Dr. Mark Hyman explains how food allergies trigger inflammation and gut damage that leads to weight gain. Damaged intestines absorb more calories and leak toxins into the bloodstream, while your body holds onto fat trying to protect itself from the inflammation.
Is your digestive system making you fat? Hi, this is Dr. Mark Hyman, welcome to my blog. Now it's hard to believe, but the bugs in your digestive tract and the way they upset your immune system in your gut just might be making you fat. Now a few recent scientific papers published in little noticed journals might hold the key to why we are so inflamed, toxic and fat. They literally open up a whole new world of thinking about weight problems and the causes of inflammation in the body. Now, I have observed this phenomena in thousands of patients and developed very effective treatments based on understanding the way in which all the body systems are connected. The gut, the immune system, toxins, hormones and more. It's what I call the seven keys to ultra wellness. I've even described this phenomena based on the emerging scientific principles in my book, the Ultra Simple Diet which explains how toxicity and inflammation are key underlying causes of obesity and illness. And I have seen over and over patients who lose significant amounts of weight just cutting out food allergens from their diet. I have also seen people lose 20 to 30 pounds simply by fixing the intestinal system and balancing the bacteria and the ecosystem in their gut. In fact, one patient was a 38-year-old woman with chronic inflammation, fluid retention, acne, fatigue, as well as joint pains and irritable bowel syndrome, and she had bloating and gas. She tried every known diet but was unable to lose weight. She couldn't lose weight because she was inflamed. So when we had her eliminate the foods she was allergic to and gave her some healthy bacteria to heal her gut, she lost 35 pounds in a few months and all her other symptoms went away as a side effect. Now the big debate in medicine is which comes first, inflammation which then causes obesity or obesity which then produces inflammation as a secondary effect. I have always believed that we become inflamed first and gain weight second, which makes us even more inflamed, perpetuating the cycle. Now this incredible new research bears us out. Let me tell you a little more about these studies and what the implications are for treating obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and more. Both studies were done in Europe, where there is more openness to different ways of thinking. In the first study, published in December 2007, two groups of children were studied. The first group was overweight and the second was normal weight. Then they measured three key factors connected to inflammation. First, they looked at high sensitivity C-reactive protein, which is a blood test that measures the level of general inflammation in the body. Then they looked at the carotid arteries, the main arteries that supply the brain with an ultrasound, looking for plaque or thickening. And third, they looked at the blood tests for IgG or delayed food allergies, which I talked about in the Ultra Simple Diet. What they found was startling. The overweight kids had three-fold higher level of CRP or C-reactive protein and a two and a half-fold higher level of IgG antibodies to food. This means food allergens. This is astounding because most medical studies, just a difference of 20-30% is considered significant. In this case, the differences were 300% and 250%. The overweight children also had much thicker carotid arteries which are a sign of early Atherosclerosis are an indicator of heart disease. The study suggests that these food allergens are a cause of the inflammation and obesity, not a consequence. And the authors of the study also explain that damage to the gut can lead to a leaky gut allowing food particles to leak in and be exposed to the immune system in the gut. This triggers then a system wide immune response leading to inflammation all over the body which produces obesity by increasing insulin resistance. We already know that inflammation from any cause, a bacteria, food, inflammatory high sugar, high fat diet will produce insulin resistance, leading to higher insulin levels. And since insulin is a fat storage hormone, you store more fat mostly around the belly. This study shows a remarkable link that has received little attention by conventional medicine. And then the authors of the study go on to say that we should consider elimination of these allergic or IgG food allergens as a way of treating obesity and preventing heart disease. This is radical. That means that you don't limit calories, you just get rid of allergic foods that cause inflammation. But then you might ask the question, why is the gut leaky? Well, the next study may help explain why we have such a leaky gut and how toxins from the gut, not just allergens from food, can contribute to inflammation, obesity, heart disease and diabetes. In the next study published in the journal Diabetes in July of 2007, The authors performed a complex, powerful study teasing out which comes first, the chicken or the egg. Does inflammation make you fat or does being fat cause you to be inflamed? The research shows that inflammation is clearly found in obesity and heart disease in almost all chronic diseases and many studies using anti-inflammatories are underway to try to treat or prevent these conditions, which I don't think is a great idea. But hardly anyone asks why there is inflammation and where it's coming from. The authors of this study called Metabolic Endotoxemia Initiates Obesity and Insulin Resistance looked at the effects of a bacterial toxin called LPS on obesity in mice. And what they did was quite ingenious. They took thin mice and fed them a very high fat diet. Now the high fat diets change the bacteria in the gut. The toxin producing bugs are promoted by high fat diets while anti-inflammatory and protective bugs die off and there are about 500 species of bugs in your gut all fighting for territory. So the high fat diet feeds the bad ones. And in fact, our highly processed, high sugar, high fat, low fiber diet along with many gut-busting drugs like antibiotics, steroids, anti-inflammatories, acid blockers, hormones completely alter the bacterial ecosystem and lead to breakdown in the gut and inflammation and leaky gut. So these mice had the equivalent of an American diet were found to produce many more bacterial toxins which then promoted inflammation in the body. What was interesting was that they found that even with a normal diet when they injected the toxins into the bug, into the mice, they still had obesity even without a bad diet. They just injected toxins. So when you have bad bugs in your gut from a bad diet, your whole system goes upside down and the world leaks in across a damaged gut lining leading to not just obesity, heart disease and diabetes but to all allergic and autoimmune and inflammatory diseases. And this is what I found in patient after patient, is what I describe in the book Ultra Metabolism. And it's a powerful model for looking at weight and obesity and chronic disease. We have to look at the source of the problem. So let's review what we learned. When you eat a typical American diet, you foster the growth of bad bugs in the gut. They then damage the gut lining and produce toxins that are absorbed into your system. because of then the damage is there, partially digested food particles also leak into your bloodstream, then your immune system reacts to the toxins in the foods producing a firestorm of inflammation. That inflammation then leads to a fatty toxic liver and insulin resistance, which leads to higher levels of insulin in your body and since insulin is a fat storage hormone and also a disease and aging hormone, it produces obesity. So an unhealthy gut makes us fat and sick because it makes us toxic and inflamed. This is groundbreaking research that needs to shake up our thinking about how to help people lose weight and get healthy. So here are a few simple things to try if you're struggling to lose weight or feel better. First, try an elimination diet for three weeks. Second, eat a whole foods plant-based high fiber diet. And three, take probiotics daily to boost healthy gut bacteria. I talk about this more in my written blog so you can have a look at what I prescribe specifically there. But within a very short weeks, if you do nothing else, you will see a dramatic difference that comes from cooling off inflammation by healing your gut. If you want to get rid of your gut, you have to fix your gut.
