53: How All Of Your Symptom Are Coming From Your Gut

IBD doesn't show up by itself - it creates a whole whack of symptoms inside of your gut and this episode is going to teach you why that's happening and how to fix it.

TOPICS DISCUSSED:

• The 3 reasons you get sick
• The role of chronic stress, poor diet and mold
• Your gut microbiome and leaky gut
• Immune responses 
• Your blood brain barrier
• The 5 R's to reversing IBD

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Transcript

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Every symptom that you're experiencing inside of your body that is outside of your gut is coming from your gut. And in this video, you're going to learn how things like skin issues, joint pain, anxiety, fatigue, gallstones, and all other symptoms you're experiencing are coming from your gut. You're going to learn what specifically is causing these problems, how it works and how it gets there, and ultimately what you can do to reverse this and get healthy again. Contrary to what your doctors told you, Crohn's and Colitis are reversible. Now I've helped hundreds of people reverse their bowel disease and I'm here to help you do it too, because inflammation always has a root cause. We just have to find it. This is the Reversing Crohn's and Colitis Naturally podcast. Now I do these live trainings in my Facebook group every single week and put the audios here for you to listen to. If you want to watch the video versions of these episodes, just click the link in the show notes to get access to our Facebook group and YouTube channel. And for weekly updates, information, tips, and tricks, you can sign up for our email list by clicking the link in the show notes below. Now if you don't know me, my name is Josh Dech. I'm an IBD specialist, medical lecturer, and physician's consultant. And I do videos like this so you can learn to reverse bowel diseases like IBS, Crohn's, and Colitis, because the world frankly is wrong about these diseases and you don't have to be stuck with it. And on today's video, I'm going to show you how all symptoms are coming from your gut. We're going to talk about how your gut is causing all issues inside of your body. We're going to talk about different symptoms for different parts. There's three things you need to know before we get into this. And those three things are the reasons why you get sick. Some sort of toxin, some sort of microbe, some sort of deficiency. That's the only reasons you get sick. Toxins cover a wide array of stuff. Toxins are covering heavy metals and mold and chronically high blood sugar, chronically high stress, glyphosate, emulsifiers, food dyes, food coloring, sugars. All these things can be toxic to your body. The second is going to be some kind of microbe that grows inside of your gut, which again, causes issues everywhere else. So parasites, fungus, viruses, whatever else we get in there is going to be going on. My brain's got kind of fried, guys. I apologize. I've been nonstop at the computer for eight days. So our microbes are going to be parasites, bacteria, viruses, and fungus. On the other hand, of course, we're going to have some sort of deficiency. Vitamins, minerals, amino acids, fresh air, sunlight, exercise, a deficient gut-brain connection due to chronic stress, trauma, all kinds of stuff, okay? So those are the reasons we get sick. Now, all these things will infiltrate in some way inside of your gut. You are someone, or if you are someone, who doesn't currently have a gut issue but has an issue elsewhere in your body, it's probably coming from your gut. You're the lucky one. If you have a gut issue, IBS, Crohn's, colitis, whatever is going on right now, you can feel it inside of your gut. It's easier to know that these conditions we're going to talk about are coming from your gut. Let's talk about how this works. So first things first, you have a toxin and microbe deficiency. Something gets into your system. So for the argument's sake, based on what's super common, let's talk about chronic stress, poor diet, and mold. 60% to 70% of the standard American diet is some kind of junk food, preserved, fried, fast food, whatever. Up to 70% of homes have a mold infection and most of us are stressed. Social media, politics, work, traffic, whatever's going on, finances, these are stressors. So let's go with that for today. Let's just assume you've got some kind of environmental issue like mold, you're stressed, and your diet's maybe not perfect. Let's talk about how this affects your body. Number one, all the microbes inside of your microbiome, so inside of your gut, your microbiome means tiny ecosystem, about 90% actually live in what's called the cecum. So it's where your small and large intestine actually connect to each other. It's about 90% of your microbes live there. And from there, you have other microbes inside of your small intestine, and every 8 to 12 inches or so, they're a little bit different inside these intestines. They do different things. Some will break down and ferment the vegetables and fibers. Some will break down the fats. They all do kind of different things inside this little ecosystem. What happens when you disrupt these? We start to get one of these three things. Toxins like mold or chronically high stress, they inflame your digestive system. They inflame your gut. And inside your gut, you have this really beautiful lining. Your small intestine is one cell thick. Your large is two cells thick. And what happens when you become inflamed because of mold, because of stress, because of diet, microbial