69: How to Control Inflammation Naturally When You Have Ulcerative Colitis or Crohn's Disease

When your gut hurts, controlling inflammation is the highest priority but your doctor’s tools are limited to drugs like steroids and immune suppressing medications. But if you want to learn how to control your inflammation naturally, this episode is for you. 

TOPICS DISCUSSED:

• How inflammation works in IBD
• What it looks like to manage inflammation
• Natural solutions for control inflammation in Crohn's and colitis

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Transcript

Speaker: 0:00

When your gut hurts, controlling inflammation is the highest priority, but your doctor's tools are limited to drugs like steroids and immune suppressing medications. But if you want to learn how to control your inflammation naturally, this episode's here for you. You're going to learn how inflammation works and what you can do to control it naturally. 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. I want to be very clear, as we're going through this process, I am not anti -drug. The thing is, we take these chronic inflammatory conditions like Crohn's and Colitis and Diverticulitis, we take drugs or medications which treat for a short amount of time. It's an acute treatment. So, we have a chronic condition, we take acute treatments and use them chronically, and then we call that treating. It's managing. It's no different than having a nail stuck in your foot and just using numbing cream and reapplying every time it wears off. It's not the way to treat the nail in the foot, nor is that the way to treat bowel disease, and that's what we're talking about today. And so, there are some things I want you to know that can be so severe. You need something like prednisone. I'm not saying herbs and other things are going to work all of the time, right? Drugs like prednisone or rudesonide or even a biologic, they can be okay short term. It's this chronic application of acute therapies we want to avoid. So, we're talking about maintenance primarily and prevention, and this is all things kind of prior to getting over that hill. When you're in a flare, there's a lot of these tools that can still help, but when things are severe, your quality of life is that compromised, just get the drugs. Use them acutely until you can work through these processes to get to the root and begin reversing it naturally. That's the difference and that's what I want to sort of frame this entire conversation today. So, the first question is, we need to be answering, if we're going to talk about the things we're talking about today, is what is inflammation? What is it? Inflammation is simply an immune response, and this is your body's response designed to protect you or heal you from something. It's actually defined as a localized protective reaction of tissue to irritation, injury, or infection, and it's characterized by pain, redness, swelling, and sometimes a loss of function. So, when it comes down to the bowels, you have a localized that's within the bowel, a protective reaction, that's inflammation. The blood cells come down to try to help you or heal you from something that shouldn't be there. It's defending you. So, there's irritation, injury, or infection of some kind. That's when you get your pain, you're going to get redness, your colonoscopy reports are going to show that you have swelling and loss of function. So, you get strictures and fistulas, and you get all kinds of inflammatory things going on like constipation, diarrhea, and the loss of function. So, localized protection from something. The problem is our doctors never ask us what that something is. Now, I've talked about this many, many times. We talked about the first step to preventing inflammation is figuring out what's causing it. It's not what we're talking about today. It's another episode. I've done that dozens of times. Today is about how to control it if you don't know the root cause or while you're working toward the root cause. And stop guessing. I see people all the time, like, I'll figure out my root cause eventually. No, you won't. If you're giving me the eventually thing, you're not looking hard enough because it's not hard to get to when you know what you're doing. If it's been 10 years, you're telling me you're still looking, we're not having the same conversation. So, this conversation right now is about how to control the inflammation if you do not know the root cause or if you're currently working with someone through that root cause. And so, IBD related inflammation, there's going to be four main veins that we're going to be talking about here. The first one, when I say four veins or four lanes, I'm simplifying. This is a very oversimplification of inflammation. So, the scientists out there, don't at me. Here's another thing we want to look at. The first one is going to be your histamine or allergy-based responses. When we see Crohn's colitis, we see a lot of this stuff. Even if you tell me, no, I'm not allergic to peanuts. I'm allergic to bees. I don't have histamine issues. Histamines can affect the gut via inflammation. Histamines