Resources for the autoimmune leaky gut diet

The leaky gut diet, also known as the autoimmune diet or anti-inflammatory diet, changes lives. Removing inflammatory foods allows an inflamed and damaged gut to repair, which in turn allows damage in the body and brain to recover and repair. However, despite the phenomenal success rate of the leaky gut diet, it can look very daunting, if not impossible, to the beginner.

In a nutshell, the leaky gut or autoimmune diet is free of grains, dairy, eggs, all sweeteners, nightshades (potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant), and processed foods. What’s left is a diet that focuses on plenty of vegetables, cultured vegetables, such as sauerkraut, and healthy meats and fats. You should eat regularly enough to avoid drops in blood sugar and drink plenty of filtered or spring water.

Because the diet is rather stringent, grabbing a quick meal while you’re out or conjuring a meal from an empty fridge is tricky. The most important strategy for success on the leaky gut diet is planning and preparation. You have to be one step ahead of yourself when it comes to future meals. Also, as the diet can be so new to people, simply knowing what to eat is a brain tease in itself.

Following are some resources to help you embark with confidence on the leaky gut diet.

Autoimmune Paleo Cookbook

The author created this book as a result of her own journey on the autoimmune diet and the significant recovery it brought her. Seeing a need for support with menu planning and recipes, she created the Autoimmune Paleo Cookbook.

Allergy-free Menu Planners

This is another support service in the way of planning and recipes. The Allergy-free Menu Planner sends you monthly menu plans that include shopping lists and menus for every night of the week.

Celiac.com

If you’re new to eating gluten-free, the lists of legal and illegal foods can be confusing. Gluten is lurking in many seemingly innocuous foods, such as condiments, sauces, and even airline peanuts. Celiac.com is a site that details what is and isn’t safe on a gluten-free diet and provides information on gluten-free sources.

Cultures for Health

Consuming cultured foods and drinks is an essential part of the leaky gut diet to help restore a healthy balance of gut flora. To the newcomer, fermenting, culturing, and kefiring can seem foreign and even risky. Cultures for Health provides plenty of easy how-to articles and videos, as well as starter cultures. You also may be able to find starter cultures locally through food co-ops or on Craigslist.org. Pickl-It supplies airtight culturing containers for a genuine ferment that is low in histamines, compounds that can trigger inflammation.

Grass-fed meats

The ideal types of meat on the leaky gut diet are pastured meats raised on small farms. The animals are raised ethically and on diets nature intended, and are free from hormones, antibiotics, and GMO feeds. Because grass-fed meats have become so popular, you may be able to find them on small farms in your area or at health food stores. US Wellness Meats is an online source that can ship a wide variety of frozen pastured meats to your home.

Coconut oil

Coconut oil is a staple on the leaky gut diet, taking the place of butter for many cooking needs (unless you are sensitive, which some people are). Thankfully coconut oil is becoming more commonplace on the shelves of health food stores and even Costco. Tropical Traditions was one of the first to offer coconut oil for sale online and continues to offer premium oils.

These are just a few resources to get you started. For more advice on the leaky gut diet and nutritional compounds to facilitate your wellness journey, contact my office.

Can your brain breathe? How to oxygenate your brain

Even though you can breathe normally your brain may not be getting enough oxygen. Lack of oxygen in the brain is not something the average person can recognize. However it can cause poor brain function and increase the risk of vascular dementia, the second most common form of dementia after Alzheimer’s. The brain can be hungry for oxygen years or decades before dementia sets in. Risk factors include high or low blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, smoking, alcoholism, and high cholesterol.

By learning to recognize symptoms you can take action to increase oxygenation of your brain, improve brain function, and reduce your risk of vascular dementia.

How to tell whether your brain can breathe

The brain contains one of the body’s most dense networks of blood vessels, which carry oxygen. It is very susceptible to any hindrances in blood flow. When the flow of oxygen-rich blood to the brain is hindered, brain cells die and the brain degenerates.

Many conditions can affect blood flow to the brain, things not normally associated with brain function. They include:

• Smoking
• Chronic inflammation (such as chronic pain, an autoimmune disease, or other inflammatory disorder)
• Low blood sugar (hypoglycemia)
• High blood sugar (insulin resistance)
• Hypothyroidism
• Diabetes
• Anemia
• Chronic stress
• Aging

Symptoms that may alert you to poor flow of blood and oxygen to the brain include cold hands and feet, becoming easily fatigued, brain fog, erectile dysfunction, and chronic toenail and fingernail fungus.

How to help your brain breathe better

Two of the most effective ways to oxygenate the brain are to lower inflammation and stabilize blood sugar. An anti-inflammatory diet is designed to lower overall inflammation in the body, which can boost blood flow to the brain. Be sure to eat a hearty breakfast with protein, eat regularly enough to avoid blood sugar lows (but avoid overeating), and avoid foods that spike your blood sugar, such as sweets or refined carbohydrates. Just focusing on an anti-inflammatory whole foods diet can go a long way to improving blood flow to the brain.

Certain herbs improve oxygenation to the brain. They include Ginkgo biloba, vinpocetine, and Butcher’s broom.

How to exercise to improve blood flow to the brain

Exercise is a great way to improve overall blood flow. High-intensity interval training in particular dilates blood vessels, lowers inflammation, and improves blood flow to the brain. This involves reaching your maximum heart rate with just a short but vigorous burst of exercise, resting, and repeating. It’s important, however, to work within your ability and avoid overtraining or you’ll negate the benefits. Even just a few minutes of high-intensity exercise can improve blood flow in the brain.

Improving blood flow to the brain may also include managing hypothyroidism, anemia, or other conditions. The book Why Isn’t My Brain Working? by Datis Kharrazian covers the topic of brain oxygenation. Ask my office for advice on improving brain health.

