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The two most important contributors to health are diet and gut flora. All of the other contributors, such as exercise, genetics, environmental toxins, hygiene, etc. are of minor importance. A healthy diet, such as The Anti-Inflammatory Diet that I recommend on this blog, is simple and relatively easy to follow after weaning from the Standard American Diet. One version of the healthy diet is just eating meat, fish, eggs, dairy and plenty of vegetables, but avoiding vegetable oils and grains. Most people will be healthy with that general diet, but if and only if, they also have a healthy gut flora that is adapted to the food they eat.
Most people make themselves sick by not matching their gut bacteria to what they eat, so let me repeat the main point of this article:
You will get sick if the bacteria in your colon can’t digest your food.
And sick means allergies, autoimmunity, cancer, etc.
Read and Heed or Dead
What Killed American Gut Flora?
There are hundreds of different species of bacteria growing on partially digested food (soluble fiber) in your colon. Americans are sick, not because they are too poor to buy food, but because they have the worst, i.e. least diverse, gut flora in the world.
Do: We pick up, recruit, eat new bacteria and repair our gut flora by:
- touching surfaces, people, pets, etc. and putting our fingers near our mouths,
- eating live fermented food, or semi-clean vegetables,
- not cooking/killing/sanitizing all of the bacteria around us,
- eating probiotics and transferring some of their genes to our gut flora.
Don’t: We wipe out or reduce the diversity of our gut flora by:
- using inappropriate hygiene that kills the bacteria we need for health,
- taking antibiotics that kill gut flora and compromise our immune system,
- trying to eat a wide variety of foods, which is counterproductive and only permits a few varieties of bacteria to survive.
Hygiene Kills Beneficial Bacteria
Nothing comes from nothing… For bacteria to come out, bacteria must go in. You have to eat bacteria to extrude them by the pound. Each day a single bacterium growing and dividing in your gut once per hour will produce a million daughter bacteria (24 doublings, estimate that doubling two, ten times is about a thousand, and 1000X1000= million.) So if you mixed a milligram (about the size of the period at the end of this sentence) of gut bacteria with ample food, you would have a kilogram (pounds) of bacteria by the end of the day. Similarly, it takes about a day for a single bacterium applied to a petri dish of nutrient agar to produce a colony weighing about 10 milligrams. The point here, is that a single bacterium that makes it through the acid bath of the stomach can be a major player in your colon in a couple of days. This is a very good thing. We want to kiss babies, because babies systematically vacuum up bacteria from the darkest of corners and with shameless generosity present them in an irresistible pucker. We need those bacteria, and so do the babies. Hygiene, e.g. antibacterial hand soap, bleaching surfaces or closing toilet lids isolates people from potential sources of beneficial gut bacteria.
Traditional Food is Fermented (with Live Bacteria) |
| Shockey |
In most cultures, extra food is mixed with something like salt or spices to kill local problem microbes and then bacteria are permitted to grow. The result is fermentation of the sugars available in the food with production of organic acids, e.g. vinegar, that stop the growth of other bacteria that might grow on protein and cause objectionable flavors. Homemade fermented veggies contain a wide variety of happenstantial bacteria that can adapt to productive gut growth.
Cooking Kills
We cook to dissolve and soften foods. Meat can be eaten whole and our stomach enzymes will easily digest the protein and fat to provide all of our nutritional needs. The only plant material that can be digested by our enzymes is starch. The rest of the plant requires cooking to make the protein available and the remaining carbohydrates, soluble fiber, require digestion by hundreds of different enzymes produced only by microorganisms. Cooking will release soluble fiber to feed gut flora, but it also kills bacteria, so some raw foods must be eaten to make sure that the gut is always supplied with fresh bacterial recruits. Cooked or pasteurized foods do not contain live bacteria and are not useful as sources to repair gut flora.
Probiotics are not Gut Flora
Commercial probiotics are made from bacteria used in dairy products (dairy probiotics) or bacteria used to make enzymes in other products, such as laundry detergents.
These bacteria can be repackaged and sold as probiotics, because they have already been tested for toxicity. These bacteria don’t normally grow in the gut and if you swallow them, they just pass through. These “probiotics” can temporarily provide some of the functions of gut flora, because they are bacteria, but they don’t grow in the gut.
Gut Flora are Bacteria Created in the Gut
Gut bacteria produce chemical signals that coordinate the metabolism of food by hundreds of different species of bacteria. We call these chemical signals vitamins, because humans extract the vitamins from the bacterial biofilms that always line the gut, so humans don’t need to produce their own vitamins. Gut flora can produce all of the vitamins that we need, so it is not surprising that multivitamins do not provide any health benefit and concentrated vitamins my be harmful by disrupting normal metabolism of gut flora. Biofilms also promote the exchange of genes between different species of bacteria, so the concept of species does not actually apply to gut flora, where new species are rapidly being created. A common example of this process is the curing of lactose intolerance by simply eating small amounts of live yogurt for a couple of weeks. The cure results from the transfer of a gene that produces an enzyme to digest lactose from the yogurt probiotic bacteria to the regular gut bacteria. The new species, a natural GMO, continues to grow in the gut, digest lactose, and cure lactose intolerance. The yogurt probiotics just get flushed away and that is why dairy probiotics must be eaten continuously to provide some of the benefits of healthy gut flora.
Antibiotics Kill Gut Flora, Compromise the Immune System and Cause Disease
Antibiotics are a huge benefit in curing and avoiding infectious disease. Unfortunately, antibiotics can cause lasting damage by killing beneficial species of bacteria of the gut flora. Loss of essential bacteria is commonly seen as food intolerances (true food allergies are rare) or constipation. Since gut flora are needed for development of both the aggressive and suppressive parts of the immune system, which occurs in the lining of the gut, then antibiotics slowly lead to loss of function of the immune system that leads to autoimmunity or allergies. Probiotics typically administered following antibiotic treatments do not repair the gut flora and leave the immune system damaged and prone to autoimmune diseases and allergies.
Variety in Foods Leads to Loss of Diversity in Gut Flora
It may be more entertaining to eat a new cuisine at each meal, but it confuses your gut flora. Your gut is a river that endlessly moves food from mouth portal to pottie. Bacteria divide and eddies cast some of the bacteria back to mix with food upstream before inevitably moving with the masses down and out. Bacteria that don’t multiply as quickly as others eventually become extinct. Bacteria that grow well on broccoli may wither with onions. If you continue to eat some broccoli and some onions, then your gut flora will adapt, but if the type of polysaccharides, the soluble fiber, changes continuously, then you will end up with the stunted gut flora of Americans. Diversity of gut flora is reduced by too much variety in food.
Matching Food to Gut Flora Takes Time
All of the gut problems that people complain about, gas, bloating, diarrhea, constipation, food intolerances/allergies (except gluten and a couple of others), etc. are due to a mismatch between food and the digestive enzymes of gut flora. Modern food processing retains protein, fat and starch and removes the polysaccharides/soluble fiber that reaches the colon, feeds gut bacteria and produces short chain fatty acids (acetic acid, butyric acid, propionic acid) that feed the colon and reduce inflammation. It takes time for gut bacteria to adapt to new soluble fiber in new foods by recruiting or creating new bacteria, and this is only possible, if inappropriate hygiene is avoided or if homemade fermented foods are eaten.