overgrowth, whatever toxin, microbe deficiency you have, it starts to create leaks in the gut. And so what ends up happening, if you picture your cells stitched together like grandma's quilt, right? You have all these big squares and they're stitched together. When you get stressed or inflamed, those stitches start to pull apart and those squares spread. This is what happens inside of your body when you have these cells that are stitched with what's called gap junctions. And then you become inflamed. Well, these gaps will let go. And now you have what's called leaky gut. Things pass through. Instead of going through the cell and the membrane saying, check, you're good, like border security, go on through. What happens instead is you have things leaking through, crossing the border illegally, bringing all kinds of trouble to your body. So now you have directly on the other side of that, you're going to have your bloodstream and lymphatic system. If you're curious for the anatomy side of things, it'll kind of look like this in the small intestine. You have all these little like finger like structures and inside coming up into each one is blood and lymphatic tissue. Now in here, we call this your galt, gut associated lymphoid tissue. It's all the lymphs inside of your gut. What happens when you have leaks in here is things pass through when they shouldn't, they get into the system. And where does your blood and lymphatic system go? Everywhere. And this is what happens. This is what's called leaky gut. And if you're inflamed, if you're bloated, if you're living in the world today, you have leaky gut. And so the problem is now you've got something that crossed over. It went into your blood. It got out when it shouldn't have gotten out because you're inflamed and there's leaks. And that is now traveling around your body. It's getting into your lungs. It's getting into things like your joints or into your skin. Maybe it's getting into your eyes. It gets into your brain. Things like this will also toxify these toxins because they're swirling around your liver. They're inside because your liver is processing this stuff. They get into your liver and what do they do? They slow it down. Now you have a sluggish liver. So everything's connected. Once it gets into your blood, it goes all around your entire body. Things land there, your immune system reacts, you become inflamed, and now you get sick. And this is what's very, very important. So let's talk about some of these individual conditions that you may have going on right now. We're going to go through the most common ones that are associated with IBS, Crohn's and Colitis because that's my specialty. So here's what we're going to talk about. Number one, you have these things that sneak out. They go through these leaks in your gut. They get into your bloodstream. They circulate. They land in your joints. Your body says, man, that shouldn't be there. We need to clean you up. What does it do? It brings in your immune cells. When your immune system sees a problem like a nail or a splinter puncture in your hand or a bacteria that got into a cut, it gets infected. That's a good thing. It's a defense mechanism. If it gets controlled, then it goes away. Because what's happening is your body is bringing in all these immune cells to clean up the area. It inflames the tissue because, one, your blood vessels dilate. So you get more blood and more healing to the area. Well, that swelling and inflammation also puts pressure on and sensitizes nerves. That's why it hurts. And that signal goes back to your brain and says, ow. That's what inflammation is. That's infection. So you have these things that land in your joints and your brain and your body say, let's heal you. Things dilate, nerves sensitize, like, ooh, I've got something in my wrist or something in my knees or my back. It just hurts. That's because these toxins leaked, they circulated, they landed. And this can happen in anywhere. Uveitis is very common to have like an eye issue or inflammation in there from bowel diseases as well. Because the toxins circulate, that's where they land. We can also see other things like skin issues, chest, arms, back, shoulders. That's more lymphatic tissue. There's a couple reasons this happens. Your body has exit doors inside. If we think about collecting the trash, this is going to be detoxing. But the drainage is actually taking it over your shoulder and bringing it out to the curb. That's getting rid of things, getting them out of your body. So what happens, your skin is a drainage pathway. If your liver, gallbladder, bile ducts, your bowels, your kidneys, your sinuses, all these other exit doors are congested, your body can actually push stuff out of your skin. That's another reason you'll get things like acne, dryness, psoriasis, eczema, it's immune response, it's things pushing out. But all these toxins, guess what? You have a microbiome inside your gut. You have one on your face, you have it in your scalp, in your sinuses, your mouth, rectally, vaginally, your armpits, groin. They're all these different ecosystems like kind of like neighborhoods within a city all working together. And so what happens now is when toxins or microbes get through your gut, these things get out, they can disrupt your microbiome on the skin causing rashes, infections, things like that. And so that's coming from the gut. Let's talk about the brain. We have something here called the blood brain barrier, BBB for short, blood brain barrier. It is a sacred passageway. It's very dense, fibrous, it's like a filtration system. And