Digestive Rescue: Part 1 of 3
Do you have issues with your digestion that are ruling your life?
Do you suffer from symptoms such as bloating, cramping, constipation or stomach pains? Do you find yourself rushing to the loo unable to control your bowel movements?
You are not alone.
These symptoms and others can be very common, which I understand and have been through with my family before. My husband has suffered with Ulcerative Colitis since he was a child, taking dozens of pills everyday all the way through into adulthood. Recently his Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) symptoms started getting worse and conventional doctors recommended increasing the strength of his medication with no alternative paths to follow. Constant high strength medication was not a route we wanted to explore so after a lot of research I decided to increase my knowledge, study and become qualified with the world-renowned Institute of Optimum Nutrition. It was there that I discovered how powerful prescribed nutrition, lifestyle changes and tailored supplementation can be.
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What some people don’t know is that a compromised digestive system can affect our entire bodies, with symptoms that appear unrelated. This could mean chronic fatigue, skin conditions, autoimmune conditions, mood disorders, allergies or intolerances, arthritis and even autism.
My husband’s continuous symptoms included stomach pains, cramping, joint aches and tiredness, to name a few and they greatly impacted the quality of our family life.
Do you find yourself juggling everything and trying to find a work, life balance but not have the time to spend on figuring out how to help your digestive issues?
Let me help. We will create personalised steps to take back your life so that you can easily go out with friends and family without worrying about what to eat or whether there is a toilet nearby.
Often the contributing factors to your symptoms, such as stomach pains or bloating will be linked with lifestyle, high stress levels or perhaps the food you’ve eaten such as bread or pasta. Working together we can find a way forward. We will work to try to identify your root causes, look for food intolerances, use specific functional tests to determine current bacteria levels, nutrient deficiencies, digestive function as well as introduce the right probiotics and prebiotics into your diet that will help your condition.
By using the knowledge I have gained over 3 years of studying, as well as using recent evidence based research, my husband and I were able to implement bespoke changes through a personalised programme. From this he was able to come off all drugs and move his IBD into remission. This could be you too.
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It is now a case of maintenance which easily fits into an active, busy and full family life.
My goal is to help others in similar situations: to educate how personalised nutrition using a functional medicine approach can make a massive positive impact and lead you towards optimal gut health and happiness.
So when it comes to optimal gut health, it's important to focus on the foods that provide your body with the right levels of nutrients as well as look at those that might be causing you harm, especially when it comes to symptoms that may relate to IBD.
Whilst diet is not the cause of Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD), there are certain foods that may trigger a flare-up or make symptoms worse, such as increased diarrhoea. Those triggers can vary widely from person to person and no one type of food or beverage aggravates symptoms for all people with ulcerative colitis or Crohn’s disease. Equally there will be foods that can help repair your gut and keep it healthy and working as well as possible.
Your digestive system is designed to break down and absorb all the food you eat. Nutrients from your food break down and are delivered to your body’s cells in order to help your systems, such as your immune system or central nervous system. These nutrients will then help to make your systems work optimally.
The intestines are part of your digestive system, and this is where most of your digestion and nutrient absorption occurs. If your body is not able to break down the food you eat, because of inflammation within your intestinal lining, it's not going to get the nutrients that it requires.
This means you may lack energy, crave certain foods, and start to become more susceptible to infections and illnesses because of a compromised immune system.
If your intake of food consists mainly of processed foods, which are often full of sugar, additives, preservatives, synthetic fats as well as genetically modified ingredients, this will have a negative effect on your digestive system as well as potentially cause inflammation of your gut lining. It is important to realise that the food you eat may either prevent or trigger inflammation within your body. Continuous inflammation can then lead to an array of problems including heart disease, stroke and diabetes.
Diets are often found to be low in fibre as well, especially a diet that contains processed foods or is low in vegetables and fruits. That combined with a low consumption of water will affect the efficiency of your bowel movements and you may become constipated. In addition, eating processed foods (junk food) may cause your digestive system to slow down, resulting in uncomfortable bloating.
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These types of foods are refined in such a way that they lose most of their key nutrients, which can potentially contribute to nutrient deficiencies. Nutrients such as vitamins and minerals are essential in order for our bodies and our systems to work effectively. For example in order for our bodies to create energy, we need B vitamins.
We can get B Vitamins from specific foods but they are also are manufactured in your gut, so if your gut is not working well you may be at risk of deficiency. B vitamins provide energy and support stress hormones but each B vitamin has a specific role, for example vitamin B5 is important for stress management whereas vitamin B6 is crucial for happy periods. In addition, vitamin B12 is often missing in vegan and vegetarian diets but often deficient in those with IBD.
I can offer a fantastic test in clinic (a urine test) which measures nutrient deficiencies, particularly B vitamins, allowing us to hone in on where your diet needs to change the most or perhaps where supplementation would benefit you the most.
