Your Health is Heavily Influenced by Your Gut

If you struggle with a chronic health issue, whether it be anything from skin rashes, pain, inflammation, brain fog and moodiness, to blood sugar control or thyroid problems, you probably don’t immediately look at your gut as a major contributor.

But you should.

According to Dr. William Davis, author of Super Gut, these issues and many more are heavily influenced by the type of microscopic organisms living in your gut, and where they reside in your gut.

As someone who has been researching health information for decades, I can tell you that the phrase “all disease begins in the gut” has been around for a long time. I have heard it so many times from so many different people that I can’t even remember where it originated. And over the years I have come to believe that it is (mostly) true.

Numerous experts have written books about the gut, countless podcasts have dug deeply into the topic, and numerous articles and newsletters have covered it. Entire companies have been formed just to study it.

For a long time, “probiotic” was the buzz word. I remember a time when those were hard to find, now even Walmart sells them.

Then it was oh wait, we need “prebiotics”! And what about “gut biodiversity”! And people were sending their poop off for DNA testing to find out exactly what species (and how many) were living inside of them.

And now the latest - food allergy (or intolerance) testing, and the oh-so-happily-named “FODMAP” testing.

We have progressed from: throwing every random microbe at our guts and seeing what helps, to: actually targeting a problem with specific bacteria but still not really knowing if it will help, to: let’s just all stop eating all these foods humans have been eating for eons and yeah, that will fix it!

That is why I find this particular book very different and interesting.

As I have said many times, our bodies were designed to be able to digest FOOD. What is FOOD?

FOOD is material you eat that your body recognizes as essential nutrition and efficiently and joyfully assimilates into itself in an effort to support and maintain life.

Once food leaves your stomach, it travels to the small intestine and then finally to the large intestine. Billions of microorganisms reside in your large intestine in order to help your body digest the food. Not only that, but they convert much of it into beneficial nutrients for your body to use.

What happens when you keep eating things that are NOT FOOD?

Material you eat that your body does not recognize as essential nutrition and inefficiently and regretfully assimilates into itself in an effort to support and maintain life is NOT FOOD.

Continually eating material that is NOT FOOD negatively affects those guys living in your gut. You will starve some and cause others to overgrow. This is called dysbiosis. Sometimes the overgrowth is so bad that you end up with some nasty bugs living up in your small intestine. This has a very obvious name - “small intestinal bacteria overgrowth,” or SIBO.

Now, here’s where Dr. Davis diverges from many, and I happen to agree with him. If you can’t eat FOOD successfully, then there is something going on in your gut that you need to fix. The answer isn’t to just avoid the food forever. You need to get rid of the dysbiosis and SIBO and cultivate the bacterial species that you, as an individual human, require.

Dysbiosis and SIBO can be caused by all kinds of factors.

From Dr. Davis’s book:

“Meat is prekilled for us; vegetables are purchased in plastic bags or are served in a salad bar, not picked off plants, trees, and bushes or dug from the ground. The distance we’ve created from butchering and digging has created a squeaky-clean, sanitized, and antibiotic- and industrial chemical-filled present.

Convenience, mass food commercialization, and the lack of blood and dirt under our fingernails have contributed to a silent but massive health epidemic. Many of us were delivered by C-section and fed synthetic baby formula that led to food allergies, obesity, and diverticular disease later in life. We survive a urinary tract infection or pneumonia by taking antibiotics, only to develop ulcerative colitis or compulsive behaviors months or years later. We refrigerate food to prolong its shelf life but deprive ourselves of the fertile growth of microorganisms that appear naturally in fermenting food, and thereby set ourselves up for autoimmune thyroid disease and rosacea.”

In a nutshell, with all the modern devastations we have imposed upon our own microbiome, it’s any wonder that it functions AT ALL.

But this book doesn’t just deliver the painful news that we have royally screwed up our internal ecosystems, it offers solutions that don’t involve tons of tests and consultants.

Dr. Davis believes you can fix your gut biome with yogurt. That YOU make. From scratch. And consume every day.

Not just any yogurt, of course. Targeted species grown at specific temperatures for extended times that will produce many-fold higher counts than any yogurt or probiotic you’ve ever bought in a store.

I love this approach, and I am totally in.

Stay tuned!