It Starts With Food:
Discover the Whole30 and Change Your Life in Unexpected Ways
Disclaimer:
I am not a medical doctor. Everything I share here are things I have learned from others and from personal experimentation. I am simply sharing what has helped me. Hopefully, there are a few nuggets that help you on your personal journey to become healthy and serve the Lord with all your might. If you have pre-existing medical conditions, check with a doctor (a functional medicine doctor if possible).
I am not a medical doctor. Everything I share here are things I have learned from others and from personal experimentation. I am simply sharing what has helped me. Hopefully, there are a few nuggets that help you on your personal journey to become healthy and serve the Lord with all your might. If you have pre-existing medical conditions, check with a doctor (a functional medicine doctor if possible).
The book It Starts With Food explains how certain foods create systemic, low-grade inflammation in our body. When this happens, our body is constantly working to reduce this inflammation (using a lot of our available energy). Because so much of our energy is going into removing this low-grade inflammation, there is not much capacity left to heal injuries or illnesses as quickly.
By removing these foods from our regular diet (we still eat some of these on special occasions), we allow our body to focus on healing. If we don't, it would be like hitting every possible pothole while driving our car. The cumulative damage is going to cause long-term problems.
Some of the key foods that cause inflammation are:
- Sugar
- Preservatives
- Wheat
- Legumes/beans
- Alcohol
- Dairy
- Artificial foods (MSG, artificial sweeteners, etc.)
- Vegetable oils (olive oil, avocado oil, and coconut oil are OK. The rest are not good for you.)
This is not a cure-all, but it definitely helps the immune system to focus its full capacity on the primary problem.
Getting the RIGHT foods to help you repair is also important, but removing the bad foods is MORE important as a first step.
Why? This illustration from the book helped my understanding:
“Your small intestine is the key to a healthy digestive tract...The small intestine functions as a “holding tank,” keeping your food in place until it’s fully digested, but its most important job is to help you effectively absorb nutrients. Think of the intestinal lining as similar to the skin on your body—a highly flexible, resilient, semi-permeable membrane that acts as a barrier between your insides and the outside world. Skin is designed to keep good stuff (fluids, tissues, etc.) inside your body and bad stuff (bacteria, viruses, etc.) out. Your small intestine does pretty much the same thing—except on a much larger scale... your gut is so critical to your immune system.
IT STARTS IN YOUR GUT
About 70 percent to 80 percent of your entire immune system is stationed in your gut. That’s because there are all kinds of nasty beasties that would love to use your body as base camp, and most of them come in with your food and drink. So your immune system fortifies your intestinal wall with immune cells, which seek out and destroy pathogens trying to get through the intestinal lining. Any bad guys who make it past these immune cells into the bloodstream then have to travel through the liver, where even more immune cells are on hand to protect you. If they get past all of those defenses and manage to infect other tissues, a full-body immune response is triggered. Think of food that is still inside your small intestine (in the lumen) as technically still outside your body. That’s right, until your food passes through the lining of your intestine and into your bloodstream, it is technically not yet in your body. Here is another critical point: The entire process of digestion takes place while your food is still inside the long tube that passes from one end of your digestive tract to the other. If undigested food somehow finds its way into the body, well, it’s as good as wasted. Useless. And probably harmful. Keeping the right stuff in and the wrong stuff out is critical to a healthy gut. Let’s go back to talking about skin. Think about what would happen if your skin was “leaky”—for example, if you crashed your bike and had major road rash. That road rash would expose your unprotected insides to the outside world. If some bacteria found their way inside, they could cause a pretty ugly infection, which your immune system would then have to work hard to fight off. Well, a similar thing could happen if your gut was damaged and “leaky” to the extent that it was no longer able to keep the bad stuff out. If that were the case, your immune system would (again) have to deal with the foreign invaders that got “inside,” where they didn’t belong.
