4 POWERFUL Ways to Heal Your Gut Naturally

Have you ever wondered if some or even all of your GI tract digestive system issues could be lessened or even healed using natural therapies, et cetera? Today, I want to talk about some things I've been doing for many decades with my patients that are good to consider and may be helpful. Let's look at 4 different ways that we can be kind to our digestive system and allow it to heal on its own or with a little bit of help. Now, with all things first, We want to always remember that digestive system symptoms, if they're not going away, can be a sign of something much more dangerous. And if they don't go away with normal treatments, you really need to see a healthcare provider about that. The other side of the coin though is that the digestive system is set up to have very quick restorative powers in general because the digestive system, much like, you know, the skin turns over all the time and we're always making new skin because it's exposed to the outside of the world. Well, the digestive tract has an epithelium that turns over and is regenerated because we're always putting food and drink through there. So it's set up to be able to regenerate as we go along. So when we use these 4 steps, we can often access the type of healing that we need to move from a more dysfunctional digestive system to a less dysfunctional or healed digestive system. So the first step is stop adding irritants. Okay. So what do we mean by this? If I have this wonderful digestive system that is set up to, you know, be able to auto-heal and regenerate and all of this, but if I'm also constantly beating it up, it's going to keep trying to heal and it's going to keep getting injured at the same time. So one of the metaphors that I use with patients is it's sort of like if you skin your knuckles, and we've all done that probably, and it's very uncomfortable, but you know that your skin regenerates and can heal. But if every day you go out and reskin your knuckles, your body will be trying to heal from the bottom up like it normally does, but then you injure it again, and the next day you injure it again. And so your poor body is pushing all this healing apparatus towards a wound that you keep reopening. It'll never heal if you do that. That's the concept behind stop adding irritants. Now, what's the easiest irritant to consider for digestive tract health? The first one really is alcohol. One of the best ways and easiest ways to decrease the stress on your digestive system is to significantly decrease or remove alcohol so that you're not, again, kind of literally pouring gas on the fire or irritants into the system. The next thing, which can be Either very obvious or kind of silent is allergens that you may have. Now, people will say, "Well, if I was allergic to a food, I would have anaphylaxis and I would die," which is true. You can have that, but you can also have non-anaphylactic reactions that are very inflammatory to your digestive system. And there are many ways to sort these things out. But the first thing that we usually do with people is if they have a lot of digestive tract things, is we do two types of testing for GI. Allergen/sensitivity. The allergen side is usually an IgE, E like Edward, test. There's a panel. It's your commonly eaten foods. And we usually don't get a whole lot of those turned positive, but if there's 1, 2, 3 in there and the person doesn't know about it, it's really good to just don't eat those because they're creating a pretty big reaction. What about on the other side, which is part 3 of stop adding irritants? And that would be a sensitivity or an intolerance. Well, that's not an allergy. It's kind of analogy, but it's the same thing. It's another way to keep reskinning your knuckles and not letting the GI tract heal. Now, intolerances are traditionally difficult to sort out. The gold standard, if you will, is an elimination and then rechallenge test. So you take foods that you might be reacting to out of your diet. It's usually all the things that we normally eat. And so, you know, that might be dairy products, it might be grains, it could be certain meats, it could be all sorts of stuff. And you go to sort of like a low allergen diet, which is a real chore. And then after a few weeks, you start to add one food at a time back in. That's one way to do it. There are also tests that can be done, and there's different types of tests and they do different things. So you can't really, it's not apples to apples in the intolerance world. The one I use a lot are called mediator response tests or MRT, which is a blood test. And it looks at the production not only of histamine, but other inflammatory mediators, hence the name. And it can tell, oh, you're just really reactive to this food. You don't have anaphylaxis. Lactose to it, but you're just really reactive. Take that food out of your diet, and you're going to have lower reactivity. A lot of these we never know about, or in retrospect, we might say, "Yeah, I guess when I eat that, I don't feel that good." But again, anything you can do to decrease the irritation, the better. Now, one final thing, and it's a little related to alcohol chemically in the way it does stuff, but not is high simple sugars. And the reason for this is not just because you know you're. Mom told you not to eat too much candy, but high simple sugars will often feed part of the microbiome that create more inflammation. So you're sort of feeding the fungus and bacteria and stuff that maybe aren't as helpful to you. So watch the macros in your diet, you know, make sure you have enough fiber, make sure you have enough protein and all that stuff. Step 2 is to use healing foods, sometimes called demulcents. Okay, what are these? Well, the internet is full of good information. So one thing you can look at and search is a prebiotic food. Now we've all heard of probiotics, maybe take some lactobacillus or bifido or something. These are prebiotic foods that help your own natural formation of good bacteria in your GI tract. So prebiotic, B-I-O-T-I-C, look up prebiotic foods and not all of them will be foods you like to eat or you might be sensitive to So some don't eat those, but there's plenty of other ones that you can eat that would be helpful to your GI tract. So that's the first one. The next one would be things that tend to engender a, you might think of it like sort of thick foods, okay? Or gooey types of foods, et cetera. If you eat in certain types of areas of the world, you know, you look at things like congee or certain types of porridges