Gut Feeling

We have all heard the old adage about trusting your gut, but I don't think most people realize just how much our gut does for us, and how it is literally connected to our feelings and mental states.

I recently heard an interview with Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride who has a thriving medical practice in Cambridge, England. Unfortunately, it is thriving because of the drastic spike in autism, ADHD, dyslexia, depression, schizophrenia and other ailments, which she addresses. What launched her into this area of expertise was when her own son was diagnosed with autism at the age of three. She admits that her medical training left her with no solutions and so she returned to school to obtain a doctorate in nutrition and this is the basis of her success today.

She explained in the interview and in her book, Gut and Psychology Syndrome that the gut is the basis of all health in the body. She is not the only medical doctor advocating this these days, but there is still much awareness to be developed by mainstream medicine in this area. In fact, the practice of medicine in western, industrialized countries has contributed a great deal to the demise of this foundational piece of health. It was, as she explains, the introduction of broad spectrum antibiotics at the time of World War II, which were over prescribed for every sore throat or earache, that began upsetting the balance of beneficial microorganisms in the gut. Additional contributors to the depletion of beneficial microorganisms are the high percentage of sugar and processed, starchy foods, as well as other foods grown with pesticides, and animals raised with hormones and antibiotics. Oral contraceptives and chemical pharmaceutical products, both prescription and over the counter, also wreak havoc on beneficial organisms. Another factor that set the stage for a rapid decline in health was the trend away from breastfeeding from the 50s to the 70s. This weakened babies immune systems, 80% of which is in the gut wall, because they never received the good bowel flora that is introduced through the mother's milk. On top of all of this, the increase in the number of vaccinations, which may help those with healthy bowel flora, can be devastating to babies with already compromised systems. The result of all of this is that twenty years ago the occurrence of diagnosed autism was about 1 in 10,000. Today, in western industrialized countries it is about 1 in 150 and some places in the UK and US it is as high as 1 in 66!

So, the bottom line is if we don't start trusting our guts more, and educating ourselves on what it takes to restore the important balance of microorganism species there, we are in big trouble. A good start would be reading her book, which she said many people are using successfully in a self-guided program.

I appreciated the analogy she used of our bodies being a planet inhabited by hundreds of species (about 500 different species in the gut) and that when the body becomes compromised, imbalanced and toxic, the opportunistic pathogens take over and well-being declines. She also said that you can't kill all the bad microorganisms and that the better approach is to focus on creating a supportive environment for the good ones and introducing more of them into the system. The "good ones" will keep the "bad ones" in check and when the system is weighted in favor of the good the "bad ones" actually have a beneficial, synergistic role to play.

Sound familiar on another level? So, let's get healthy! It's all connected.