Happy Healthy Gut (6 page)

Foods that Reduce Inflammation

1. Vegetables. Raw veggies are full of living enzymes that your gut adores. Your tummy goes all drooly and ga-ga for raw veggies. Feed the beast!
   
2. Water. Water is key to reducing inflammation. What’s the first thing you want to do in the height of summer, after spending all day outside getting red and swollen? Take a cold shower! If you can see the anti-inflammatory results from water on the outside, imagine what is happening when you drink it on the inside. Water equals awesomeness!
   
3. Spices. Spices like ginger, turmeric, and cinnamon are naturally anti-inflammatory foods. They have strong flavors to entice us to ingest them, so get on it!
   
4. Omega-3s. Anything containing naturally high levels of this essential fatty acid, such as nuts, nut butters, algae, seeds, olives, and avocados, is key to good health. This is really great news for me, because I love olives! (Especially when they’re stuffed with garlic.) On a western diet, we get way too many
   omega 6 fatty acids. This creates an uneven fatty acid ratio, which ideally should be 1:1. Eating more omega-3s will help to regain this ratio, and so will eating foods in their whole form.
   
5. Green tea. This oldie but goodie is known for its anti-inflammatory properties and antioxidant loveliness. Drink up some green love!
   

Foods that Inflame

The following foods are a western diet junkie’s dream, but are very bad for causing inflammation:

1. Sugar. This highly addictive substance is the number one inflammatory food. It’s bad, and the more refined, the worse it makes you feel. If you don’t believe me, try eliminating all sugar from your diet for two weeks. I’ll bet you get super grumpy, lethargic, and headachy throughout the duration of week one. In your second week you will feel great. Then, when you board the crazy sugar train again at the end of the fourteen days, you will really experience sugar’s wrath. It’s addictive, manipulative, and messes with your body from the inside out. Blech!
   
2. Alcohol. (One of the reasons people look so puffy after a bender, along with fluid retention.) Alcohol breaks down into pure sugar, so just go ahead and read the sugar rant again.
   
3. Refined grains. White rice, white bread, and white pasta are just more examples of highly refined, crappy sugar.
   
4. Dairy products. Because dairy was never meant to be consumed by humans, but we all seem to think it’s a health food and consume a lot of it, it really has its way with us. Like sugar, it’s addictive. Why? Because it has a lot of sugar in it! (“
   ose
   ” at the end of a word indicates sugar, like fructose, glucose, sucrose and, you guessed it, lactose!)
   
5. Trans-fats.
   These are found in foods such as margarine and fast food. Trans-fats are weird. They are a liquid-turned-solid that never really break down and are completely preserved and last forever on the floor of your garage. True story.
   

These foods are not only incredibly inflammatory; they are also devoid of nutrients. There is no point to eat them ever. They should be moved to your naughty list, stat. By eating the foods in the first list, and skipping the foods on the last list, you will be able to feel an almost immediate transformation within your newly, cooled-off body. Within a week, you will look and feel less bloated, retain less water, your eyes will appear less puffy, and you will probably lose a few pounds, too. Yippee!

Nowadays, you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who doesn’t live with some sort of food sensitivity. I say “nowadays” because I, along with many others, genuinely believe that this problem was not as prevalent in the past as it is today.
⁶¹
With the way we currently process food, and routinely add chemical cocktails to enhance it for the ultimate purpose of generating more money, food sensitivities are now inevitable. I almost guarantee that you have heard someone from the baby-boomer generation comment that “no one was allergic to peanuts in
my
day.” I’m not saying that nut allergies are new, but they are definitely more mainstream. So are wheat, gluten, dairy, seafood, corn, and soy. And egg. And food coloring. And . . .

Let me explain. Because of the western world’s incredible obsession with convenience, we have inevitably begun to eat some of the same foods several times a day in ways we are often unaware of. We are constantly inundated with wheat, corn, soy, sugar, salt, and casein products, as well as a wide variety of chemicals such as MSG (monosodium glutamate), food coloring, and artificial flavoring. These ingredients are present in almost everything processed, and
because we consume so much of them, and they come to us in such overly processed forms, our digestive system eventually decides that it has had enough, and so challenges our immune system to a duel. En garde!

