How your gut affects the environment: personal environmentalism

In my post, “Do you have the guts to get healthy,” I discussed the overall importance of gut function from a 10,000-foot view. Now, I’d like to come a bit little closer to earth and discuss how gut function impacts you. Let’s start by stating an obvious anatomical fact: Your gut (from your mouth to the other side) is technically the outside of your body, much like your skin is the outside of your body. Therefore, anything that comes into contact with the outside of your body, your skin, and your gut may be absorbed into your bloodstream and affect your internal environment.

Now, some of you might be thinking, “So what? I eat what I’ve always eaten, and I shower every day, and therefore, I’m clean.” Others might be thinking, “Uh-oh, I am in trouble.”

I can’t tell you how frustrating it is when I ask my children what they are learning in health education classes in school and they tell me they learn about cigarette smoking, tobacco use, alcohol, and drug abuse. Really, staying healthy is about not smoking, drinking, or doing drugs? Is this all we are striving for?

The classroom of the future will need to start teaching gut health as it relates to the environment in multi-semester course work that begins in elementary school and continues throughout high school and beyond. This will result in the most dramatic decrease in health care costs and an increase in academic success and, in my opinion, overall happiness for individuals.

I envision a world where children from very early ages recognize that they are born with an innate genetic drive toward health. You are genetically designed to express health, not genetically designed to get diabetes, heart disease, or cancer. This is not an opinion; it is fact. The principles of evolution dictate that the genetic pool gets better over time, not worse. Yes, there are genetic disorders, such as cystic fibrosis and Down syndrome, but they are very rare. The overwhelming majority of us are born with the genetics of survival that have evolved over the history of this planet.

Our children have been taught in recent decades to recognize that our shared environment (the water we drink, the air we breathe, the soil we till) is very important to our health and well-being and that generations to come will be impacted by how we treat this shared environment, the earth. We now need to recognize that we have a personal environment, and it is equally important and in need of immediate attention. Our personal environment is dictated by our own choices and behaviors.

Your personal environment is the interface between what we put into our body in the form of food and our bloodstream. This interface between our internal environment (blood, organs, tissues, and glands) and the external environment (food) resides in our gut.

The personal environment is also the interface between what is on our skin and our bloodstream and the interface between the air we breathe and the bloodstream. And this interface resides in our lungs. All three — gut, lungs, and skin — are very important. I place particular importance in this post on the gut.

The small intestine is where we absorb the nutrition from our food. The cells of the small intestine have little fingerlike projections that dramatically increase the surface area the small intestinal cells have to interact with and absorb nutrition from the food we eat. If you think about it, the gut is the outside of your body, from your lips to the other side.

The small intestine is where most of the interaction occurs between your bloodstream and your food. If you were to roll your small intestine out flat to reveal its entire surface area in one dimension, it would be the size of a tennis court. That is a lot of space to interact with your bloodstream. Since food has many components we need to enter our bloodstream, we also recognize that food has many things we’d like to keep out of our bloodstream, such as unhealthy bacteria, undigested proteins, unwanted parasites, viruses, etc. This requires the gut to have a very extensive immune or protection system to only allow what we need and desire to enter the bloodstream and the rest to be passed along and eliminated.

It is estimated that 80 percent of our entire immune system resides in our gut. The gut is a very active place. Think about it as being like an airport where there is a lot of security (immune system) and plenty of people are passing through (food). The security has to be efficient every day to be successful.

It is no wonder that gut dysfunction leads to immune system disorders, the most common being autoimmunity when the immune system works against and attacks you. Autoimmunity, as a class of diseases, far exceeds all other chronic diseases combined. Autoimmunity exceeds cancer, heart disease, diabetes, stroke, car accidents, and HIV all put together. There are 80 to 100 known autoimmune conditions. Many autoimmune diseases are severe, such as MS, ALS, type 1 diabetes, among others, and many are relatively benign or merely a cosmetic challenge, like vitiligo. We know autoimmunity is very common in the industrialized world and statistically insignificant among non-industrialized countries and indigenous cultures, leading us to conclude that the environment plays a primary role regardless of one’s genetic propensity.

The gut is a very metabolically active part of the body. That means the cells use a lot of energy and experience a lot of wear and tear. All cells in the body have to replace themselves, and some organ systems replace themselves faster than others. For example, all of the cells that make up our bones will replace themselves at least once every 14 months. Our red blood cells have to be replaced every 120 days (almost to the day). We will go through 400 pounds of skin in the shower during our lifetime. Our gut cells replace themselves very rapidly, every 90 days, because of their high rate of activity and work to digest food and protect us. Forty percent of what we eliminate every day in our stool are dead and discarded intestinal cells.

It is safe to say that a healthy gut is one that replaces cells at an equal or greater rate than it discards. It is also safe to say that this rate of repair and rate of destruction is determined by how healthy our personal environment is. This repair process is mediated by the immune system.

• Our personal environment in our gut is dictated by what we choose to eat:
  • Does the food we eat have the essential nutrients our bodies need?
  • Does the food have harmful chemicals in the form of preservatives, dyes, pesticides, etc.?
  • Are the foods present in our gut in a state we can recognize as being food? Some food is processed to the point that our immune system (security system) sees it as being foreign, which causes the immune system to mount a defense. Think about some of the ingredients on packages that are very difficult to pronounce. Think about the new proteins in our genetically modified foods (GMOs). If that food is present regularly, the defense will be chronic, resulting in chronic inflammation.
  • All the foods we eat should be genetically appropriate for the human animal to eat. There is a strong argument that the human genome evolved over millions of years without consuming certain grains, dairy (milk of another species), and legumes, and their dominance in our diet today (especially in a highly processed state) is considered genetically inappropriate.

• Our personal environment (gut, skin) is dictated by the presence of microorganisms such as bacteria, archaea, and parasites. It is believed that the number of bacteria in our gut should outnumber the total cells in our body by a factor of 10.
  • Here is a mind-blower: 90 percent of the genetic material in our body does not belong to us. So much attention is paid to our genes; what about the genes that make up 90 percent of our cells, that account for 70+ percent of our immune function? This collectively is called the microbiome.
  • The microbiome is not only protection from the outside world; it is also a communication entity between our nervous system and hormonal system. This is an incredibly complex system that is best treated by allowing it to thrive. That means asking questions about what kind of foods are best suited to feed the microbiome as well as what kind of foods are harmful to the microbiome.
  • Diseases like autism and many psychiatric disorders are linked to the gut microbiome: The Brain Gut Connection.
  • Antibiotic treatment has a devastating effect on the microbiome.

An unhealthy personal environment will lead to an unhealthy microbiome and resultant damaging inflammation, possible or probable autoimmune disease, genetic polymorphisms, and poor general and mental health. These processes can occur symptom free for years before it is evident that a problem exists. The solution will not be as simplistic as medications to make inflammation go down.

Thanks for reading!

 

Do you think you have signs of inflammation? Share some questions or comments below. I’d love to talk with you more.