can affect the skin via rashes and hives. Histamines can affect the brain in the way of anxiety. Histamines can affect the gut in bloating, distension, food sensitivities, irritability. There's lots of stuff. The next, this is going to be number one. Number two is going to be this innate pathway. We're just going to call it your alarm systems. This is your body reacting to stuff. This is your body sending in the cavalry to try to heal you. The next stage that we see, or the next lane, is going to be attack. And this is where autoimmune or autoimmune-like symptoms can come in. This is where a doctor calls it autoimmune. It is not an autoimmune condition. I'm telling you right now, the research is very clear. There are assumptions that they've made, which led to this rhetoric about the disease being called autoimmune. The research is crystal clear. It is not autoimmune, like at all. So then the fourth thing we get, the fourth vein of types of reactions we're going to see are going to be repair or tolerance-type reactions. So intolerances. I'm going to run through these in a bit more detail. So we have your histamines, your alarms, your attacks, and your tolerance or repair. The first one, symptoms, if you're dealing with these, the histamine symptoms, I'm going to run through what those can look like. And again, it's a short list because there's so many things I had to condense it. I'm going to show you the drug. So if you take these drugs or these medications, you go, yeah, I'm feeling really good, then these natural alternatives should also provide some benefits. But before I get into this, I'm going to give you a disclaimer. I'm going to go through the medication. This is not medical advice. I'm not telling you to take these medications. I'm also not telling you to swap your medications for these natural alternatives. I legally am obligated to tell you to talk to your doctor. I'm not your doctor. So when you're doing this, also be warned, peptides, some of them have very high safety profiles. A lot of clinics and functional medicine clinics will use them. Your doctor might even be using them with you. But be wary because I have seen people use peptides who have had some horrific reactions. I've seen some practitioners be grossly irresponsible of peptides and hurt people. Do not do it unless you're under supervision when it comes to peptides. Noted. Okay. So first one, if you're experiencing any of these types of symptoms, histamines, so it's going to be flushing, itching, hives. If you have food sensitivities, they kind of come and go. Like one day I can have chicken, the next I can't. If you have mask cell activation, so you get sweaty and you get really itchy or you're sensitive in your skin. If you're bloating after meals or in the evening, chronic runny nose, you're sensitive to everything, you might be in this histamine allergy type space. So you can use over the counter antihistamine drugs. So anything like a Benadryl, Reactin, Claritin, Allegra, Pepsin, or even something called Ketotifin. Anyway, I'll spell it for you. It's called Ketotifin. And that one is a histamine regulator. It's going to help control some stuff. Now I got some clients who are having a lot of issues with their gut. And I've seen over 500 Crohn's colitis cases now. And I gave them Benadryl. I said, just pop one. Let me know how you feel. Like, dude, symptoms are gone. Medications are working, nothing was working. They took a Benadryl over the counter and their symptoms went away. Now this can be well sustained. Some people are just fine. Some people can rebound from the Benadryl. And that's where something like Ketotifin can come in as a lesser rebound from that. But if you're experiencing these histamine type symptoms and you take like an antihistamine over the counter, you're like, man, I feel really good. Here are some things you can start taking to control that lane of inflammation. And we're going to do this for each lane. So for this one, Quercetin. If you're not familiar with these, I can write some of these down. I'm going to run out of room. So I'm just going to put it short. Quercetin. You can try stinging nettle. You can try things like vitamin C. These are kind of staples. Also NAC, perilla oil is another one you can take. There's all kinds of good stuff. Luteolin and something called DAO. It's a bit more expensive, but sometimes that can be helpful to control these histamine responses. On the other hand, there are peptides available. Now they are, when you buy them offline, it says for research purposes only. This is how they make sure they're not charging you $2,000 a bottle. They're charging you $50 a bottle to go through that pharmaceutical process. But there are some things here, which again, not medical advice, but look into these for your own. So things like KPV can help control immune pathways associated with histamines. Or BPC-157, it directly affects the gut, the gut lining. It builds something called angiogenesis. You get new blood vessel creation. It can help really control those inflammatory pathways linked to histamines. So write those down, because I'm going to have to