Certain gut-healing strategies have proven their worth. That’s good, since problems in the microbiome can affect everything from our risk of cancer and depression, to our daily ability to function without pain or discomfort.
Chief among these strategies are the various elimination diets that operate like the name sounds—ridding food from the diet to determine what might be causing health symptoms. What we feed the gut either supports the factors that decide our health—such as immunity, metabolism, and the production of hormones and neurotransmitters—or fans the flames of inflammation and disease.
There simply isn’t one cure-all diet because our microbial makeup—the trillions of bacteria, viruses, and fungi living in our digestive tract—is as individual as our fingerprint. What is problematic food for someone may be healing for another. Even some of the healthiest foods can trigger symptoms of a microbiome imbalance (dysbiosis) in someone.
Detective work is required to figure out the offending food, thus making elimination diets and food sensitivity testing the only options for resolving the root issue and healing gut issues naturally. Approaches may differ slightly, but elimination diets can be self-directed or supervised by a knowledgeable physician or nutritionist. If problems persist, testing and treatment could also become part of your treatment plan.
“It’s a difficult thing to remove favorite foods. It takes work and dedication,” Amy Pieczarka, director of PreviMedica Nutrition Services, told The Epoch Times. “It’s a lot easier to take a pill.”
While drugs might be easier in the short term, Pieczarka—an integrative and functional nutrition expert—and others attest to the cost of pharmaceutical solutions. One example is proton pump inhibitors (PPI) commonly prescribed for acid reflux and stomach ulcers. Recent studies link long-term use of PPIs to adverse effects via dysbiosis such as Clostridium difficile infection, malabsorption of vitamins and minerals, dementia, pneumonia, and more.
In fact, many pills and antibiotics used for gut issues and other diseases are proving harmful to the microbiome. Nearly 25 percent of 1,000 drugs tested were found to inhibit at least one bacterial strain test in vitro, according to a 2022 Frontiers in Medicine review.
Slow and Steady Healing
Patients with gut dysbiosis rarely complain of a single symptom. Usually, they suffer a collection of problems involving digestion, pain, the nervous system, weight, skin problems, mental health, and sleep. Dr. Doni Wilson, a naturopathic doctor and certified nutrition specialist, told The Epoch Times that trying to tackle all of them at once would be like learning to pilot a plane and thinking you could instantly move and adjust dozens of dials without knowing how each one affected the others.
“I never see it as one thing. Our bodies are so interconnected with multiple systems talking to each other,” said Wilson, author of “Master Your Stress Reset Your Health.” “But what we want to do is use that interconnectedness to our advantage. I think this is one of those things we miss is compassion for the body and this process.”
The Power of Food Journaling
It may be enough to begin noticing food reactions. This bit of self-awareness can have cascading benefits. Dr. William Li, renowned physician, scientist, and author of “Eat to Beat Your Diet,” told The Epoch Times that he suggests patients keep food journals.
“Most people are surprised when they do this because they learn how much they’ve been eating and then the quality of the foods they have been eating,” he said.
It helps to remember that the microbiome isn’t a root cause of disease, Wilson said, but a reflection of health status. Learning to tune into cues, or symptoms, can help us develop eating habits that foster a healthy, supportive microbial community. Eating habits are the true root cause of health or illness for many many people. Nourishing, real foods foster a healthy balance of bacteria and other microbes capable of inhibiting the growth of pathogenic and disease-causing microbes.
“Think of the microbiome like a garden,” she said. “If you’ve been overfertilizing it and not taking care of it, not only are the plants you want going to be overgrowing, but you’re also fertilizing a bunch of weeds.”
Elimination diets are a lot like tilling the soil and planting seeds. Journaling, then, is a tool to observe the garden that’s growing in your gut and determine what you need to plant more or less of and what practices help nurture the microbial community you want.
Elimination Aids Detective Work
Elimination diets come in many different forms, often named by the functional doctor that developed any given protocol.
Pieczarka teaches the 5R framework taught by the Institute for Functional Medicine:
- Remove unhealthy, inflammation-provoking foods, as well as sugar, packaged, and processed foods.
- Replace those foods with non-reactive protein and whole foods such as fruit, vegetables, and whole grains, as well as foods that are naturally antimicrobial and antifungal.
- Reinoculate, which means to rebuild gut flora by introducing and feeding microorganisms. This is done with a diet that includes fiber and fermented foods—the prebiotics and probiotics that will create a thriving community.
- Repair the intestinal mucosal lining with micronutrients to protect the body from inflammation.
- Rebalance the body with better lifestyle choices and anti-stress activities.
Ultimately, the goal is to reintroduce—a sixth R—foods that were previously reactive, Pieczarka said.