LEAKY GUT SYNDROME
Leaky gut syndrome is not generally recognized by mainstream medical practitioners, which is probably frustrating for those of you who experience the consequences on a daily basis. Leaky gut (a simple way of saying “ongoing increased intestinal permeability”) occurs when the intestinal lining is abnormally permeable or structurally damaged, leaving the small intestine unable to do its job of nutrient absorption while maintaining inside-outside order. As a result, some bacteria and their toxins, undigested food, and waste may “leak” out of the intestines into the bloodstream, triggering an immune reaction. This is how leaky gut syndrome is related to immune-mediated problems in the body. So if the lining of your gut is the physical barrier between your insides and the outside world, it should be clear why the integrity of this barrier is pretty darn important. You must be able to maintain control over what is allowed inside your body. Without that control, there is chaos, which starts in your digestive tract and spreads throughout the body. The good news is that a healthy gut is very well adapted to filtering out the bad guys while still absorbing the stuff from your food that you need.” (It Starts With Food, pg. 65-67)
Going one step further, consider what would happen to our skin if we had an injury, and every day we took some sandpaper to the injury. It would never heal. If our skin was healthy, we could handle sandpaper being rubbed on it (briefly) every now and then without any major problems. In the same way, if our gut is unhealthy and we continue to eat inflammatory foods, it will never heal. But if our gut is healthy, it is strong enough to handle eating a bad meal now and then.
Why is gut health important?
“Increased gut permeability (and the ensuing inflammatory chaos) is linked not only to intestinal inflammatory conditions like Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, and irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), but also to chronic diseases like cardiovascular disease and diabetes, hypersensitivities like asthma and allergies, and autoimmune conditions like Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, rheumatoid arthritis, and type 1 diabetes.” (It Starts With Food, pg. 71)
Getting the Right Foods:
Feeding our body the food that gives it the nutrients it needs to repair, build up the immune system, and create new cells is essential. The nutrients you give your body are the building blocks to keep you healthy. This book unpacks how different foods can positively help your body.
Self-Experimentation:
Healing injuries:
The author of this book had shared how cutting out inflammatory foods had helped a long-lasting injury to recover quickly. When I first read this book, I also had a 6-month-old shoulder injury that would not heal. Once I cut out all inflammatory foods it healed in 2 weeks.
Skin (Rosacea and Eczema):
For many years I have had problems with certain foods that flare up rosacea or eczema. However, if I regularly remove inflammatory foods, it reduces stress on my body and keeps flare-ups at bay.
Healthy gut for travel:
For my ministry, I need to travel a lot. I was ministering in Africa when I first read this book, so the food I could get when I traveled was not always the best. I needed my gut to be in prime health so that I could handle the occasional bad meal when I traveled and eat what my hosts put in front of me. This process took longer than 2 weeks, but my gut is far healthier now as a result of regularly removing inflammatory foods.
Creaky joints:
Foods that cause inflammation in your gut also create inflammation around your joints. Before I found this book, I was taking Glucosamine and Chondroitin for my joints which were already starting to creak before I was 40. Once I cut out sugar and these inflammatory foods (except for special occasions) my creaky joints went away. I was able to stop taking the supplements as well and my joints are better now than they have been in years. If I add sugar back in for just a couple of days, my hands will start having joint problems.
Weight Loss:
Removing foods that cause inflammation has made it much easier to maintain weight. Also, when trying to lose weight it is helpful to avoid things that spike your insulin. Anytime you eat something that spikes your insulin levels it shuts down fat burning because you are using the glucose or fructose for fuel. So, even though fruit is healthy, it is BAD for weight loss because of the natural sugars found in fruit. Worst offenders are bananas, apples, etc. that have high fructose. Berries do not have the same effect on your insulin levels so are usually ok for weight loss.
Brain Health:
Ever wonder why sweet food is so hard to avoid? Because of what happens in our brain. Sweets and foods that are unnaturally flavored cause our brain to be flooded with endorphins that make us feel good. The downside of this is that our brain can become addicted to sugar or these unnaturally flavored foods. When we are stressed, like someone addicted to smoking or alcohol, we turn to a substance that releases endorphins in our brain and helps us feel better: sugar. Just like any addiction, breaking it is difficult but rewarding. It is only by changing habits that our brain is rewired to learn to enjoy healthy foods. It takes time, but it is worth the battle. Whole foods do not create unhealthy addictive patterns, but sugar and foods that are unnaturally flavored do.
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