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.
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.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 Aids Detective Work
Elimination diets come in many different forms, often named by the functional doctor that developed any given protocol.- 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.
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.”
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.
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.
“There’s extraordinary data now on FMTs. Overall, 85 to 95 percent of people are better.”
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