Clean: The Revolutionary Program to Restore the Body's Natural Ability to Heal Itself (13 page)

As I looked for answers and solutions to my own health issues, my journey also changed me from Western-trained specialist to openminded doctor. As I started studying other traditions of healing, one concept kept cropping up in many of them: health and disease start in the intestines. This concept, which initially I did not understand, held the key that unlocked the answer I was looking for. Hidden, just like roots, our intestines absorb nutrients from food, our soil. Intestinal health plays a huge role in whether we get well-nourished. Toxicity, depression, irritable bowel syndrome, nutrient depletion, mucus, acidity, serotonin production—all these loose pieces of the puzzle became connected in a multilevel matrix that answered my questions about how and why.

Most people underestimate the importance of intestinal health. Other organs, such as the heart (the “king of the organs”), tend to get center stage. Yet as I learned, information on this system proved to be the missing link between my irritable bowel syndrome and my depression.

The human gut is similar to the root of a plant: both are hidden, both absorb water and nutrients, and when sick, both can show symptoms on organs far away, like the leaves and branches or the skin and hair. But hidden in this root is one of the most important systems for human life: a high-precision machine with abilities and functions that not only allow us to obtain the building blocks and chemicals that will make our bodies, but also detect who to trust in life. A machine so delicate, it needs a very specific set of conditions for balanced function. Nature is the designer of the machine and also provided the perfect conditions. When we departed from the ways of nature, the conditions for optimal gut function deteriorated. When the intestines are in distress, nutrient deficiencies are likely. But also your intuition may suffer. Your “gut feelings” may get confused. Your seasonal allergies may come back with a vengeance. You may gain weight despite “not eating,” get depressed, or get constipated. You may start to react to foods that you never reacted to before. Every single organ or function in the body has a direct link to the intestines.

Toxicity often affects the gut before any other organ. The gut, as I refer to it here, is not a single organ. It is a system that performs important, diverse, and almost magical functions. A short description of the four major constituents of the gut system will help you understand how it can be the root of the problem for totally different diseases.

The Intestinal Flora

The silent heroes of health, the beneficial bacteria that live in our intestines are so important that some healing traditions call them the “invisible organ.” They may live far out of sight, but they are essential to the maintenance of intestinal integrity. A healthy intestine contains about two pounds of helpful bacteria. Like our inner rain forest, the intestines host a thriving mass of tiny microorganisms. These guests occupy prime real estate, cozy within the folds of the intestinal mucosa, our first skin. The rent is high, and they pay it in hard labor. They help with digestion, enabling essential nutrients to be absorbed that otherwise would have not been able to cross the intestinal wall into the circulatory system. The depletion of healthy intestinal flora guarantees nutrient depletion and its consequence, system malfunction. They also protect us from infections. They take up all the real estate on the intestinal walls so that other organisms, such as pathogenic flora (disease-causing bacteria), viruses, and parasites literally cannot get a foothold. From their prime location on the intestinal wall, the beneficial flora functions as the first filter for toxins, neutralizing about a quarter of them before they get inside the bloodstream. And their presence speeds up transit time of toxic waste in the colon (feces) so it doesn’t sit there too long, which would let toxins get reabsorbed into the bloodstream.

There are always a few bad or pathogenic bacteria in this mix—it’s inevitable. But modern living has altered this balance in almost everyone. Toxic chemicals, medications, and especially antibiotics—medicine designed specifically to kill “biota,” or tiny life-forms—wipe out the good flora over time. Alcohol and stress contribute. The pathogenic or disease-causing microbes, resistant to the chemical mix that killed the good ones, find a way to survive and take over, a situation called dysbiosis. Yeasts are one of the organisms that overgrow the first chance they get. They thrive on the sweet foods and dairy products we eat and expel their waste, a toxic emission that makes us bloated, gassy, and irritated. Dysbiosis affects everyone to some extent—even those who eat whole foods and take probiotics, because we are all exposed to toxicity.