your body can say you can come in, you can't. The blood brain barrier is the most selective filter that you have in your entire body. Well, certain toxins and microbes not only create leaks in that blood brain barrier, punch holes in it, but they will cross at some of them on their own without even punching holes, which get into your brain, which can cause inflammation. Now, remember we talked about things leaking from the gut. These are things that we actually call LPS. It stands for lipopolysaccharide. The more endearing term might be endotoxin, meaning internal toxin. These toxins that are endo, they then become exo as they push through your skin, right? So from inside to outside, but they can circulate, they can land inside of your brain. What happens when your brain gets inflamed? Well, you get headaches, you can have migraines, you can have anxiety, depression, mental health issues. Over many, many decades, you can develop Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. You see, these toxins will leak out, they'll land on nerves inside of your brain. And then what happens is your body says, hey, that's a bad guy. We produce extra cholesterol to bind onto that toxin like a fire extinguisher on a flame. It puts it out. And then that cholesterol hardens and turns to plaque. Now you've got Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, even heart disease, as you get what's called atherosclerosis. So this plaque builds up in the vessels, which means your heart, the arteries, instead of expanding, contracting, they harden, you build up plaque. It's a heart disease, but it can come from the gut and the toxins circulating, landing, being bound, and then hardening. Other issues that are common, simple brain fog. Well, guess what? If you have a factory inside of your gut, it's designed to create all of these things. It creates about 90% of your neurotransmitters. These are things, no, not all of them are made for the brain, but things that your brain needs, serotonin, dopamine, and all this stuff comes from your gut. Well, if you have a factory and on the other side out comes a car, that's a proper working factory. What happens when that factory is on fire? What do you think gets produced and sent out the assembly line? Not the right balance of stuff to that 90%. The car is missing a door, it's missing a windshield, the steering wheel is sideways, so you've got to push it this way instead of turning it. All kinds of weird stuff happens. And so when you have these toxins, your factory is on fire. It's not working properly. You're not producing the right neurotransmitters. You get brain fog, anxiety, depression, other things. Comes back to your gut. What else happens over here is talk about your liver. Gall stones are super common. Something like 15, 20% of people now in North America get their gallbladder removed. Because of gallstones. What happens? Your liver is a major filtration organ. Well, when you have toxins circulating from the gut through the blood, your liver filters as an adult about four liters of blood per minute. It's filtering constantly on top of 500 plus other functions that it's doing. Filtration is one of them. These toxins can get in and all these little tubes that run through your liver, they can get congested. They can get built up with toxins. It's like not changing your oil in the engine. It gets sludgy. And then what happens is, guess what? Your liver produces bile, which gets into the gallbladder. What do you think happens when you produce sludgy, trashy bile? You get sludgy trash in your gallbladder. And then when your gallbladder tries to eject this into the small intestine, what happens? Things get congested. So now you develop gallstones. Maybe you don't produce enough bile salts. You don't get the right mixture of things that you need. So the bile is again sludgy because the liver is compromised. The factory does not produce good bile. The factory is congested or on fire. The output is compromised. And now you get gallstones. Or you get fatty liver disease, what's called NAFLD or non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. So you get fat storing in and around your liver, but it's not because of alcohol. It's because of toxins from your gut. It's because of the diet, like high fructose corn syrup, which congests the liver and congests your factory. And you end up with gallstones or liver disease or something else down the road. What else can happen? Asthma. I've seen people with bowel diseases coming in with asthma. You fix the bowel, you fix the lungs. Why? Because we have research now showing that leaky gut not only means leaky brain, but it means leaky lungs. So you get inflamed, you get short of breath. Maybe you're having trouble with energy production. Guess what? Each cell has thousands of little things called mitochondria. And it's like the battery pack. It's necessary for a lot of stuff, but it's best known as the energy producer battery pack powerhouse. And what happens, they produce all this energy like ATP. And what happens when your cells are working healthy, they have the tools, they have the resources they need, they produce healthy amounts of ATP. And your body utilizes that to create energy. It makes you feel good. It makes you feel awake. You can run, you can jump, you can lift weights, you can whatever. You need energy made from these cells. When you are toxic with things like mold, you're deficient in certain nutrients, your body cannot properly make energy. So you're chronically fatigued. When these toxins are circulating around, what does