It Starts With Food: Discover the Whole30 and Change Your Life in Unexpected Ways (10 page)

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.

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. Let’s use another analogy to show how a healthy intestinal lining manages the process of selective absorption.

Think of your body as an exclusive members-only nightclub in the rough part of town. At Club Body, there is a security force on patrol inside the club at all times (immune cells circulating throughout the body) that watches over the members and deals with any riffraff that happens to sneak in. But the big, muscular bouncers at the doors (a collection of immune cells that form a part of your intestinal barrier) are your first line of defense: they decide who can enter Club Body (members) and who can’t (anyone else).

Some substances—properly digested food, for example—are recognized as members and allowed to come inside, while strangers and troublemakers (like bacteria and viruses) are denied entry. Other things we can’t make use of inside, like undigested food and fiber, are also turned away.

The bouncers take their jobs very seriously, as experience has taught them that
all
outsiders have the potential to cause a lot of trouble if they get inside. There are only so many ways into the club, however, so as long as the bouncers guard all the doors and screen out any unsavory characters, things inside should (theoretically) stay healthy and safe.

Since keeping your inside healthy and secure is so important, your body has assigned your security force some additional agents—a group of unlikely allies on the outside. Your body is home to trillions (yes,
trillions
) of bacteria, and most of them are in your gut. Over the course of a very long time, our immune system has developed a working relationship, an alliance of sorts, with some of these bacteria. Their presence does not trigger an immune response—they’re considered trusted friends, and are a vital component of a healthy human body. We consider them our BBFs (Best Bacterial Friends), and we’d rather go without our big toes than give up these “friendlies”—they are
that
important.

Our alliance with these friendly bacteria is largely what helps regulate our delicately balanced immune activity. These bacterial undercover agents hang out in the intestine just outside the door to Club Body, helping your security staff by discouraging the bad guys from loitering and starting trouble. Friendly gut bacteria help us digest our food, absorb micronutrients, manufacture vitamins, stabilize immune function, and generally take up space that would otherwise be snapped up by pathogenic bacteria.

So it seems as if your body (and your club) has a pretty good system for keeping itself healthy and safe. You’ve got the secure structure of the club itself (your intestinal lining), bouncers at the doors (immune cells in the lining), and a security force on the inside (circulating immune cells). Plus, you’ve got your friendly bacterial allies (BBFs) on the outside, helping to maintain law and order.

Your body’s gut defense system generally works very well.

Until it doesn’t.

There are a few ways bad guys can get into this exclusive nightclub. They might assault a bouncer, or wear a mask pretending to be a member, or pry open a locked (unused) door that was left unguarded. Or, if your gut is leaky (picture a sieve), all the doors and windows are wide open, and there’s no way to control who comes in. This spells big-time trouble for the in-house security force.

In this situation, your club is no longer healthy and safe. Letting bad guys in (through what should be tightly controlled entry points) leads to fights and destruction of property and could eventually overwhelm the rest of the security staff inside.

Once they’re in, the bad guys run rampant through the
whole body
.

And that is a very bad situation—but do you want to know the worst part?

Poor food choices are to blame.

Poor food choices flood your gut with bad guys, overwhelming your immune system. Bad food is what brings in the hoodlums, impersonators, and lock pickers, all of whom do what they are biologically designed to do—get in and wreak havoc. You create this condition of increased gut permeability, digestive distress, and systemic inflammation just by choosing the wrong foods. And it’s not your fault, because you didn’t even know you were doing it. (Not to worry—we’ll explain which foods disrupt your gut in Part 3.)

Some overly optimistic folks may wonder at this point if there could be an
advantage
to increased intestinal permeability. We get where they’re coming from—like maybe if that barrier were a little more lenient, you could potentially absorb more nutrients, or digest your food a little bit faster. But that’s not how the body is meant to work. Again, let’s talk about skin. Is there
ever
a biological advantage to having an open wound? The answer is, of course, no.

Increased gut permeability is
always
a problem because it means your body no longer has control over what comes in and what stays out. 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 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.

In fact, this third Good Food standard is directly linked to the fourth, because increased intestinal permeability provokes systemic inflammation. (You’ll learn why that’s bad soon enough.)

One last thing—and the final nail in your leaky gut coffin. Remember how excessive abdominal fat (central obesity, or what the media calls being “apple shaped”) is a clear risk factor for heart disease, high blood pressure, stroke, and diabetes?

Deposition of visceral fat (which contributes to that sexy apple shape) is one of the
direct
effects of increased gut permeability.

Over time, with ongoing gut leakage, your liver and surrounding fat deposits act like a spongy trap for some of the bad guys that get in. This leads to significant inflammation in those tissues, as well as excessive deposits of fat in both the liver and surrounding adipose tissue.

That means your leaky gut also plays a major role (along with cortisol) in your stubborn belly fat and directly contributes to your risk of conditions like heart disease, high blood pressure, stroke, and diabetes.

We should have your attention by now—but once again, there is good news. Much like with your hormones, even after decades of poor diet and in the face of a gut leaking like a sieve, in most cases, the situation is all
highly reversible
. You can heal your intestinal lining, reinstate a high-functioning security system, and restore a thriving population of healthy bacteria if you do the same simple thing:

“The thought of resetting my system so it didn’t crave sugar or carbs was my original Whole30 motivation. I had no clue that God would use the Whole30 to bring total alleviation of my pain! I’ve been diagnosed with fibromyalgia, osteoarthritis, IBS, and other issues. At one point, I was on four or five different medications!
 
But by my third week of the Whole30, all of my joint pain, bone pain, and muscle pain was gone. My mind was clear. I was focused. I also happened to lose fourteen pounds and kicked my cravings, but those were minor compared to having complete relief from all of the other issues.”

—
Bethann M.,
Pleasant Lake, Indiana

Our final Good Food standard, clearly linked to the third standard, states that your food choices should support immune function and minimize inflammation.

When we say “support immune function,” we mean that your food choices should result in a well-rested, highly-effective defense system. In other words, food should not cause excessive ongoing immune activity, also known as
systemic inflammation
. (More specifically, we’re concerned with
chronic
systemic inflammation—the stuff that goes on for weeks, months, or even years.)

You might have heard of systemic inflammation before, in a headline or a media sound bite, but you probably don’t have a very clear picture of what it actually is, or why it matters.

Let’s tackle the first part.

Inflammation, put simply, is the immune system doing its job—it is your body’s protective attempt to stop injury in its tracks and initiate recovery. Inflammation indicates a mobilization of your immune system; it’s a call to arms. Whether the damaged tissue is a result of infection from bacterial invaders, overuse, or physical trauma, the purpose of the inflammation that ensues is to prevent additional damage and repair the damage already done.

But what starts out as a healthy response can have adverse effects if it persists for too long or spreads too far. Since there are a few different subsets of inflammation (some healthy, some not so healthy), we’ll give you the rundown here: