The Road to Good Health...

There are so many ways that intestine health is important, especially considering that 80% of our immune system is in our intestines.  Autoimmune diseases are now such a common and devastating problem, and they are strongly linked to unhealthy, 'leaky' guts.  These occur when your immune system becomes hypersensitive to a protein or foreign compound because it sees that substance way too often.  The problem comes when you have increased intestinal permeability (leaky gut), you absorb too big of proteins, and these proteins look a lot like your tissue.  So your immune system starts attacking.  This would be a great thing except for the fact that it is attacking you!

Here is the best analogy I have come up with for an autoimmune disease.  Think of how annoyed you get when you see that in-law or relative that just gets on your nerves.  If they are around enough, then you start to get inflamed, irritated and might just take it out of family members that you like.  So basically your immune system gets over stimulated, irritated and inflamed, and starts taking it out on your healthy productive tissues.

This is just one of the many reasons why it is so paramount to take care of your intestines.  Once your immune system loses its “mind,” it is hard to get it back under control.  The easiest and best ways to take care of your cut is to stop eating the things that inflame it.   These include but not limited to: grains, wheat, oats, pasta, rice, corn, dairy, soy, and sugar.

The response I normally get from patients is what else is there to eat?  The answer simply is any protein and any non-starchy vegetable.  If you just make that simple shift in your diet closer to what our ancestors ate and away from the processed, homogenized food like substances we eat today, I promise you will be amazed at the results both in your intestines and in your health.  So Dr. Rogers was onto something when she said: “The road to good health is paved with good intestines.”