The Pegan Diet by Dr. Mark Hyman

Author:Dr. Mark Hyman [HYMAN, MD, MARK]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2021-02-23T00:00:00+00:00

PRINCIPLE 15

Eat for Gut Health

This is the decade, maybe even the century, of the microbiome. Who knew that poop was the key to health, weight loss, and longevity? Hippocrates did when he said, “All disease begins in the gut.” While the science of the microbiome is still in its infancy, practitioners of functional medicine have been treating complex chronic diseases by fixing the gut for decades—autoimmune disease, allergies, mood disorders, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, skin problems, headaches, weight issues, hormonal imbalances, and even autism. A fecal transplant, for instance, reduced autistic symptoms by 50 percent in one study, an improvement that lasted long-term.28

It turns out the microbiome is likely the most important regulator of our overall health. There are 100 trillion microbes in you, 10 times the number of your own cells, and 100 times your DNA. We have 20,000 genes. Your microbiome contains 2 to 5 million microbial genes, all making proteins, cell-signaling molecules, messengers of health or disease. Some scientists estimate that a third to half of all the molecules in our blood come from microbial metabolites. They interact with our genes, hormones, immune system, brain chemistry, and every single process in our biology. Our gut microbes also provide us with essential vitamins: vitamin K and biotin.

Sadly, our gut microbiome ain’t what it used to be. We eat gut-busting foods, live a gut-busting lifestyle, and take gut-busting drugs. Want to grow toxic weeds in your gut? Feed them a processed diet high in sugar and starch, food additives, and the microbiome-destroying weed killer glyphosate, used on 70 percent of all crops. Our diet is also low in food for the good bugs: prebiotic fibers and polyphenols (all the colorful medicinal compounds in plant foods). We also take too many gut-damaging antibiotics, acid blockers, anti-inflammatories like Advil, hormones, and steroids. Add to that environmental toxins from our food, air, and water, and our inner garden is a sorry place with too many disease-causing bugs and not enough healing bugs.

The bad bugs drive inflammation, which is at the root of almost all chronic diseases and obesity. Sixty percent of your immune system is in your gut, right under a one-cell-thin layer of gut lining. When we treat this lining unkindly, we develop a leaky gut, allowing food proteins, microbes, and microbial toxins to “leak” into our bloodstream, triggering our immune system to start fighting the foreign invaders. Your biology is collateral damage. We call this dysbiosis (as opposed to symbiosis), an imbalanced gut microbiome.

Every day we understand more and more about the link between chronic illness and gut dysbiosis. My journey toward understanding is not just theoretical. My own gut taught me much about what goes wrong and how to fix it. Twenty-five years ago, mercury toxicity damaged my intestinal microbiome, resulting in severe irritable bowel syndrome, bloating, and diarrhea. Getting the mercury out and healing my gut fixed it, but I guess I still had more to learn.

Things got really, really bad for my gut a few years ago. It was a perfect storm, a domino effect of insults.

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