54: This is How You Got Crohn's and Colitis

Crohn's and colitis aren't random like your doctor told you - there's a reason why it's happening. I'm going to show you what that reason is, what parts of your immune system are inflamed and what to do about it.

TOPICS DISCUSSED:

• The 3 reasons you got sick
• The immune pathways implicated in IBD (and what they mean for you)
• The 4 stages of IBD
• Understanding your origin story / how you got IBD
• The tests you can run for root causes
• Steps to reversing it

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Transcript

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All titled, so I'm live here, one, two, all right. Yeah, it's crazy. All right, ready? Three, two, one. Stress is wrecking your gut, there's no doubt about it, and it's causing you to flare up. But there are some simple things that you can do to actually fight back against the stress. Now I'm gonna be showing you here exactly what stress is doing to your gut, how it's hammering your microbiome, your immune system, and your gut lining. I'm gonna show you how this is actually contributing to your existing bowel issues or bowel disease, and of course, what you can do to beat the stress and ultimately heal your gut, because you can't avoid the stress, so we have to figure out how to fight back. Now if you don't know me, my name is Josh Dech, I'm a Crohn's colitis specialist and a physician's consultant for complex gut diseases like IBD and IBS, and I do these videos so you can learn how to heal your gut naturally, because you absolutely can, regardless of the fact that your doctor probably told you no, you can just manage it. I disagree. Now I'm gonna give you guys a free guide during this process as well, so make sure you comment the word stress, and we're gonna send you a link to a PDF that summarizes all of this, all the supplements, all the steps, everything in that. You comment the word stress to get that. Here's what we're gonna be getting into. First thing we wanna know is what is stress actually doing to you? How is it actually managing or damaging your gut? And at any point during this process, by the way, if you have any questions, I have my other phone here, all the cameras, so drop your comments below, and we're gonna make sure we have a chance to get to those questions at any point during this video. So the first question we're asking is what is stress doing to your gut? First thing that we wanna look at is going to be your microbiome. When we're looking at your microbiome, stress creates a state what's called dysbiosis. This is a dysregulated or imbalanced microbiome. Now what is your microbiome? That's all your bacteria living inside of your gut. It's about three to five pounds in the average adult, and about 80, 90% of it lives in what's called the cecum. So it's right here on the right side, right where your small intestine connects to your large. That little pocket of large intestine contains about 80% of your gut bacteria. The rest is kind of sprinkled throughout. And when we are stressed, that bacteria, that ecosystem gets completely screwed up, which also means we have a decrease in something called short-chain fatty acids. These are super important for healing your gut. It's actually the primary source of fuel or food for your gut cells. And so when we have high stress, we end up producing less of these, the bacteria get destroyed, and that means we have a weaker gut lining, so leaky gut, et cetera. On top of that, we have excess amounts of cortisol. Now when we're in two main states when we're dealing with stress in your nervous system, the first one is going to be fight and flight. The other one is going to be rest and digest. Now when you're in rest-digest, guess what's happening? You're rested and digesting. I know, it's magic, right? But here's what happens. When you sit, you put your feet on the ground, you relax, you chew and swallow, you smell your food, your body increases that peristalsis, that movement of food through your gut. It actually produces stomach acid, digestive enzymes, it absorbs your nutrients. But when you're in fight and flight, the last thing your body cares about is eating, digesting. It needs to get you safe. So when you're chronically stressed, you're in fight or flight, you're producing less digestive enzymes, your motility is way too fast or way too slow, you're not absorbing nutrients, your mouth gets really dry, you're not even breaking down carbs or sugars in your mouth, and excess cortisol can actually be inflammatory to your gut and eroding the gut lining as well. So that's what stress is doing. And all in all, this dysbiosis, this inflammation, if you're not digesting your food properly, it can be hyperfermenting, leading to all kinds of bad guys overgrowing and these gases or toxins getting into