Many studies show the importance of good intestinal flora for all aspects of health. Mothers who take probiotics give birth to children who don’t get sick and years later even do better in school. Athletes with healthy intestinal flora recover faster from injury. Meanwhile, taking antibiotics as a kid correlates significantly with having all kinds of diseases later on. In the toxicity story, this is such an important player that to embark on detox without restoring the good bacteria and removing the bad is almost pointless. Rebuilding, reinoculating, and restoring the intestinal flora will be an integral part of your Clean program.

Ironically, when I prescribe probiotics, other cardiologists look at me, puzzled. None of the hospitals I have worked in during my career had a useful stock of them, nor did I ever see them prescribed in other departments, although hospitals are arguably where they’re needed the most. Even gastroenterologists, those who specialize in digestive organs, are only now looking at probiotics as a way to help their patients. Barely a thought is given to the condition of the animal population of the “inner forest.”

New medical-grade probiotic brands are being developed by the pharmaceutical industry, targeted toward those with bloating, constipation, and irritable bowel syndrome. Even though it is a step in the right direction, the probiotics are still made and marketed by those with the same mind-set used with traditional drugs—as a magic-bullet cure to a complex problem. Their marketing suggests that damaged intestinal flora can be fixed with a probiotic product alone—no dietary changes or detox program is advised or even mentioned as helpful. This “one-stop shopping” approach is appealing, because it suggests we don’t have to sacrifice anything to regain health. But it’s counterproductive. Only when you eliminate the foods that feed the pathogenic bacteria, use natural antimicrobial foods or supplements to scare them off, and provide live bacteria of the right strains and in the right number can you truly rebuild the intestinal flora successfully. Taking a pharmaceutical probiotic while continuing to drink coffee and eat doughnuts is like throwing a Tic Tac at a charging elephant.

The intestinal flora also helps with the in-house training of the body’s inner Department of Homeland Security. Because our intestinal first skin is the border with the most foreign visitors, which are all trying to get in, the immune system has built many military bases on the intestinal wall itself, with periscopes looking into the intestinal tube, where the good bacteria are fighting their battles and completing their work. The good bacteria, by teasing them, keep the guards alert enough to recognize any real threats, but not so much that they generate a state of alert, which would start recruiting all the services of the immune army all throughout the body. Around the intestinal tube, there are so many immune-system operation camps that all together they make up to 80 percent of the total immune system in the body. Gut-associated lymphatic tissue, or GALT, is the name it goes by. My prediction is that we will find many more functions performed by the GALT once researchers become interested.

ANTIBIOTIC OVERLOAD

Science has done a great job of studying toxic bacteria that cause disease. It has succeeded in developing powerful weapons to kill them—antibiotics—which have saved many lives. But it has ignored the fact that killing the bad bacteria also kills the good flora that we need to thrive. The indiscriminate use of antibiotics has obliterated intestinal flora and contributed to everything from malnutrition and depression to infections by decimating this first line of defense. Now, the mutation of a number of these bad bacteria into dangerous and disease-causing superbugs, like the “hospital superbug” MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus), which is killing patients in the very place they come to get healed, is a result of the overuse of antibiotics.

The Intestinal Wall

To get inside the body, inside the circulatory system, the bloodstream, anything foreign has to pass a border, a barrier that separates the inside of the body from the outside. The first skin, whether facing out (skin) or facing in (intestinal wall), needs to be intact to serve its protective purpose, that of filtering what gets inside. Whatever makes it to the inside must be chosen and transported on purpose (absorption) by the intestinal-wall cells themselves, the “bricks” of the wall. In a healthy intestine, the wall is smooth, with no cracks between the bricks. They have what are called “tight junctions.” Such “tightness” is seen clearly under the microscope, and it serves an important purpose, to let nothing unwanted in.

