Your Gut is Leaking!

So, I fully intended to write about this topic during our Healthy Eating Month in June, but didn't get around to it.  That's OK, because every month should really be healthy eating month anyway.

Leaky Gut Syndrome (LGS).  I know, it sounds made up, but you can look it up, it's a real syndrome.  Now the official, medical  version of LGS is a very serious and possibly life-threatening state.  However, I argue that most Americans have some sort of LGS going on.  It all begins with our diet.

The foods that we are constantly surrounded with in our society (starches, sugar, lab made fats and chemicals) are constantly trying to be digested by our digestive system.  The problem is that most of this junk is very difficult to digest, if not impossible to digest.  It does help if you get the natural enzymes and bacteria to aid in the digestive process, but most of us are lacking in those as well.  So what happens when you can't digest those foods?

It turns into sludge.  That undigested, rotting "food" just sits and sits in your large intestine waiting to get passed out.  But it takes too long to pass through because it is sludge.  Sludge doesn't move very well, so it kind of just sits there.  And when it sits in one position for too long, it can irritate and even perforate, or bore holes, through your digestive tract.  No too bad of a thing right?

Wrong.  That sludge is essentially toxic to your blood stream and right on the opposite side of your intestinal wall, is your blood stream.  The smaller particles of the sludge leak (LGS) out of your gut into your blood stream and wreak all kinds of havoc.  It has been proven to lead to plaque build up in arteries, chronic general inflammation, and acidosis among other things.  So essentially, LGS can lead to almost any disease that plagues your body (Diabetes, fibromyalgia, hyperlipidemia, heart disease,etc.).  In my opinion, it is one of the main causes of the exponential increase in the chronic diseases that we see these days.

So, how do you prevent LGS?  It's as simple as eating healthier.  More whole fruits and veggies, fewer simple carbohydrates (cookies, breads, potatoes), healthier fats (fish oil, lean, grass fed red meat and poultry), and more water help promote a healthy gut and better movement of food through our gut so we don't get that rotting sludge building up and infecting our blood.