UltraWellness Key #3: Is Your Inner Tube Making You Sick?

Hi, this is Dr. Mark Hyman. Is your inner tube making you sick? Welcome back to my series of blogs on Ultra Wellness and a new approach to health and medicine. So far we reviewed the real origins of disease, the environmental factors that are at the root of disease, and also how inflammation is critical to understand and treat if you want to stay healthy. Now, is something wrong with your inner tube? What am I talking about? This is your inner tube of life. This is your gut. You're one of probably those 100 million people out there with some type of gut problem. Irritable bowel, reflux, bloating, gas, diarrhea, constipation, and more. Now, the top three and seven selling drugs in this country are gut drugs, acid blocking drugs. There's over 200 million over-the-counter digestive aids. Visits for gut problems are among the most common reasons for visiting the doctor. What is going on here? Well, this is not just about your gut. Everybody wants to have a healthy gut and we'll certainly help you how to do that. But it's not just your gut. Your digestive dysfunction is connected to distant problems, things like allergies, arthritis, autoimmunity, skin problems, mood disorders, autism, dementia, cancer and more. These are things that most people don't think of as related to the digestive function but it's critical are directly linked to your gut. Now, I always start people by fixing their gut. That's how I start treating people in my practice. So, I'm going to tell you a little bit later how to know if you have a problem and how to fix it. But first, I want to tell you a little bit more about the gut. It's a big filter. It keeps out the bad stuff like toxins, allergens, bugs, and it lets in the good stuff, right? Food, nutrients, water. And so, health is really about the optimal functioning of digestion, breaking down the food, absorbing the food and assimilating the food so you can stay healthy. When the ecosystem in the gut is not working, this big ecosystem, there's 500 species of bugs in there, three pounds, you probably didn't even know you had a whole extra organ of bugs in there. It's a chemical factory that digests your food. It produces vitamins, it regulates hormones, it excretes toxins and it makes healing chemicals. There's a huge functioning system in there. When that's out of balance, you get sick. So what are the things that damage this system? What damages the barrier in your gut? Well, it's a huge surface area. It's about the size of a tennis court. It's only one cell thick and it's damaged easily by any kind of toxin, food, allergens, bugs and these things ultimately lead to damage. And when this gut layer is damaged, things leak in. Foods that shouldn't be there so you get allergies, toxins, microbes and all sorts of things that disturb the normal functioning. This is called a leaky gut and it causes wide-ranging effects in your body. So what causes a leaky gut? Well, a low-fiber, high-sugar, processed diet, the typical American diet always talking about, overuse of medications, things like anti-inflammatories, aspirin, antibiotics, acid-blocking drugs, hormones, and steroids, these all disturb the gut function. Low-grade bug imbalances, things like yeast overgrowth or overgrowth of bacteria in the small intestine or parasites, things can go often undiagnosed. Also toxins in mold and mercury also may affect the gut. And poor digestive function from inadequate digestive enzyme function, things like zinc deficiency will cause this for example. And stress. So the gut brain is a huge factor. The gut brain system is a very powerful factor in your health. and most people don't realize that they have a second brain. It's called your enteric nervous system that is involved in almost every function of your body. So let me tell you a quick story and then I'll tell you what to do and how to fix the gut. There's a 57-year-old woman who came to see me and she had oozing eczemas all over her body, eight years suffering miserably. She had it on her back, her arms, her legs, everything, chest. She had a diet that was high in sugar. She had lots of yeast overgrowth and yeast infections that she told me about. And we discovered she had food allergies and a leaky gut. We treated her by eliminating the food she was allergic to, by giving her antifungals, healthy bacteria, and boom, her symptoms were gone within a very short time and never came back. And I've seen her four years later and she's still fine. So how do you keep your gut healthy? Let me tell you. First, eat whole, unprocessed foods with lots of fiber. Two, try an elimination diet. Get rid of common food allergens like gluten and dairy if you think you have a gut problem. Three, treat infections or overgrowth of the wrong bugs in your gut. Four, try digestive enzymes. Five, take probiotics, healthy bacteria. Six, take omega-3 fats, very anti-inflammatory, help heal the gut lining. And lastly, take gut healing nutrients, things like zinc and glutamine that can help to repair the gut lining. So remember, to be ultra well, you have to get your gut working properly by getting rid of what triggers problems, by giving back the things it needs to heal and repair. It's that simple. So next week, I'm going to help you understand why we're all so toxic and why detoxifying is essential to ultra wellness.