Body Ecology: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

What if I told you that you are only 10% human? I'm not saying you are part chimp or alien, although science shows that we are descendants of one and conspirists say the other is "the missing link." What I am saying is that 90% of your cells are distinctly not human. Scientists used to think of the human body as a physical island, but in the last ten years research has shown that this island is actually heavily populated with a complex system of invisible inhabits. In fact, there are trillions of microorganisms living in each human body.

We've all gotten a "bad bug" from time to time. Whether it's an illness, or food poisoning, they eventually make their way out of our system. But now scientists understand that there are many microorganisms that live in every part of our bodies. What do these organisms for us? Are they good or bad for our bodies? How can we manage our island ecosystem to our benefit? Like a naturalist, we want to create a good environment for the critters who belong there and keep out the ones that don't. Here, I will share my knowledge about the good, the bad and the ugly microbial flora, which I have learned about in an effort to cultivate my own thriving ecosystem.

The Good: Essential and Beneficial Flora 

Organisms that provide benefits to us are often referred to as probiotics or beneficial flora. Our bodies have evolved to live in a symbiotic system with many strains, or types, of flora. Most of these microbes live in our gut, where they do very important work in assisting with digestion of foods. They break down our foods and help transport nutrients - in fact some foods cannot be broken down without them. Dietary fiber is actually bad for you without the aid of essential flora. Milk can be difficult for many to digest without a good gut colony. Additionally, gut flora produce vitamins K and B, as well as amino acids, so that we can have a steady supply throughout the day, and not just when we eat foods containing those nutrients. The best foods and supplements are useless to us without our fantastic little friends. The main strains of good flora are strains of Lactobacteria, for which Lactobaccillis is the original poster child of the probiotic movement, and Bifidobacteria, which Jamie Lee Curtis touts on Activa commercials. 

The Bad: Infection from Outside

You've heard of rotten food giving us E. Coli. Raw chicken, or improperly handled spinach can give you a dose of these unfriendly visitors. These guys are really tourists on your island, and eventually the locals kick them out. In fact, it is other strains of beneficial E. Coli that do the best job getting rid of  harmful E. Coli. In 1994 the World Health Organization stated that probiotics were the best defense in protecting from bacterial infection, second only to antibiotics. When traveling in places with untreated water, it is often recommended to take probiotic supplements to fight off a bad invasion. Even in the USA, we regularly fight off small bands of bad bacteria, thanks to our good gut flora.

The Ugly: Opportunistic Flora 

Unfortunately antibiotics and probiotic supplements are not enough to maintain our ecosystem. In fact, antibiotics kill not only the bad bacteria, but also the good. It's like bombing your island. The few that survive scramble to set up camp again, and often it's the guys who aren't so helpful who claim the most territory. These are called opportunistic flora, and they generally live in all humans and can provide some benefits when their populations are limited. It's like bees: having some bees is helpful for pollinating flowers, but do you want your island to be swarming with bees everywhere you go? No, you want just enough bees to do the job, and no more. These microbes can be difficult to control once they take over. And some of them are completely resistant to antibiotics but can be put in check by a critical mass of good flora.

Without a thriving population of the good guys, your digestive track is left vulnerable. The good flora usually protect your gut lining to regulate what goes into your bloodstream. In their absence, the opportunistic flora get into your bloodstream, where they essentially poison you. Additionally, they bore holes through your gut lining, which allows other poisons to get through. The milk protein Casein gets through these holes, where it has negative effects once in your blood - often causing lethargy and depression. Most symptoms of the common Irritable Bowel Syndrome, which currently accounts for 12% of doctor visits, can be attributed to an imbalance of gut flora.

The Right Balance: 

Maintaining a beneficial balance of microbial flora is not so easy to do in the modern age. Stress on us places stress on our most handy helpers. Pollutions and toxins harm our finest friends. Processed foods, especially complex carbohydrates, that are more difficult to digest, place more stress on our friends and often help out the opportunistic flora. While antibiotics are necessary and beneficial in cases where permanent damage or death can occur, they are sometimes over used today to the point of compromising the gut ecology. Additionally we consume a great amount of antibiotics through eating industrially produced meats.

Many people are returning to diets inspired by our ancestors - diets filled with organic produce and pastured meats. Cultured foods were an important part of the ancesteral diet because the culturing helps preserve the foods and provides probiotics. You can make your own cultured foods easily for little cost!  Today we can also take probiotic pills. It is important to note that these supplements are not going to be new residents, but are more like the Red Cross who comes in and provides some support and then departs. Like the Red Cross, you have to send enough help in order to make a difference - a good probiotic supplement should have at least 10 billion organisms, from several strains of bacteria. In order to re-establish a colony of good flora, it can often be necessary to make major lifesytle and dietary changes. This depends on the severity of your situation. For reference, I take 50-100 billion organisms a day, coming from 9-10 strains. Symptoms of indigestion, irregular bowel activity, lethary, feeling burnt out, or also emotional issues likes depression and anxiety can be signs that your gut flora is compromised. In these cases you should speak with a health care professional. Advertised products like Activa may not help you as the sugar content will feed the opportunistic flora and may not offer that much benefit.

It's easy to damage the good gut flora, and hard to get rid of opportunistic ones. If you currently have a healthy balance, it can be important to take steps to maintain it. As we get older, it is harder to do so. This is why some people develop a food intolerance or two later in life - when the population of mini digestors diminishes,  the ability to digest certain foods also lessens. The basis of your health depends on your ability to digest nutrients and thus depends on managing your microbial ecosystem so that our island can thrive.

Making it Through the GAPS Introduction Diet

Hello hello! 