your bloodstream. And so this environment, this is an inflammatory environment. And inflammatory environments favor bad bacteria. So E. coli, clostridium, candida, all kinds of other inflammatory, triggering types of bacteria, Klebsiella, Citrobacter, Proteus, all these things that can overgrow becomes highly problematic. And so we end up happening, all in all, like we talked about, this fight and flight, you have this decreased digestive function. So you're not breaking down, digesting, absorbing the low HCL or stomach acid, the lower poor quality digestive enzymes. You start losing this, motility gets all screwed up. These undigested foods actually end up fermenting. And now you have all these nasty gases being produced, these undigested proteins and these toxins from this disruptive microbiome. We call these LPS or endotoxins. You have undigested food and then you have ferments, bad gases and these extra proteins. Together, they actually leak, get into your bloodstream and circulate around your body, creating inflammatory responses. And so now we have the screwed up digestive function, increased bacteria, inflammation, leaky gut, poor digestion, poor immune function because we're also decreasing our nutrient absorption. So now we get an increase of something called zonulin. Now zonulin is a protein that breaks down these gap junctions. All the cells in your gut, they're like stitched together with these tight junctions. Zonulin is a protein that breaks these down. It actually breaks down what's called occludin and clodin. See if I can write these down here for you. Occludin and clodin, occludin as in occluding, right? Sealing off. The zonulin breaks these downs or breaks these downs and then your cells spread apart, meaning you have leaks in your gut and things leak out, they get into your blood. And now we have these proteins, these toxins, these LPS circulating around your system, creating inflammatory responses, triggering your immune system. Then what happens is your immune system does what? It gets really, really fighty. Now you have an increase in all kinds of immune responses, not to get super, super technical, but it's all kinds of stuff that we can see, like we'll call them TNF-alpha, we have interferon gamma, you have interleukin-6, all these different inflammatory markers, interleukin-18, one you're commonly familiar with as well, your CRP, you'll see your C-reactive protein on blood. Stress drives all these things up. It drives up all these inflammatory markers. And now here's what's interesting. A lot of these markers that your stress actually pushes up to say inflame more. Did you know drugs like Remicade, your corticosteroids, like your budesonide and prednisone, your JAK inhibitors, those drugs are suppressing these immune pathways. And when you're stressed, they come right back up. Think about it. The reason stress flares you up, your immune system is hyperreactive. All these pathways of your immune system are hyperreactive. So you're inflamed, you're aggravated, irritated, there's ulcers and fistulas and bleeding and mucus and all this stuff. Those drugs come in and suppress them. So that's why you feel better. But then you get stressed, they go right back up again. And now the drugs have to fight on two different fronts. And this is why we're constantly having issues with stress. And so here's what we're gonna do. Your existing bowel issues, they're gonna be worsened. They're gonna be sped up or slowed down. So if you're constipated or have loose bowels all the time, it's increasing your inflammation. It increases, we'll say increasing poor digestion and it increases this immune activity. So everything about your bowels right now that you're dealing with, which is inflammatory, irritated, whatever it is, is now ramped up under stress. This is why I say comment the word stress and we're gonna send you a free PDF you can download with a whole guide on summarizing this whole thing, all my supplements, all the things we recommend for you guys to manage this. Which brings us to our next stage, which is what do you do about it? If you have any questions, drop them in the chat. This is a great time to do it. We're gonna get to them at the end. So what do you do about stress? How do you beat it? There's a few lifestyle things. There's some supplementary things and some basic steps that you can take to actually manage it. Now, drinking, smoking, not gonna be the thing to deal with this for you. I'm telling you right now, there's a lot more side effects and drawbacks from just getting drunk and drinking away your sorrows. Makes things way worse. So here's what we're gonna look at for you. The first thing we can look at is a really simple, what we call box breathing. Now, box breathing is very, very easy. It's literally, the reason we say box breathing is the