This is especially true for those of us who already have a slight sensitivity to one or more of these ingredients. We can only expect our digestive systems to take on so much, and after that, we feel the refusal. For example, I can abstain from cheese for a month and feel great, and I can eat a little bit here and there without feeling the negative effects, but if I decide one night to chow down on an entire wheel of brie with my beloved olives (something that I have unfortunately done
several
times), I always pay for it. It’s like my body grudgingly will process bit by bit until I overdo it, and then it shuts down and becomes terribly inflamed. I always regret it.

Cheese is my boyfriend that I know is bad for me in every single way, but I keep coming back for more despite the very predictable consequences. If I had a cheese therapist, she would tell me to break the cycle. You break it, too!

“Let food be thy medicine and thy medicine be thy food.”
⁶²

—Hippocrates, father of modern medicine

So many of us are living with food sensitivities like this and don’t know it; it’s hard to make the connection when pain is unpredictable and sometimes random. I personally only discovered my dairy issue when I cut out meat. Because the heaviness of meat was out of the picture, and my inflammation was greatly reduced, I was able to feel the other foods that made me feel bad, too. Wheat, dairy, and meat all make me feel swollen, bloated, and in pain. It sounds like a lot that I’ve had to remove from my life, but the difference in how I feel can only be described as amazing, and for me, it’s undeniably worth it. I also welcome other fabulous side-effects of this diet, such as
being able to stay at my desired weight effortlessly. For me, it’s just not worth it to eat the foods that make me feel bad. I love feeling good, and I sure as hell love feeling good in a bathing suit!

Besides the ones previously listed, foods high in acidity, such as tomatoes and animal meat, can trigger a sensitivity-like effect. In addition, food additives, such as artificial colors, flavors, nitrates, and MSG can cause small reactions that you may not even be aware of. Take note of what makes you feel badly, log it in your “foods-that-make-me-feel-like-shit” book, and try eliminating it for awhile. See how you feel. Reintroduce it and notice if it has an effect on you. You can also get an allergy/sensitivity test done by a local naturopath.

Chronic inflammation is scary. It means that your body is overreacting to something that is bothering it on a consistent basis. It should be a warning sign to you if any part of your body is always inflamed. For me, and many other digestive disorder sufferers, inflamed intestines are a very real deal. IBD, IBS, lactose intolerance, and diverticulitis, in particular, are extremely inflammatory disorders. If you suffer from one of these, I urge you to help your body. Eat foods that fight inflammation, not the ones that cause or provoke it. Try the garlic-stuffed olives . . .

Question:
Do you have noticeable bloating after eating a meal? Bloating is a sign of inflammation, and you can only feel and see a small percentage of what is actually occurring in your body. If you notice that you bloat after eating certain foods, then stop eating them! Your body is trying to show you what’s happening; let it know you’re paying attention.

“ . . . the factory farm industry (in alliance with the pharmaceutical industry) currently has more power than public-health professionals. We give it to them. We have chosen, unwittingly, to fund this industry on a massive scale by eating factory-farmed animal products . . . and we do so daily.”
⁶³

—Jonathan Safran Foer,
Eating Animals

O
bvious to many, something is happening that is changing the quality of our health. These changes might seem small or relative to the general population, but they aren’t. More people are dying from chronic yet preventable diseases than ever before. People are getting sicker faster and younger. Despite taking into account the population increase within the last one hundred years, diseases, such as diabetes, heart disease, cancers, hypertension, chronic and debilitating digestive ailments, and obesity are on the rise like never seen before, and I mean never.
⁶⁴
So, what the hell is going on? One word: nutrition. Or rather, lack thereof . . .

We are in the middle of a healthcare crisis of epidemic (soon to be pandemic)proportions in Canada and the United States. There are two major factors that are responsible for this, in my opinion.
The first is our affinity for the western diet, which is certainly the norm in these two countries, and unfortunately, is quickly becoming quite popular everywhere else in the world, too. The western diet comprises foods that are mostly . . . well, not really food.