your body need to do? It calls in the Calvary. It says, hey, we need more resources, vitamins, minerals, amino acids, nutrients, fats, cholesterol, all these things to repair and heal the damage being done. Well, your body has a pecking order. What's the most important thing? Survival. Second to that is going to be things like health and healing and digestion and hormones and all this stuff goes down the pecking order. When your body says, shit, we're in red alert. Look at all the inflammation we have around our body right now. Do you think its primary function or primary concern right now is making sure you have enough energy to get up, do your day and go to work? Or do you think its primary function is diverting the resources that it has to healing the vital functions and vital organs you need to survive? This is another reason why you're low on energy. Toxins like mold actually damage this factory of the mitochondria. So it cannot produce what it needs to produce properly. Another thing that we start to have inside of your gut, we talked about the galt, right, your gut associated lymphoid tissue. Well, part of this is going to be your immune system. Did you know, depending on who you ask, the base number seems to be 70 as the consensus, but up to 90%, so call it 70 to 90% of your immune cells, B cells and T cells and all these things, they're made inside of your gut. You need a healthy factory to grow, nurture and mature these immune cells to give your body a fighting chance to fight back against invaders. What happens when you think the factory is on fire? We know you produce less energy. We know you don't produce the right things you need for your brain. Well, guess what? You also don't produce the right things you need for your immune system. So bad guys sneak in. Viruses, bacterial overgrowth, fungal overgrowth, all kinds of nasty business that gets in and compromises your immune system. So you're frequently sick, you get the flu all the time, you constantly got runny nose, sinus infections, other things. But not only that, your immune system kind of works in this really beautiful balance. It ebbs and flows. I feel like this is like a really bad dance move. But anyway, your immune system ebbs and flows. What happens when things are trying to ebb and flow, but one is ebbing, the other is not flowing? You have hyperreactive immune response. This is like an interpretive dance. You have a hyperactive immune response and an underactive immune response. The different paths of your immune system are no longer working and flow, which means you can have hyperactive immune responses, which is really what Crohn's and colitis are. It's an imbalance or hyperreactive immune response, not autoimmune, immune mediated, hyperactive, hyperreactive. And so your body becomes inflamed. It becomes susceptible or prone to infections. Bad guys like E. coli and C. diff and all these nasty microbes, Klebsiella and all these nasty citrobactors, whatever it is, they have a chance to overgrow because the good guys are not there to police them and to regulate them. The good microbes that we want in this ecosystem can't live and can't thrive. Like you wouldn't live in a house that's on fire. No windows, holes in the roof, raccoons and spiders in the corner. No, you want a nice house. So do your microbes. They're kind of high maintenance. And so when your house is on fire, your microbes can't live. That's another vital part of your immune system. Not only your immune cells, but the microbes which balance out that ecosystem. When bad guys overgrow, they do more of this inflammation, producing toxins, circulating and inflaming. And this is the core principle of how all these things, all symptoms are beginning inside of your gut. It's production, inflammation, circulation and reaction. And then of course, depletion. So what can we do about this? I mean, that's really why we're here. It's one thing for me to say, look how bad this is when your gut sucks, everything falls apart. It's like your house is on fire and you have raccoons. But what we ultimately want to know is what can you do right now to begin reversing this to heal yourself? We're going to go back to the age old tried, trued and tested five hours. These are easy. And the complexity is finding out specifically what your five hours are. But that's what we're here for. Ask me questions. We're here to help. So the first hour that we're looking at is to remove. Remove what? Well, first remove is the problem. If you're chronically stressed, it's contributing to chronic inflammation. Manage the stress. Can't always get rid of stress in your life, but you can handle how you manage it or take supplementation or something to manage your body's responses to it. If you were in an active moldy environment or you're eating the junk food like we talked about at the beginning, remove those things because ultimately you can't empty the bathtub until you turn off the tap. You want to make that easy. Turn it off. Remove the problem. Problems are contributing factors. You have a parasitic infection. We have to stop drinking parasite infested water, right? We have to remove the problem. The second hour that we're going to look at is called replenish. What does that mean? Remember we talked about three reasons you get sick, right? Toxins, we have microbes and deficiencies. Well, if you have a toxin or toxic microbes or deficiencies, we need to remove the problem. Remove the thing that's making you deficient. Remove the toxins actively invading your body. Remove the toxic microbes, parasites and yeast