Quick and easy tip to avoid sitting disease

Even if you exercise regularly and eat a healthy diet, researchers are increasingly finding just the act of sitting for long hours—something many of us are forced to do for work—still predisposes you to many modern ailments. However, new findings show you don’t have to give up your desk job to stay healthy as long as you set an alarm that frequently reminds you to stand up.

Long days of sitting are linked with increased risk of heart disease, excess belly fat, chronic inflammation, insulin resistance, and diabetes. The metabolic changes predisposing us to these conditions happen quickly, within 24 hours.

Fortunately for the desk jockeys, former NASA researcher Joan Vernikos, who studied the negative effects of sitting and how to counteract them, presents evidence for a sitting antidote in her book Sitting Kills, Moving Heals. Vernikos’ research found you can counteract the negative effects of sitting by standing up. A lot.

Best results are achieved by simply standing up every 20 minutes. It’s best to set an online alarm so you don’t forget because stretching out your intervals to even every 35 minutes provides only a fraction of the benefit. What is even more interesting is that standing every 20 minutes is more effective than going for a daily walk in terms of ameliorating the effects of long hours in the chair (although daily walks are extremely beneficial for a host of other reasons.)

Why standing up frequently helps combat sitting disease

The key to standing up frequently is that it forces your body to interact with gravity. One thing the space program has learned is the body and brain require gravity in order to function. Vernikos saw the lack of gravitational forces that sickened and prematurely aged astronauts had the same effect on bedridden people. NASA researchers learned a gravity-free environment accelerates the aging process by 10 times. The same mechanisms that cause one to age quickly in space lie behind the increased risk of disease from sitting long hours.

Although regular strength training workouts, high-intensity interval sessions, and even daily walks have been associated with dramatically lower risks of disease and dementia, the key to combating sitting’s detrimental effects is constant activity throughout each day that forces your body to work against gravity. Vernikos’ findings show gravity plays a role in health and aging, so use it to your advantage as frequently as possible.

This is good news for people who are not willing or able to stand all day at a standing desk (Vernikos says standing all day is also not healthy; we are meant to move through a variety of positions throughout the day). Nor do you necessarily have to build or invest in a treadmill desk. According to Vernikos, humans are meant to squat, kneel, and move consistently throughout the day.

The sitting disease antidote protocol

To combat the negative health effects of sitting disease, do the following:

• Find an online alarm or alarm app that goes off every 20 minutes, reminding you to stand. Sitting and standing 35 times in a row does not deliver the same effect as spreading it out in regular intervals.
   
• If possible, work against gravity more vigorously at your 20 minute intervals by squatting or doing squat jumps.
   
• Move in your chair and maintain good posture with shoulders back as much as possible.
   
• Incorporate “non-exercise” activity throughout the day, such as reaching for things, bending, kneeling, walking, lifting, and so on. Basically, avoid what is convenient for what is more active.

Are you in chronic pain? Go to the root cause

Chronic pain can drain you of energy, joy, and hope and make everyday activities seem like insurmountable obstacles. Over-the-counter anti-inflammatory medications, prescription pain meds, and steroids may bring temporary relief, but they come with complications and do not address the underlying causes of chronic pain. For more genuine and permanent relief, it’s important to address what is causing the pain to be chronic.

Is inflammation causing your chronic pain?

One of the most common causes of chronic pain is inflammation. Inflammation is the result of an immune response to remove harmful compounds, including damaged cells. It is necessary for healing and protecting the body, however runaway inflammation keeps the immune system on red alert and can cause chronic pain anywhere (or everywhere) in the body. One of the most important things to address if you suffer from chronic pain is inflammation.

Anti-inflammatory diet for pain

Following an anti-inflammatory diet is foundational to dampening inflammation. Many everyday foods are actually very inflammatory and people can experience considerable relief by removing these foods from their diet. For instance, two of the most common pro-inflammatory foods are gluten and dairy, something most people eat at almost every meal. Many people have found considerable pain relief simply by eliminating these foods from their diet. You can find out which foods are inflammatory for you through a food sensitivity panel or simply by following the anti-inflammatory diet for about a month and then reintroducing foods one at a time every 72 hours and monitoring for reactions.

Some people find a group of vegetables called “nightshades” cause pain and inflammation in their joints. Nightshades include eggplant, potatoes, peppers, tomatoes, tomatillos, and hot pepper products (cayenne, Tabasco, etc.). Simply removing nightshades from the diet has brought relief from joint pain for many.

However, don’t ditch vegetables completely. Ample vegetable consumption, including veggies that are cultured, is a key component to a pain-busting diet.

Ditch the sugar to tame chronic pain

In conjunction with removing anti-inflammatory foods, it’s also important the diet work to stabilize blood sugar. Blood sugar that is too low, too high, or that swings between the two will contribute to inflammation. One of the best ways to stabilize blood sugar is to ditch the sugar and refined carbohydrates. Not only does the sweet stuff destabilize blood sugar, it also directly causes inflammation. Eliminating or minimizing sweets is vital to taming chronic pain.

Unwinding vicious cycles of pain

The problem with chronic pain is it can create vicious cycles both in the immune system and in the brain that perpetuate pain. In other words, the pain itself stimulates the body to create more pain. Fortunately, certain nutritional compounds have been shown to help unwind these vicious cycles. They include therapeutic doses of emulsified and highly absorbable vitamin D3, omega 3 fatty acids, turmeric, and resveratrol. Other natural compounds and therapies can also help with pain relief while you work on bringing down inflammation naturally.

Ask my office for more information on alleviating your chronic pain by addressing the underlying cause.