Dr. Mark Hyman explains how hidden inflammation from diet and food sensitivities drives weight gain and illness. He outlines a one-week plan to cut toxins and allergens, targeting leaky gut to reduce inflammation and improve health.
Is hidden inflammation making you fat and sick? Hi, this is Dr. Mark Hyman. Welcome back to the second part of my series where I tell you a little bit more about my one-week plan that I've been using for years to help my patients. Now many people on my site and in my lectures keep asking me for something simple to get started without a whole bunch of complicated steps. So I'm going to teach you how to do that. Now last week I reviewed the first key to this simple plan, addressing toxins and improving your body's own detoxification system. This week I'm going to review the second key factor in health and weight loss and that factor is inflammation. Now, did you know that most of you are inflamed and living an inflammatory lifestyle? That being inflamed makes you fat and sick? And that being fat and sick makes you inflamed? It's a vicious cycle. So, what is inflammation anyway? And why does it make us sick and fat? Well, inflammation can be a good thing, right? It's part of your body's own defense mechanisms. If you have a cold or an infection, you bang yourself, inflammation helps your body heal. But it's bad when it goes out of control. Now what makes us inflamed and what makes the inflammation get out of control? It's mostly our diet. It's bad foods, sugar, trans fats, food allergens that are hidden, lack of exercise, stress, even hidden infections. All these things promote inflammation. So how do we deal with it? Well, we detox from inflammatory foods. We just get rid of them. for a little while, one week, see what happens. Things like sugar, processed food, junk food, caffeine, alcohol. But what else is important? And I want to spend a little time talking about this other factor that mostly gets ignored. It's called hidden food sensitivities or hidden food allergens. And they're delayed. They're not like you eat a peanut and your tongue swells up and you have to go to the emergency room. I'm not talking about that. I'm not talking about shellfish allergy where you can nearly die from it. What I'm talking about are delayed, subtle, and often unrecognized symptoms that come from delayed reactions to the things we're eating. And these symptoms can include weight gain, fluid retention, fatigue, brain fog, irritable bowel syndrome, mood disorders, headaches, sinus problems, joint pains, acne, eczema, and much more. Now, why do we get it? Let me just say something first. This is an unrecognized epidemic and most physicians, most practitioners ignore this type of allergy. It just hasn't hit the radar. And yet it's the biggest thing I do in my medical practice to help people feel better quickly and to lose weight quickly. So you have to recognize that it's not the same for everybody. That one man's medicine is another man's poison. And if you're eating something that doesn't agree with you, that you've developed a food sensitivity to or an allergy, you can develop a whole host of problems. In fact, in this country, we have an epidemic of inflammatory and allergic diseases. We have 24 million people with autoimmune disease. We have 50 million with allergic diseases. We have 30 million with asthma and over 60 million with irritable bowel syndrome. and all of these are connected by inflammation. So the question is, why have we become so sensitive? Why is our immune system acting this way? Obviously we weren't designed to have an immune system go awry and create tremendous amounts of inflammation all the time, make us sick and fat. So something's gone wrong. What has gone wrong? Well, it has to do with the idea that food is not just energy. I've talked about this before. Food is information. So it can be good information, right? Good information from phytonutrients, things that are found in plants, colorful antioxidants, detoxifying and anti-inflammatory molecules found in plant foods. So that's good information. But it can also be bad information. And that can include bad information from allergens and from toxins. So when does it become a problem? Well it becomes a problem when we get something called a leaky gut. The medical term for this is increased intestinal permeability. But it basically means that the stuff on the inside of your gut, which should stay on the outside of your immune system, gets in and leaks into your body and is exposed to your immune system which then doesn't like it. And the cause of this leaky gut or damaged membrane in your intestinal tract is a bad diet, lack of fiber, too much sugar. It's drugs, antibiotics which kill all the healthy bacteria, hormones which promote yeast overgrowth, anti-inflammatories which damage the lining of the gut, acid blockers which change your whole digestive process, and even stress can cause a leaky gut. So when this all happens, the lining breaks down and all hell breaks loose. What happens is then that on the inside of your intestinal tract there's basically a sewer, all the stool, food, junk, particles, things that should be protected from your immune system. It starts leaking in across this leaky membrane and is exposed to your immune system, 60% of which is right under that lining. When that happens, your immune system goes, ah! and starts attacking these quote foreign molecules, but it's really just food that you haven't properly digested or that should have been broken down, but is suddenly exposed to your immune system and that's when you start getting sick and fat. So this one week plan that I've designed is so simple and it's designed to give your body a vacation from toxins and allergens. And it's what I do for my patients and I just created it for you in a one week plan for you to try. All you have to do is this: get rid of the bad stuff and get the good stuff and the body does the rest. All right, so next week I'm going to give you all the details of this simple program that I've developed over many years that is profoundly successful in helping my patients not only lose weight quickly, which is a nice side effect, but to truly feel healthy again for the first time in years. Most people don't know how bad they are feeling until they start feeling good. So stay tuned till next week Thank you for joining me. This is Dr. Mark Hyman.