typical setup for box breathing might look something like four seconds in. So it's a nice in the nose, count to four, and you're gonna hold that for four more seconds, and then you breathe out for four seconds and then pause with empty lungs for four seconds. Now, what we're not doing, if four is too much, maybe it's four inhale, two hold for you. Six exhale, two hold for you. That's fine. What we don't wanna do is breathe all the way in and fill your lungs up and then breathe all the way out. You have nothing left to work with. You don't wanna stress your body. If your heart rate is speeding up, you're feeling anxious, change your breath. Maybe it's four in, hold it gently for two seconds. Breathe through pursed lips like you're breathing through a straw. Breathe out for five seconds, then pause. And that's maybe your pattern. This box breathing is your own time. So maybe it's gonna be like a rectangle breathe. If that works better for you, that's fine. But that's the idea. I'm gonna change out my marker here because this one is old and dry and that's my fault for leaving it the wrong way. All right, so that's box breathing number one. Some other things we can do to manage the stress is gonna be dietary. Believe it or not, stress, we talked about all these immune pathways. They sit under these umbrellas. And these umbrellas, we call TH1 and TH2. Now, TH1 is your innate immune system. You scrape your knee, you catch a cold, all that stuff is taken care of. TH2 deals with some other specific stuff, parasites and fungus and other things it can battle. But TH2, when it's active, also produces histamines. So if you're having, with your bowel issues, if you're having, like you scratch your skin and it's bright red, you're prone to welts. If you are somebody who's got chronic sinus issues, maybe you have palpitations or anxiety, you get bloated when you eat things like vinegars, cured meats, fermented foods, all that stuff, those are high histamines. These are histamine-type reactions. You're somebody with allergies. Maybe you've got skin issues, psoriasis, eczema. You're prone to rashes and hives. All these things can be histamines. Now, histamines show up a lot of ways in the body. But in bowel diseases like Crohn's, colitis, and even some IBS, histamines are very prominent. So simply doing a low histamine diet keeps that immune pathway calm. And that's why dietary things matter. Short-term stress is that innate immune system. Long-term stress can create histamine imbalances. So if you're under chronic stress, there's trauma, you're in a job that you hate, a relationship that's toxic, all this stuff is gonna trigger these pathways. Now, we also want to unburden your body, right? Because being burdened by a lot of stuff is what makes us sick. And so another thing we can work on is going to be detoxing. I almost forgot how to spell the word sweat for a sec there, but we can work on sweating. Now, this can be gentle exercise, it could be saunas, it could be infrared or red light. But just getting that detoxing out of your body, and then of course replenishing. So certain things we can start to take, like trace mineral supplements. They're often what's called desalinated seawater. So it's a concentrated form of seawater where it's just all the mineral content without the salt. It's really quite bitter, but really good for you as well. So we can work on some of that. If you're feeling stressed out, you want to calm your body down, you can actually try what's called a magnesium chloride, even Epsom salt's gonna be fine, but like a foot soak. Get some of that magnesium in your body. You can actually take a magnesium glycinate, help some people sleep, puts them right to bed. Not me, but I enjoy the way it makes my body feel. Magnesium is needed for stuff. Magnesium can help bring some of this stuff down. If you want some other supplements you can look at, there are lots of stress supplements. That's actually, if you comment, again, the word stress, there's a whole bunch of them that help with your stress responses and immune responses in this document, but you can take certain things to help regulate cortisol. Things like magnolia, and that's a magnolia bark typically. There are other supplements that you can utilize to help your body chill out, calm down, like lemon balm. I'll put it up here. You can use lemon balm or valerian, and that's a valerian root. It can be very, very soothing and calming. Lavender sometimes can be very calming. There are certain compounds you can use to digest or break down histamines if you have a lot of them, like DAO. This stands for diamine oxidase. It's a bit more expensive, so if you're having histamine issues, go with certain things like stinging nettle, perilla oil, quercetin, again, magnesium, stuff like that. Histo-X is another one that's a good