In addition simple blood and stool tests can also be used to determine food intolerances or allergies or help us to identify if you are not absorbing the nutrients needed but are taking in through your diet.
As part of our time together I can guide you through these functional tests, finding the ones most appropriate for you and your current symptoms. These tests can then either be done at home or through your GP with the results sent back directly to you.
By analysing your current diet and using the results from your functional tests, I can get a good idea of your current nutrient status. There is no ‘magic’ diet that works for everyone with IBD but I can help you identify foods that cause you flare-ups. We can then include foods that will help calm inflammation and heal the gut lining, this should then help you to manage your IBD, reduce flare-ups and their effects and ultimately work towards remission.
This information will be a good starting point but we also need to take into consideration your lifestyle as well as your hormone and bacterial profile. This will then give us a bigger picture and help me to understand and identify the mediators and triggers for your symptoms.
The takeaway message from this is that we are what we eat – you can either create an environment that will optimise your gut health or one that will increase inflammation and exacerbate your symptoms.
Processed, refined and high sugar foods are inflammatory and will also feed harmful bacteria. You need to choose foods that will improve gut health, heal any potential damage to the gut and ultimately reduce flare-ups.
Establishing balanced gut friendly nutrition is key - the easiest way to find out what works for you is to start by analysing your current dietary habits, discover potential nutrient deficiencies and malabsorption issues. With the use of functional tests we can decide what would personally benefit your digestive system.
I can create a personalised plan that is unique to your body and lifestyle.
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By looking at your nutritional profile as well as your hormonal and gut bacterial balance I can design a programme that is right for you, with the overall aim to create a healthy happy gut.
If you are eating food that is low in nutrients and high in refined sugars, such as processed foods, this can then feed and encourage the growth of harmful bacteria inside your gut.
If you are eating lots of processed foods or foods that are low in nutrients and fibre, you may not be eating enough of the foods that help the beneficial bacteria inside your gut to grow.
We need the beneficial bacteria to proliferate in order for them to provide all the healthful benefits to us that they can, such as creating B vitamins for our energy systems or creating short chain fatty acids, which are important for colon health.
Bacteria live throughout our body, but it is said that the ones in our gut have the biggest impact on our health. If your microbiome becomes unbalanced, then the harmful microbiome can take over and cause many problems.
As Hippocrates once said, “All disease begins in the gut.” Several disease processes can be turned on if the microbiome becomes imbalanced and often the resulting symptoms will seem to have nothing to do with the health of our gut.
Research has shown there are links between our gut bacteria and health conditions such as inflammatory bowel disease, obesity, diabetes, mental health disorders, autoimmune conditions, constipation, diarrhoea and skin conditions to name a few.
The number and types of bacteria that we have in our bodies can be thought of like a fingerprint. Unique to the individual. It is estimated that the number of bacterial cells within the human body can range between 30 to 50 trillion in each individual and that we can have between 500 and 1000 different types of bacteria in each of us, some beneficial to us and some not but they can control our brain function, our digestion, our mood, our immune system, hormone balance and our metabolism etc.
The food we eat plays a large part in the health of your gut. It can either support the growth of your beneficial bacteria or it can cause harmful gut bacteria to proliferate. The health of your gut can then determine how you extract the nutrients from the food you eat and even how you store body fat.
Bacteria may also influence your behaviour via the 100 million neurons in your gut. This is the reason your gut is also known as your second brain.
Researchers speculate that any disruption to the normal, healthy balance of bacteria in the gut can cause the immune system to overreact and contribute to inflammation of the gastrointestinal tract, in turn leading to the development of symptoms of disease that occur not only throughout your body, but also your brain.
The gut-brain connection is no joke; it can link anxiety to stomach problems and vice versa. Have you ever had a "gut-wrenching" experience? Do certain situations make you "feel nauseous"? Have you ever felt "butterflies" in your stomach? We use these expressions for a reason. The gastrointestinal tract is sensitive to emotion. Anger, anxiety, sadness, elation — all of these feelings (and others) can trigger symptoms in the gut.
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The brain has a direct effect on the stomach and intestines. For example, the very thought of eating can release the stomach's juices before food gets there. This connection goes both ways. A troubled intestine can send signals to the brain, just as a troubled brain can send signals to the gut. Therefore, a person's stomach or intestinal distress can be the cause or the product of anxiety, stress, or depression. That's because the brain and the gastrointestinal (GI) system are intimately connected.
It is difficult to try to heal a distressed gut without considering the role of stress and emotion. Psychosocial factors influence the actual physiology of the gut, as well as symptoms. In other words, stress (or depression or other psychological factors) can affect movement and contractions of your gut, make inflammation worse, or perhaps make you more susceptible to infection.