and other stuff like that. Well, one of the things, and sometimes you see these things cross over with the Prebiotic food list also. But one of the things that these things do is a demulcent is something that's sticky and gooey. And so it sort of helps like a liquid bandage. It helps to soothe the system. So underneath the demulcent, you get some healing going on. Now, sometimes what we do with folks is we might add things that would be helpful as demulcent plants. So powders that you can put into other foods like marshmallow root. So not the white things, but marshmallow root, the plant, or slippery Elm is another good demulcent. There's others that you can do. And people might add them into their oatmeal or applesauce or something like that. You just want to be careful because the demulcent herbs are a lot more potent, like okra, right? Remember okra, if you ever cook it, you often wash off the slimy part. Well, that's the demulcent part. You can also get okra powder that you can put into foods. But the thing you want to do is if, let's say you have some porridge or you have some applesauce or something and you put a spoonful of slippery elm powder or marshmallow Taro root powder or something, or okra powder. You want to stir that up and eat it rather quickly because it's going to get thicker and thicker and thicker in the bowl and harder to eat. You want it to get thicker inside of you. And this actually is very, very soothing to people who have, you know, digestive inflammation, gastritis, stuff like that. And it literally is kind of like a liquid bandage that goes in. So the demulcent type foods, gooey type foods, et cetera. And then the next thing is actually high polyphenol foods. And polyphenols are Largely found in the colorful portion of plants, and they have a lot of immunomodulatory and anti-inflammatory capacity. One of the things that people will do sometimes to get high polyphenol foods is to do you know like a non-filtered plant-based juice, like a vegetable juice, meaning doesn't go through a filter, but it's more like a smoothie. That way you're getting the whole plant. You also get a lot of the nutrients and some of the polyphenols if you use an extraction juicer that. You know, gives you the juice, but the pulp is taken away. So whichever way you want to do it is fine. You're also going to eat these foods. Just highly colorful vegetables are really your best, most dense place to get polyphenols from. Step 3 is the one that everyone hopes doesn't occur, and that is give it time. Now, we said at the beginning that the digestive tract really loves to heal. It's set up to heal. It works really good that way, but it doesn't do it tomorrow. Okay. So if I eat something that's really inflammatory to my gut, or I eat something really inflammatory and have alcohol and sugar and all sorts of stuff, you know, that my gut doesn't need. And I do that 3 days in a row and then I'm all inflamed. I'm not going to get better the next day. Usually the regenerative process in the digestive tract, each part has a different amount of days or weeks that it takes. But generally, if we consider and we make changes, we want to do them for about 12 weeks at a time. And so that's giving it some time. So if you're going to remove foods that you're sensitive or allergic to, or you're going to decrease or cut out alcohol or decrease sugar or whatever you're going to do, or add in, you know, some high polyphenols or some demulcent foods, et cetera, you need to give it time. So 12 weeks is minimum. Now, what I will tell you from lots and lots of people I've done this with, if you get to 12 weeks and you've really made all these changes and you're still having trouble, then other Things need to be considered. But the big concept here in point number 3 is give it some time. And let's say you're not 100% better at 12 weeks, but you're 50, 60, 70% better, then that means that you're on the right track. That means that things are healing, and maybe for you it's just going to take a little bit more time. Or you might want to beef up step number 2. So let's say you looked up prebiotic foods And demulcent foods and high polyphenol foods, you've been eating those, but now, you know, maybe you just want a little bit more in there. Then you might want to use a plant source like marshmallow root powder or slippery elm powder, or you might want to use an amino acid like glutamine to help out with the healing or something like that. So you might want to kick it up a little bit. Then point number 4 is if it is not improving, please go back and see your healthcare provider and say, you know, I've been having this, you know, whatever the symptom is, burning, nausea, diarrhea, constipation, pain of some type. And, you know, I've been, I thought maybe it was what I was eating or whatever. I made all these changes, you know, it's been 12 weeks, 18 weeks, whatever. And I still have this pain right here, or I still have this heartburn, or I still have these other things. There might be something either mechanical or organic or pathological that really should be checked out. For example, I've had people where things really improved, but they still had a particular type of pain. And we have them get an endoscopy, and it turns out that they have an ulcer that just isn't healing, or it turns out maybe they have a small stomach cancer that isn't obviously going to heal from these other things. Or one of the things that I saw quite a bit was the person you get to the end of 12 weeks, and a lot of things are better and they feel better, but they still have this really you know wicked reflux going on, and we test them, and it turns out they have an infection going on. You know something else. So part four is if it's not improving, please just get a second opinion beyond yourself from a healthcare provider who can help you either sort out, well, let's just do a little more and see if it gets better, or let's do some testing and see what's there still, or whatever it is that you need at that time. All right. Well, healing the gut naturally, it is set up to heal naturally. And if there's not an underlying process that's real hardwired, a deep pathology or mechanical problem, it often will. And you can follow those 4 steps we talked about to help out in the healing process. I'm Dr. A. Thanks for listening. Please continue to subscribe, share, do comments, all of the things. We really appreciate everyone in the community. Check out these other videos we're going to recommend. Check out our playlists on YouTube, and I'll see you all on the next video.