combination, but histamine-digesting herbs can really help with some of this stuff as well. If you're stressed out and having trouble sleeping because your mind's racing at 1,000 miles an hour, couple of things. One, go get a chiropractic adjustment. When your neck's screwed up, everything's screwed up. Second to that as well, you can actually look at sleep-support supplements. These can be things like L-theanine, and I think I actually put one in this document as well. That's a stress support, but for sleep. Contains L-theanine, lemon balm. You can use supplements on and off, like GABA. GABA stands for gamma-aminobutyric acid, and this one is sort of the down regulator. Calms you down. It's a chill-out thing for your body. So we wanna make sure we can utilize all these properly. There's a lot of supplements we can utilize to help you get to sleep, like melatonin is really important. Now the thing with melatonin, keep in mind, it'll help you get to sleep and not help you stay asleep. And you can really take as much as you want melatonin. You can't get sick, it can't hurt you, but melatonin helps you get to sleep. But if you're not staying asleep, that can be a cortisol issue, bringing us back to things like magnolia and valerian, other things like that. So stress regulation is huge for a couple of reasons. It creates dysbiosis, creates leaky gut, promotes bacterial overgrowth, weakens your immune system, increases inflammation. The same stuff your body or your drugs are trying to suppress, and it just throws everything into a fuss. So if you are chronically stressed, even if you're like, nah dude, I'm pretty chill. If you have stressful things in your life all the time, even though you deal with them properly, they can be affecting you more than you know. I'm literally working with a client right now, same thing, she's pretty chill. But when we actually applied stress management techniques that we gave her, suddenly her bowels started to improve because she didn't realize how much stress she was under simply because of the stress that she learned to just cope with. And that's not the way to do it. So here's what you can do. I wanna make sure you guys get some help here. So we're gonna go over to the questions. But before we do that, I wanna show you how to get help. Some very simple ways you can do that. If you wanna get help from me and my team, all you gotta do, I'm gonna show you per platform. And what we're gonna do, if you decide you wanna get some help, all we're gonna do is just sit down and have a conversation. The first call's always free. I refuse to take money and get paid for my job unless we know we can help you. And so what we're gonna do is have a conversation and say, hey, what's going on with you? What's driving your bowel issues? What's driving your Crohn's or colitis or IBS? And can we figure out that root cause? Stress is a part of it. But how many people do you know who get stressed out and then bleed from the bowel? Right, like zero people. So the thing we have to look at here is when you're under stress, what other factors are filling your cup that makes you susceptible to blood, to mucus, to pain, to diarrhea, all these other things? There's always underlying co-factors. And we're gonna have that conversation, figure out what's going on, where this thing came from, what your body needs to get you better, and begin reversing your bowel disease. Because Crohn's, colitis, IBS, they're not just genetic, random, and those IBDs are certainly not autoimmune. So we can work on getting this better and getting your body healed up and reversed. All you gotta do, if you're on Facebook or on Instagram, you can comment or shoot me a DM with the word solution. What we're gonna do is have a chat with you, see what we can do. We'll just jump on a quick call and say, hey, where is this coming from? Can we help? This is what the options look like. If you like it, jump in. If not, that's okay. We have tons of free resources just like this, but it's your opportunity to use those. So you just send me a DM or comment the word solution. If you're on Facebook, if you're, let me back that one up. If you're watching on YouTube or you're listening on the podcast, there's a link below. You can send me an email directly, schedule a call, and learn to get some help because this is a very fixable thing. And your doctor just says, well, deal with it. Here's a pill to crush your anxiety. Rather than dealing with all the things anxiety is creating, whether you're symptomatic or not. And we can get to those roots. Any questions over there? And it looks like we don't have any questions over here on Facebook either, which is amazing. Guys, easy day today. We're in and out, nice and short. We changed the time on you. That's our fault. Thanks for your patience. We're gonna see you next time.