Understanding Gut Health: 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.
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.
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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.
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.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.
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.
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.
Understanding your symptoms, their main causes and how we can help reduce them is important but what will really make an impact is identifying the contributors, the triggers and the root cause of your symptoms and if possible of your inflammatory bowel disease (IBD).
The exact cause of the IBD called ulcerative colitis is unknown but emerging evidence shows that gut bacteria play a primary role in the development of the disease. Some researchers believe that imbalances in our intestinal flora (gut bacteria) may be at the root of IBD.
Immune cells in the walls of the intestinal tract are engaged in continual “cross talk” with the trillions of bacteria that inhabit our gut. When beneficial bacteria are suppressed and harmful bacteria proliferate, the intestinal defense system may go into “overdrive,” resulting in an over exuberant immune response, triggering autoimmunity and consequent inflammation.
As discussed previously, our microbiome is just like our fingerprints, we all have different fingerprints and we all have a different microbiome. However, unlike our fingerprints, our microbiome can be influenced and changed by a wide variety of factors. These will include things such as how you were born and fed as a baby, what medications you’ve taken, the type of lifestyle you lead, the level of stress in your life and the food you eat.
Looking at the main contributors such as poor nutrition, that can imbalance gut bacteria and therefore theoretically cause IBD, is key to being able to restore the health of your gut and ultimately have a positive impact on your IBD remission as well as other areas of your health.
Ensuring that we eat the right foods in the right amounts specific to your individual needs is essential for a healthy long life. What your body requires, changes as we get older, for example, we need different nutrients in different quantities such as more vitamin D and calcium.
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The role of your diet on both the development and the treatment of your IBD cannot be underestimated. Major changes in the Western Diet have accompanied rises in the incidence of IBD over the past 75 years. Changes to your diet in both the short and the long term can have an influence on microbial profiles such as our gut bacteria. Dietary changes will also affect the health of the bacteria within your gut.
The introduction of refined sugar and chemical-laden foods have probably fueled the rise of IBD. Diets that are high in highly-refined carbohydrates or sugars can cause the good and bad bacteria in the gut to become unbalanced. In fact, if you eat large quantities of these highly-processed foods there is potential to then develop leaky gut syndrome, a condition in which the tight junctions in the large intestine open up and allow bacteria and their toxins to get through. This, in turn, can elicit an auto-immune inflammatory response.
By reducing your intake of simple sugars, such as those found in honey, desserts, cakes and concentrated fruit juices plus artificial sweeteners, you will help your beneficial gut bacteria but you may also reduce the chance of diarrhoea. Simple sugars and sweeteners are known to increase the chance or even cause diarrhoea, a well known symptom of IBD.
Ubiquitous trans-fats and refined omega-6 vegetable oils are thought to promote inflammation and greasy fried foods are also known to increase gas, bloating and diarrhoea. At the same time most of us also have inadequate intake of anti-inflammatory omega-3s which help to heal the gut.
A diet that is low in fruit and vegetables will also be low in fibre. Fibre feeds our beneficial gut bacteria and helps them to grow as well as helping the passage of our food through the intestines which is useful if you are suffering from constipation. If you have IBD and are suffering from diarrhoea then you may need to restrict foods high in fibre, such as fresh fruits and vegetables and wholegrains, as these can aggravate symptoms (especially when the intestines are inflamed). However, fibre is a very important part of our diet as it can also be a prebiotic which feeds your beneficial bacteria. Therefore you can try cooking high fibre foods before eating: rather than eliminating these necessary foods from your diet, thoroughly cook fruits and vegetables, and avoid eating them raw.
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During a flare-up it is may be necessary to avoid things like oats and corn as well as legumes, vegetables and fruit with high fibre content (in particular cabbage, sprouts, citrus fruit, plums, grapes and apricots). Fruit and vegetables you are eating will need to be peeled, cleared of seeds and then cooked e.g. stewed apples are suitable and a great healer of the gut due to the pectin content.
It is also important that you try to make your diet as colourful as possible. The different colours contain different micronutrients and particularly phytochemicals which benefit your gut bacteria as well as the structure of your gut.
Consuming a diet high in polyphenols has a beneficial impact on your gut bacteria. If your diet is lacking in these types of foods then the health of your gut bacteria will not be optimal. Polyphenol-rich foods are excellent to include as part of your overall gut-healing plan along with some of the other heavy-hitters like probiotics and prebiotics.
Polyphenols are naturally occurring compounds found in plants. Many of these plants make up our food supply, including fruits, vegetables, coffee, tea, and wine. Once consumed, only about 5-10% of polyphenols are directly absorbed in the small intestine, while the rest make their way to the colon to be broken down by our gut bacteria into metabolites, which then exert their important physiological effects.
Researchers are now discovering that the relationship between polyphenols and the gut microbiota is a two-way street; that is, the polyphenols positively change the composition of the gut bacteria, and the gut bacteria are responsible for metabolizing the polyphenols into their bioactive metabolites which then benefit our health.
When considering IBD a healthy diet is more about what you keep in your diet, rather than what you cut out. Initially you may need to exclude foods to find out what triggers your symptoms. However, if you exclude foods, but find no real difference in your symptoms then you can try to reintroduce them slowly back into your diet.
To determine which foods tend to provoke symptoms and flare-ups, it can be useful to keep a food diary. This can help you to see how your diet relates to your symptoms.
Within the clinic, I can help you discover which foods particularly aggravate your symptoms and advise on those foods which will be important for you to include for your gut health. Whilst looking at your current lifestyle and your own exposure to stress, I will also work with your food diary making changes that will fit easily with your life. Over time we can try various different combinations to discover what works for you and what doesn’t.
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A classic mistake people tend to make is thinking they can create their own food groups, but without properly understanding how food impacts their health and the health of their gut bacteria they end up aggravating their IBD symptoms.
When considering IBD, a healthy diet is more about what you keep in your diet, rather than what you cut out. Initially you may need to exclude foods to find out what triggers your symptoms. However if you exclude foods but find no real difference in your symptoms then we can try to reintroduce them slowly back into your diet.
By looking at what you are currently keeping in your diet and more importantly what you have left out, will help determine the right course of action.
Using a food diary, tracking symptoms, looking at lifestyle and stress levels as well as using functional stool, blood and urine tests will all help determine the best personalised plan for you. A plan that fits in with your life. By making small gut healthy changes specific to your IBD you can enjoy creating a healthier and happier gut environment.
Find out how to achieve optimal gut health in 3 easy steps
Recommended Reading:
Digestive Rescue: Part 3 of 3