea is to crowd out the bad guys with good guys. Our guts are in a constant state of real estate turf war. There is only so much room to plant an anchor to hold on and not get flushed away in the normal movement of the bowel. The very act of good guys planting anchors increases the populations of immune cells just under the gut lining cells. These immune cells reach out between the gut cells and snatch, then digest bad guy bacteria. When a lot of bad guys get a foot hold on the gut wall, they inhibit these immune cells.
So, starving the bad guys and feeding the good guys was the approach I suggested. The bad guys like sugars and undigested proteins while the good guys like soluble fibers and very complex carbohydrates. So I told her to eat soluble fibers like those in cooked plant leaves and stems as well as green bananas, avocado, Jicama, and chilled boiled potato. When you refrigerate boiled potatoes overnight, the starch in the potato gelatinzes forming a soluble fiber. Green bananas – green to the point that there is not really any sweetness to the flesh, but you can still get the peel off, is very high in soluble fiber. These foods will build up the good guy bacteria. We also want to use insoluble fibers to act as a broom to scrape away the bad guy bacteria. For this I suggested psyllium seed powder – Metamucil.
The client texted Ellen back the next day to tell her that my suggestion was a big success; things were back to normal. We got lucky in that the approach I chose fitted what was actually happening to her. I eliminated the intake of anything irritating or poisonous and increased the intake of foods that would alter her gut biome. Many studies have shown that you can completely change the populations of bacteria in the gut within 24 hours by changing the diet. This is what we did. I have used this protocol to help folks with IBS and Crohn’s and it helps quite a lot with their symptoms. It is not a solution for them as they have other disease concerns to deal with that are the actual cause behind their condition. But any help is better than none.
Some time ago I formulated a mixture of soluble fibers just for this purpose – my Gut Healer formula. Obviously we could not get this to Ellen’s client immediately, so we went with foods that would provide the fibers needed. These fibers should be a normal part of everyone’s diet on a daily basis. This is part of why it is important to eat your vegetables.