“We never want them to go back to sugar and packaged and processed foods and the junk, but let’s say they reacted to chia seeds, which are normally health-promoting. Let’s put that back in,” she said. “We reintroduce systematically one at a time. If symptoms do not reappear within a four-day period, you are good to go.”
When and Why to Test
Testing is available for food sensitivities, chronic infections, and micronutrient status. Many tests have been clinically validated, such as the Alcat Test, which can examine more than 450 substances at the cellular level for evidence of chronic immune system activation.
Pieczarka said incorporating food sensitivity testing makes elimination diets more practical for patients who often find it difficult to eat only a few foods in the beginning phases. It also helps them know whether fungal overgrowth could be affecting the gut lining and how to support that along the way.
Wilson uses information from tests to personalize not only her patients’ diets but also herbal supplements.
In keeping with her garden analogy, she prefers to avoid having to “rototill the whole garden.”
“That’s not going to be the best strategy. We want to prune the plants we want and pull out the ones we don’t want.”
Small tweaks often allow the body to heal itself, integrative physician Dr. Akil Palanisamy told The Epoch Times. He uses The T.I.G.E.R. Protocol, which is the five-step program detailed in his new book by the same name.
Sometimes, gut problems are linked to a problematic infection, such as the Epstein-Barr virus, or even childhood illnesses such as enterovirus, which can cause gastrointestinal symptoms.
These pathogenic invaders are often opportunists, however. That means they aren’t the root cause of the problem, but rather that they proliferate because the microbial environment suits them or has left us deficient in the health-supporting microbes that naturally hold off these viruses.
But testing for these invaders isn’t easy, Palanisamy notes. The problem, he said, is there isn’t one blood test that detects the long list of problem-causing microbes.
“I don’t like to do [infection testing] at the beginning,” he said. “I always like to do other things first. Our focus is to make the body inhospitable to infections and allow the body to take care of infections on its own.”
Bugs as Drugs
Of course, if you are desperate enough, there’s another treatment option that’s been in the headlines a lot recently: fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT). This procedure involves taking the stool of a healthy donor and putting it into the gut of a sick patient either rectally or orally. The first pill for FMT was recently approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Currently, approval is for treating the most severe gut infection, Clostridium difficile (C. diff), and is likely to be covered by insurance. But there are studies for more than 200 other conditions and plenty of experts who believe bugs as drugs are the future of medicine.
FMT is now the gold standard treatment for recurrent C. diff overgrowth that leads to persistent diarrhea. C. diff can be deadly in the elderly, and infections often return after antibiotic treatment. Patients getting fecal transplants appear to retain diverse colonization in their guts, potentially for years.
“Really C. diff is our proof of concept of [dysbiosis]. We have an illness caused by dysbiosis that we can reliably cure by transplanting healthy stool, and I think that’s absolutely extraordinary,” Dr. Neil Stollman, chairman of gastroenterology at Alta Bates Summit Medical Center, said at the Malibu Microbiome Meeting.
“There’s extraordinary data now on FMTs. Overall, 85 to 95 percent of people are better.”
[series_posts_list][/series_posts_list]
Profile of a Top Bug
Just as some bugs, like C. diff, are problematic, there are others that are essential.
Lactobacillus may be one of the more familiar gut bacteria, as they are commonly found in probiotics, despite comprising no more than 1 percent of the gut microbiota.
Able to ferment carbohydrates into lactic acid, lactobacilli are easy to grow and culture. They have many health benefits, including protecting the microbiome against pathogens, promoting the development of regulatory T cells in the immune system, producing short-chain fatty acids, producing certain neurotransmitters, and transforming polyphenols so they can be absorbed or used by gut bacteria.
Lactobacillus also plays a role in gut barrier integrity.
Type 1 diabetes in children is associated with significantly lower levels of Lactobacillus. Studies in patients with rheumatoid arthritis show taking various Lactobacillus species can reduce inflammation and pain.
Lactobacilli are the most dominant species in the vaginal microbiome, where less diversity—the opposite of the gut—is a signal of health.
Information adapted from The T.I.G.E.R. Protocol by Akil Palanisamy, MD. Copyright 2023 by Akil Palanisamy, M.D. With permission from Balance, an imprint of Grand Central Publishing. All rights reserved.
[note label=”Next” title=”Part 9 – Stress Ushers in Harm Through Microbiome” hyperlink=”https://m.theepochtimes.com/health/stress-ushers-in-harm-through-microbiome-5276967″ description=”Stress can single-handedly take out the gut microbiome, but leveraging the gut-brain axis can also facilitate healing.”][/note]