It's been a crazy few months - both starting the GAPS diet and applying for a job. Neither of those may sound like that big of a deal but, they were both were incredibly intense! The job was intense because I had a month to work on the application, and it was very bureaucratic and involved preparing many materials. I then spent the next month preparing a lesson presentation and two rounds of interviews! Thank goodness it is over and hopefully I will get the job. Should be hearing soon! 

But you are probably here to read about the GAPS diet. What horrible timing it was that I started the GAPS Introduction Diet at the same time I heard this job was available. The first few weeks of the Introduction Diet, I was completely lethargic. Fortunately, I have a loving boyfriend who cooked and cleaned for me during this time. He basically did as much as he could for me, because I could barely function. I did make it to work everyday but I was miserable and came home and just laid on the couch all night. After three weeks of being miserable and being stuck on stage 2 because the introduction of nuts caused irritation in my gut, I went to see the doctor. What he told me is really helpful! 

My doctor's guide to going through the GAPS Introduction Diet:
Go through the stages, adding foods as you can. If you react to a food, skip that item but keeping progressing. Try adding skipped items until you can tolerate them. The stages of the Introduction Diet are more like a guideline. The important thing is to at least stick to the full GAPS diet, eating lots of broths and other recommended foods. He said I was going through starvation due to being too low carb, and encouraged me to add fruit to my diet and continue to eat lots of squashes. He emphasized that taking probiotics is essential for regulating the digestion. 


Symptoms on the GAPS Intro Diet:

1. Carb Withdrawls: This is sometimes referred to as the Atkins flu - feeling tired and achy due to an extreme drop in carb intake. Supposedly, it takes your body about a month to switch from relying on carbs to relying on ketones for energy. I was so low carb, without any fruit that I could barely function. Things that helped: 
• Eating GAPS legal squashes as they have some starch, but not too much to overload your body with hard to digest disaccharides. Adding lots of fats such as butter or coconut oil is recommended. I especially liked Kabocha squash with coconut oil and salt. 
• Drinking tea with honey. If fruit is hard to digest, as it was for me the first few weeks (especially raw), honey is a good way to get some carbs in your system. 
2. Bacterial Die Off: As you starve the bacteria from the removal of carbs, the dead bacteria are basically poison that your body has to eliminate. For  me, this meant lethargy, brain fog, and nausea. I find when I don't follow the GAPS diet well enough (drinking too much alcohol, not eating enough fermented foods and broths) that these symptoms flare up again. Things that helped:
• Take lots of probiotics and eat lots of fermented foods! The good bacteria are essentially for removing the dead bad bacteria. I find it helps to eat fermented foods with each meal, but don't always get myself to do this. For supplemental probiotics, you want to take a brand that has at least 10 strains of probiotics, with at least 8 billion organisms in a serving. Read the GAPS book for more on this. 
• Drink lots of water! Flush the suckers out of your body.
3. General detoxifying: As you begin to eat only healing, non-toxic foods, your body will begin to do what I think of as "catching-up" with its house keeping. From what I've been told, once you are not overloading your body with toxins on a daily basis, your body begins releasing old toxins that it was forced to store in fat because it couldn't process them all. I don't fully understand this, because it seems like you would just be processing the maximum amount of toxins until you got them all out, but, apparently it is common to feel worse when you first start detoxifying. For me, I feel lethargic and have brain fog. Sometimes I feel very irritable depending on how intense the detoxing is. Things that helped:
1. Again, drink a lot of water to flush out toxins! 
2. Detoxifying baths or foot baths will help take the burden off your body! I felt that the foot baths helped calm me, and made falling asleep for this life longer insomniac much easier. I felt noticeably better after just a 30 minute foot bath. I usually used Epsom salts with blends of essential oils. I like lavender and ylang-ylang. 
3. Juicing fresh fruits was very helpful for me during the first month of GAPS. I added carrot juice earlier than it arrived in the stages. Fresh juice gives a lot of people diarrhea, but I have the opposite problem, so I added it ASAP. this helps pull out toxins. 

After the visit with my doctor, I backed off nuts for awhile, but tried other foods on stage 3. By that time, I was so bored with the foods in the first few stages, I basically just started eating everything I could tolerate on the full diet. I immediately got my energy back and felt better than ever! After a week or so, I tried nuts again. I seemed to be able to tolerate them in smaller doses, but not when binging on tons of nut products. My favorite things to eat are nut based muffins or cupcakes and bananas with peanut butter. I've been taking 50-100 billion probiotic organisms a day, and my gut and whole body are feeling much better. 

A Helpful GAPS Introduction Resource: 

One helpful resource for getting started with the GAPS Introduction Diet is an e-book put together by a mother who helped her family heal on GAPS. She lays out meal plans for each stage of the diet, so for those who feel overwhelmed, it's nice to follow. I got ideas from her book, but did not follow it exactly. From her book, I was inspired to take foot baths (not having a bath tub), and I found those very helpful! My favorite food idea I got from her was making meatballs, to which I added some liver for extra health benefits! My one criticism of the book is that it is written by a stay at home mom, so it doesn't always work well for a busy working professional doing the diet for herself (me). For example, she recommended when you go through carb withdrawals to drink some juice and take a nap. I don't always have that luxury while at work, though I wish I did! I fully support stay at home moms, I'm just saying that my work routine doesn't quite work with advice like that. 

Music That Helps Me Get Through It:
Camera Obscura's new album Desire Lines makes for great cooking music! It's mellow, atmospheric, and charming as per usual for this band. On the first few listens, I don't have any favorite songs and don't love it the way I loved some of their past music, however, it's a solid album for some easy going listening.