overgrowth and viral infections. We have to remove them. All these things, these toxins and microbes create deficiencies because your body needs those resources to heal and repair. So what do we need to do? Replenish the things you're missing. B vitamins, zinc, magnesium, electrolytes, proteins, all these things your body needs. You're lacking a gallbladder? You need to replenish. Use ox bile as a supplement to fill in that gap that your body's not able to get on its own. We have to replenish the deficiencies. Otherwise, you're constantly working in debt. You're in nutrient debt on a non-stop basis. The third R that we're going to look to do, and this one kind of goes in tandem with the fourth R, which is going to be rebuild and repair. Rebuild and repair what? Well, that home, that gut we talked about being highly inflamed. Your body can't deal with that. Good guys can't live in an inflamed home. We have to rebuild that microbiome and repair the tissue, repair the house they live in. This is where things like stool sampling, GI maps can actually come in handy. You can measure your microbiome. We can see what's going on. So you can actually rebuild the gut lining. There's supplementation, certain foods, all kinds of things you can do to heal and seal that gut. We also want to repair, right? That's the repair process and rebuild the ecosystem. You got not enough good guys, put them in. You got too many bad guys, get rid of them. This is part of rebuilding and repairing that gut lining, which brings us to our fifth R, which is going to be rejuvenate. What does it mean to rejuvenate? We talked about this ebb and flow of your immune system, right? You get infected, things kick up, things come in, things kick down, your body learns about it. The problem is when you have too much ebb and not enough flow, you have an imbalanced immune system and hyperreactive responses. So oftentimes what happens, I get people coming in, they go, I want to boost my immune system. It's already out of whack. Why are you boosting something that's already hyperactive? We need to rejuvenate and bring back the ebb and flow. This is where it's very important to understand what your symptoms mean, what your blood work means, what different things can identify in your body to see what is your immune system doing, which ones need to be calmed, which ones need to be brought up. How do we recalibrate and rebalance that? There are specifics in the way of certain supplements you can use, but ultimately at the end of the day, it comes back to a clean home, clean environment, and a healthy microbiome, which means we're ridding toxins as much as we can. You never get into a sterile environment. You just need to get your body to a place where the toxins are low enough your body can keep on top of it. You need to get your microbiome balanced enough that your body can use that to cultivate a healthy, robust ecosystem. Think about it. The Amazon rainforest catches fire, grows right back. If you plant a couple of things in your garden and they catch fire, they never grow back because they weren't robust enough or diverse enough or well-rooted enough to grow themselves back, so you have to get there. Then, of course, patching the holes and deficiencies where you don't have enough nutrients, you don't have the things you need or the tools and resources your body needs to repair. The construction crew is great, but they don't have tools. They don't have concrete. They don't have hammers and nails. They can't do anything. Same thing with your body. It needs tools to repair all the damage, and this is the process to reversing and getting your body healthy once again. Your gut is at the center of all of it. There's a reason it was very symbolic where I put the gut in the middle of the whiteboard. Everything stems from the gut. In fact, Hippocrates said it 2,500 years ago, all diseases begin in the gut, and in the early 2000s, it was actually proven once again by Dr. Alessio Fasano who said, with his paper documented, all diseases begin in the leaky gut. So, this is a theory and ideology that stood the test of time. If you're experiencing any symptom anywhere for any reason of any kind inside of your body, it's coming from somewhere. It's probably your gut, even if you don't have gut-type symptoms. Your gut's the center of everything. Once you understand this, you can get the tools and resources you need to heal. So, here's what I want to invite you to do right now. If you say, Josh, I need help. I got IBS, Crohn's, colitis, things that are coming from my gut or gut diseases. These are fixable, reversible conditions. Do not take your disease lying down. Guys, thanks so much for being here. We'll see you on the next one. One of my favorite things to hear as an IBD specialist is something along the lines of, I learned more from you in 15 minutes than from my doctor in 15 years. And if this, for the first time, is really starting to click and it's starting to make sense, you're going, wait a minute, this might be reversible. I think there's more that I can do. This condition came out of nowhere. It happened to me out of the blue. I was healthy for 10, 20, 30, 40 years, and suddenly I wasn't? And you're telling me there's no cause? If you're understanding, finally, that there is a cause, that something is driving this, I want to invite you to check the link in the show notes below. Send me an email. Ask a question. See if a program is the right fit for you. Because I promise you, this doesn't have to be a lifelong sentence. You're not doomed to this, and IBD can be reversed.