Fast food, processed food, factory-farmed animal products, and a slew of chemicals including preservatives, stabilizers, artificial coloring and flavors, pesticides, genetically modified organisms and more, make up the bulk of the average North American’s diet. This diet is unprecedented in not only its laboratory-created component, but also in the effects it has had, and rapidly continues to have, on our swiftly declining, collective health.

The second factor contributing to our healthcare despair is our medical professionals’ inability to deal with this problem, because of their lack of proper nutrition education, and abundance of opportunistic misinformation from the meat, dairy, and pharmaceutical industries that are incredibly effective in convincing our doctors to push their products. (You’d be hard-pressed to find a North American general practitioner who would tell you that milk isn’t good for you. It “does a body good”
⁶⁵
doesn’t it?)

Factory-farmed animal products are just one example of how we are causing detriment to our health, typically without us knowing so. Misguided information and general ignorance towards what is being put in our food is literally killing us. American general practitioners have an average of twenty hours’ worth of nutrition education, with eighteen of those hours being centered on infant formula.
⁶⁶
This means that a nutritionist, who possesses considerably less education than a medical doctor (typically one to two years of study compared to ten to twelve), has more basic knowledge about diet and nutrition than a heart surgeon who deals with the effects of coronary heart disease, contracted in most part by terrible dietary choices that often occur on a daily basis.

This is a major problem.

In fact, as Dr. T. Colin Campbell emphasizes in
The China Study
, which is a thirty-eight year-long study that shows a very strong correlation between casein (cow milk protein) and cancer, “the health damage that results from doctors’ ignorance of nutrition is astounding.”
⁶⁷

When confronted with treating patients who have any type of chronic disease(not limited to digestive disease), most doctors will order expensive tests, prescribe expensive drugs, and if all else fails, recommend expensive surgeries. All of this expense adds up to an unbelievable sum of money spent on treatments that are typically ineffective, or could be treated more efficiently through dietary changes and real, fact-based, nutrition education for the public. Ergo, our skyrocketing healthcare costs and devastating, life-threatening cuts. Who benefits from dealing with our health issues in this typically ineffective and overly expensive manner?

Pharmaceutical companies do.

If you were able to eradicate your digestive disease symptoms naturally, it would amount to billions of dollars in lost drug sales for major drug companies. It’s deeply unfortunate, but it is not in anyone’s interest but your own to actually cure what ails you. That means that only
you
can accomplish this properly, through food and lifestyle rehabilitation. Don’t take that as scary or hopeless information . . . it’s some damn empowering knowledge! Use it to your advantage, mon ami!

An example of this inefficiency to unearth the root of digestion problems in order to heal from the bottom up is the story of my friend Kim, who is one of the sisters I mentioned in chapter three, in the section on IBD (page 23). Kim was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease at the age of nineteen, although she says she can remember digestive malfunction occurring as early as seven years old.

When, at the age of twenty-seven, she could no longer cope, she underwent two and a half weeks of testing that included a barium
enema, a CT-scan, and numerous x-rays. After pondering the results of these examinations, Kim’s doctors gave her an ultimatum: she could either begin steroids which would have cost her hundreds of dollars per injection, or she could have major stomach surgery, where they would ultimately perform a resection of her bowel. So, because Kim could not afford such an expensive alternative, she had a one foot-long damaged portion of her small intestine removed, along with a six-inch section of her colon. This left her with a crude scar that is about seven inches long, running from her navel to her hip bone, and she was kept in the hospital for over three weeks to recover.

During her recovery, her doctors administered the steroids that she had refused up until this point without her permission. She felt no physical (and certainly no psychological) relief from the surgery or the steroids, and regretted it within months. In fact, because of her scar, she has since become self-conscious, too. The hospital staff also administered morphine and ciprofloxacin to Kim, even though she was wearing a medical bracelet stating her allergy to these medications, as well as the information being clearly included in her chart. After these events, her doctor tried to persuade her to begin more steroids that would, in theory, put her Crohn’s into remission. She refused, believing there must be a better way to manage the symptoms, without having to experience the numerous side-effects of the steroid. Up until this point, she had gotten by with regular prescriptions of antibiotics to manage the inevitable, constant, and recurrent kidney infections that are associated with her condition.