As most of you know by now, a major focus of my life for many years now has been chronic gut dysfunction as a cause of most degenerative diseases we see in America today. The underlying issue is the Western diet and lifestyle. In fact a study just released this week concludes that the “Western Diet” triggers a strong inflammatory response throughout the entire body just as though we were under attack from some evil bacteria or virus. Even more importantly the “Western Diet” was found to alter our genes long term producing an over reactive immune system long after the diet is changed to a healthier diet. This hyper reactive immune system sets us up for heart disease, dementia, diabetes, osteoporosis, and a host of other autoimmune diseases.
The “Western Diet” is now a thing like the Mediterranean Diet or a Vegetarian diet. It is characterized by the over consumption of sugar, vegetable oils, refined starches, factory farmed meats, and food chemicals used to make foods more shelf stable and appealing. It generally entails a lack of fresh vegetables and low levels of food fibers. In practical terms we are talking about pizza, burgers, fries or chips, and a soda. Throw in some cheese, doughnuts, bacon, and chocolate chip cookies and you have a complete diet.
Well the body can only tolerate this kind of eating for so long before it complains and starts failing in so many ways. Each individual has different weaknesses that will be targeted first, but the most common first target of choice is the gut lining. This is because it is the first point of contact for this abusive food program. The gut has a surface area the size of two tennis courts and it is only one cell thick – half the thickness of a human hair. It has to let in all the nutrition we need to survive while keeping out massive amounts of poisons, toxic foods, and negative bacteria. It does this through velcro like connections between each of the gut lining cells that are designed to open and close to let through only the right stuff and keep out all the bad stuff.
But what happens if that velcro is destroyed? Then everything gets through and our immune system goes crazy thinking we are being invaded. This is Leaky Gut Syndrome, and the consequences of the wrong things getting through our gut wall are all the kinds of diseases I mentioned earlier.
So what can we do about it?
A few years back the state-of-the-art approach to this problem was to supply the gut cells with the specialized nutrition they needed to heal themselves. The special nutrient discovered for this job was the amino acid l-glutamine. These cells actually used the l-glutamine as an energy source for tissue repair. Gut repair products emphasized this, plus more traditional herbal products for taming gut inflammation like aloe vera, ginger, slippery elm, and licorice.
Then came the age of probiotics with ever increasing millions and billions of good guy bacteria of one to twenty various strains. The idea was good but not very effective as even the most potent blend amounted to less than one tenth of one percent the number of gut bacteria already present. Prebiotics were found to be much more effective as the specific food you feed the bacteria controls just which bacteria can grow. Each family of bacteria eats different things. This was good as we came to understand that the foods in the Western Diet specifically feed the worst kinds of gut bacteria, while other diets feed healthier bacteria.
This helped, but this still didn’t solve people’s leaky guts. They were still living with systemic inflammation caused but the inflow of toxic products into the blood stream from the gut leakage. The whole bacterial realm kept getting more and more complex as more research was done. Eventually it was found that health related more to having huge gut bacterial diversity. Health is having a richly complex diverse ecosystem of gut bacteria, fungi, and viruses. Poor health was found to relate to having fewer varieties of gut bacteria. The Western obsession with sanitation and sterile environments had turned out to be the worst choice for health. Our war on bugs was killing us.
Recently I became acquainted with colostrum as a miracle substance for healing leaky gut. It is in fact the only substance that can actually make the medical claim to heal leaky gut based on over 500 studies. I take it now every morning and every evening. Colostrum is literally borrowing a healthier immune system to help calm the inflammation down. I am still impressed with it. I also still take the earlier nutrients and herbals for gut health and take the prebiotics to support the growth of the good bacteria. But a couple weeks ago my brother, who directs the clinic for Western States Chiropractic College, turned me on to another amazing gut repair substance – Restore.
What if there was a substance that could tighten up those damaged velcro connections between the gut cells instantly? That would be fabulous. We could stop the leakage of all those toxic substances into the body that are triggering all that destructive inflammation.
In our world everything that happens comes about through verbal and visual communication. Well, in the cellular world the communication system that makes everything happen is chemical. Chemical messages sent from one cell to another controls every function in our body. Restore is a bottle full of these chemical messages called redox signaling messengers. It is extracted from a soup of these messengers created by bacteria living in peat bogs millions of years ago. The messengers are extracted and reactivated and they tell our body to reattach those velcro “zippers” between the cells and zip them up until just the right things come along.
Lab tests with gut cell linings that were damaged by various substances would show the poor connections between the cells by demonstrating very poor conductivity across the membranes. Applying Restore immediately restored normal healthy conductivity showing the cells had once again reconnected. Under the microscopes this was indeed confirmed. The negative effects of the toxic substances that previously opened the cell spaces was blocked by the Restore.
This is exciting stuff, even if it is a bit technical. But through this investigation I discovered the probable reason why healing leaky gut has been so difficult. That problem is glyphosate – the active ingredient in Roundup weed killer. When researchers were studying what chemicals caused the most damage to the gut lining, glyphosate came up on top. The problem is that this stuff is everywhere – in our water, on our food, even in our rain. Trillions of pounds of this stuff is being sprayed on our crops every year. It is manufactured all over the world now by many companies as its patent has expired. Because it is water soluble and a very small molecule, it is carried up into the clouds as water on our fields evaporates. No matter where you are in the world, you are being exposed to this gut destroying chemical. There is a lot you can do to decrease your exposure, but you can’t eliminate it any longer.
I thought that by avoiding gluten and casein I could stop the destruction of my gut and heal the leaks. Well now I know that things are just not that simple. I am excited now because Restore has demonstrated that it can stop the effects of glyphosate, but the Restore chemical messengers pass through the gut with the bowel contents. That is why I now take a teaspoon of it three times a day. I want my gut protected 24 hours a day. The constant onslaught of the glyphosate explains to me why this gut healing has been such an uphill battle.
I contacted the company that created Restore to become a practitioner distributor for the product, and should have some in the office by the time this newsletter comes out. If you are fighting any sort of chronic disease, I urge you to look to your gut for the first line of defense against these type of diseases.