How can you harm your gut bacteria? By using antibiotics, over the counter products/medications (mouthwash, antacids, painkillers). Changes in public hygiene – cleaners, handwash, antibacterial everything. Exposure to pollutants – pesticides, herbicides etc. Sterilized foods eg. milk, artificial food colouring. Increased consumption of carbohydrates – particularly refined. Bacteria feed on sugar, particularly pathogenic bacteria that have gained the upper hand.
Stress, poor diet choices, radiation treatment, and chemotherapy all affect the health of our bacteria.
How can we help the good bacteria flourish? The first step is to eat a well-balanced diet. Foods rich in fibre such as fruits, vegetables and whole grains, as well as those that have a prebiotic or probiotic effect (like kefir or yogurt) are good for gut health. Probiotics or prebiotics support microbial health by helping to restore balance to the gut. These are foods that contain live beneficial (probiotic) bacteria and, in the case of prebiotics, contain substances like specific types of fiber that nurture the growth of probiotic bacteria.
Beneficial bacteria may also protect against the upset stress causes to sleep. Recent research shows that a specific strain of beneficial bacteria may help blunt the effects of stress on sleep.
So how can we identify what bacteria we have in our guts and the levels that are present? I use a fantastic and very comprehensive stool test in clinic. It is the fastest and easiest way to get all of this information and more. The functional stool test is sent directly to you, for you to do at home. You then send the completed test directly to the laboratory who send me your results so that I can analyse them for you. We then go through the results together so that we will know what to tackle first.
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By working together, we can analyse the food you are eating, test for nutritional deficiencies as well as the current types and levels of your own gut bacteria and whether or not they are affecting other areas of your body such as hormonal balance. I will then create a personalised plan to help get your gut bacteria back into balance and then support the growth of your beneficial bacteria
The number and diversity of our gut bacteria can impact many areas of our health including digestive health, hormonal balance, mental health, body weight and whether our immune system is working efficiently. It is all about balance.
Working together we can use functional tests such as a comprehensive stool test to discover the current health and balance of your gut bacteria as well as other areas of your body.
Once this information is known we can tailor a programme to have a positive effect on the beneficial bacteria in your gut to help them grow, be healthy and happy.e to learn more about optimal gut health
We have discussed the importance of ensuring the food you eat is balanced and nutritious in order to support your body and allow it to function optimally. It is also important to understand the balance of your hormones.
Both men and women have and need hormones such as progesterone, testosterone and oestrogen, but it is not difficult for them to become imbalanced through our lifestyle choices, our nutrition or the medications we take for example.
Excess hormones of any type in your body such as cortisol, will disrupt the way your body works, including the digestive system. It is also possible that if the ratios between hormones such as progesterone and oestrogen is off, your bowels will be sluggish and could in turn cause bloating, cramping and diarrhoea.
There are many reasons for your hormones to become imbalanced, such as having an under or overactive thyroid, being overweight, taking birth control medications or increased toxic exposure as well as simply having inadequate sleep, a poor diet or being exposed to chronic stress. All these things can imbalance your hormones which can have a negative impact on your gut health.
We’ve discussed briefly some of the consequences of being exposed to continuous stress. It may also lead to overexposure of cortisol and other stress hormones which may then cause symptoms including constipation and diarrhoea as well as depression, weight gain and sleep issues.
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Hormonal imbalances is something that we will look at together as part of your programme. I use simple functional blood or urine tests that will help to identify the levels of hormones within your body. The results from these tests will be considered when creating a personalised nutrition and / or supplement plan which we will use to help re-balance your hormones.
Natural supplements such as black cohosh, red clover and evening primrose oil have been used for a long time to help combat hormonal imbalance symptoms, but lifestyle changes are also very important to look at.
It is a complicated relationship between our hormones and digestive system but by incorporating simple lifestyle changes we can work towards reducing hormonal imbalances. These changes can include a suitable exercise programme, stress management techniques and reduced toxic exposure. In addition your nutrition plan can include specific foods to help balance hormones or support your stress response which over time (recommended 12 weeks) we can start to bring the body back into a more balanced state.
Hormone imbalances impact on your digestive health. Your hormones can become imbalanced through many ways including specific health conditions such as thyroid dysfunction, medications, nutrient deficiencies, stress and lack of sleep.
Working out which hormones are imbalanced and the specific triggers for your hormone imbalance is key in order to try to rebalance and help other systems recover such as your digestive system.
Through the use of simple functional tests such as blood and urine we can discover if any of your hormones are imbalanced.
Once this is known we can start to re-balance through the use of specific foods, supplements and easy to incorporate lifestyle changes.
Your easy to follow plan will be broken down into stages to help guide you along the way so that it can fit easily into your life making positive changes to your health long term.
Find out how to achieve optimal gut health in 3 easy steps
Recommended Reading:
Digestive Rescue: Part 3 of 3