The following is a simple way to think about a complex subject. Our body is designed to protect its inside from anything that doesn’t belong there, anything foreign. For this purpose, there is a full army with different battalions and a host of weapons. One of the most delicate aspects of its intricate operation is the accurate identification of “self” and “foreign.” Everything alive is made of the three basic bricks, carbohydrates, proteins, and fats (and a few other things such as water, metals, minerals, and salts). These in turn are made of amino acids (protein), carbon and water (carbohydrates), and fatty acids (fats). The whole universe is like a Lego set. Just a few different types of individual pieces, when joined together in different numbers and different arrangements, make billions of things so different it’s hard to imagine that the building blocks are the same.

When we eat a piece of chicken, the digestive system gets to work. The job is to disassemble that chunk of chicken into its individual components. These are small enough to pass through the intestinal wall into the blood. Once in the blood, these components will not be stopped. It is impossible for the immune system’s secret police to know if an individual component comes from a chicken, a nut, or an energy bar. It will soon be used to build something, possibly muscle.

But when a clump of components that are still attached (incompletely digested) and big enough to be recognized as a piece of chicken makes it through the wall, the alarm is almost instant, and a “shock and awe” type of response is launched. One type of immune cell (lymphocyte) shoots a glue (antibodies) that tags the foreigner (antigen) and stuns it. Killer cells are recruited and on arrival attach themselves to the foreigner and release on it acid juices so corrosive that they dissolve everything on contact.

Toxicity is at the root of the chain of events that ends with a damaged intestinal wall, with holes, so that it is not impermeable anymore to chunks of food. This is called “leaky gut,” and the common set of symptoms and problems that result, the “leaky gut syndrome.” The first skin is constantly renewing itself, and any gaps, injury, or damage will be repaired by growing cells and connective tissue much faster than usual until it is fixed. The bricks used to build the intestinal wall are not so readily available to begin with (glutamine), but in an environment like the one that caused a leaky gut, chances are the wall will never be repaired. To create the right conditions for your intestines to be able to get the repair they need is why I designed the Clean program.

Gut-Associated Lymphatic Tissue (GALT)

One of the families of diseases most puzzling to the Western medical world is the autoimmune diseases. These are diseases in which the immune system attacks areas of the body itself, an act of self-destruction. How and why would a system that was designed solely to distinguish between “self” and “foreign” get so confused that it orders its army to open fire on itself?

When the beneficial intestinal flora is killed by a mix of antibiotics, preservatives, coffee, and alcohol, more aggressive, resistant, and damaging bacteria occupy its space. The GALT now mounts all types of responses (allergic, defense, inflammatory, repair), triggered by these toxic bacteria and the chemicals in food. But when the intestines leak identifiable undigested pieces, the immune system goes full force. Never in the evolution of the body did it experience such intense attack. It does not have a system in place to select its battles. Every undigested chunk will keep triggering a full army attack.

Imagine an army with soldiers who were trained for only one or two battles at a time. Suddenly millions of calls are arriving from different locations for different battles. Soldiers run in circles and end up shooting anything that resembles a chunk of food. If the chunk under attack is from the muscle of a chicken, it is possible that the soldiers will end up shooting the muscle of the body they are designed to defend, because chicken muscle and human muscle are similar. (This is an imaginary scenario—I don’t actually know of chicken muscle causing an immune attack on human muscle because of a leaky gut.)

What is not imaginary is that autoimmune diseases are on the rise. One of the earliest and most familiar autoimmune diseases is rheumatic fever. Strep in the throat generates a massive army deployment. Strep molecules have a surface similar to the surface of the valves in the heart, especially the mitral valve, and also to the large joints. The army mistakes the joints and heart valves for the strep and the fire is targeted at them. The joints recover, but the heart valve is damaged, scarred for life. Open-heart surgery for valve repair or replacement is often needed decades later.

Simply from exposure to the standard American diet, our GALT tends to live in a high state of alert, constantly initiating immune responses. This subtly steals energy from the body’s economy, which then has less energy available for healing, detoxification, and other important functions. This draining of energy reserves can be felt in many subtle ways including, obviously, daily tiredness.