erase it to make some more room here. So if you're having any histamine-type things, so flushing, itching, food sensitivities, et cetera, you can try any histamine. If you feel really good, then the quercetin, vitamin C, stinging nettles, et cetera, can be very safe for very long-term use to help regulate that inflammatory-type pathway. The next one we're getting into is going to be your stage 2, your alarm. So if you're experiencing, you're somebody right now with high calprotectin levels, if you're prone to going into flares, if you have known exposures to toxins like mold, or if you've had a gut microbiome and you see your bacterias all over the place, we call this LPS. That's lipopolysaccharide. It's the byproducts a lot of these bacteria are going to make, which toxifies your system. Any kind of heavy metal or toxic load, or if you're living on a farm next to an orchard where they spray all the time, right, you have fevers, aches, or feel inflamed. Those types of symptoms are going to be in the alarm. Okay, this is an innate immune system. Your body's inflaming or flaring up to try to protect you. And so if you're responding well to certain drugs, things like steroids, so your prednisone, your budesonides, if you're responding really well to those, or your five ASAs they're called, like mesalamine, if you're responding really well to this one, or even some antibiotics like cipro or ciproflaxacin, rifaximin, or metronidazole, if you respond well, you go, I felt really good for a short time. The two weeks I was on those, I bounced right back. That's a problem. That could be this alarm stage. So some other things you can use if you have those symptoms and you respond well to those drugs, some things that may really help you here are going to be curcumin. Now I recommend high quality curcumin matters. The form matters. If you get a 95% purity on that, that would be great. Or even the curcumin phytosome or the curcumin rhizome is going to get directly into the gut. So there's different forms. You can see curcumin, you can look at the brackets on the ingredient side. But omegas, omega-3s, NAC, that's going to be N-acetylcysteine or glutathione. This is a precursor to glutathione. You can get some of those. Sulforaphanes or even binders. So modified citrus pectin, bentonite clay, chlorella, or even charcoal, activated charcoal. These can be good things to help get your body to calm down by capturing some of the toxins. Remember, the alarm is set off by environmental toxins. Mold, LPS toxins made by excess bacteria. So things that help you get rid of it, that help support your liver, that help control inflammation, and even binders that capture some of these toxins, your bentonite clay, etc., can help get rid of them, decreasing the load on your body. So if you respond well to prednisone, budesonide, mesalamine, and other antibiotics, so at your time with your doctor, these things like curcumin, omegas, NAC, and binders might be a really good option for you. Now we're talking about the third stretch here. The third stretch is the attack. So it's an autoimmune-like. This is where your body is going to be so inflamed, it looks like it's attacking your own tissues. But think of it this way. If you're doing a controlled burn in the forest to try to get down some of the brush to prevent large fires, you're doing a controlled burn. That's one thing. But if the house catches on fire and then you don't stop it, it's now ramped up and gotten out of control. Inflammation is going to work the same way. When you're dealing with inflammation inside of your body, what's happening, your doctor goes, you're inflamed, let's shut it down. No, no, no. It's a healing response. The problem is the healing response doesn't have an off right now, because the thing that it's trying to heal you from is never dealt with. The mold exposure, the chronic stressors, or whatever it is, has never been dealt with. And so your doctor is just trying to suppress the inflammation rather than find the nail in the foot. And so what we're talking about here, if you're somebody with these autoimmune type reactions, so you're dealing with deep Crohn's, so layers and layers of Crohn's, you have ulcers, fissures, fistulas, strictures rather is what I meant. Fissures, that's a new one. But even fissures can be a thing. You're prone to flares or colitis flares. You got blood or pus, and that immune system looks like it's attacking you, then you're in this attack phase or this arm, this lane of your immune system. And so if you're someone who responds really well to things like biologics, and a lot of the standard ones out there, if you're responding well to Remicade, Humira, Intivio, Symsia, Symphonia, Stelara, Skyrizy, Tremphia, you're responding to OMVO, RINVO, Xeljanz, whatever those are, then you're going to be likely in this attack style. Next up, if you're in the attack and your body's attacking itself, and you're taking biologics, and you're feeling good, some things that may help you are going to be your curcumins, again, something like Boswellia. If these are helping you, great. Resveratrol, back to your omegas, vitamin C, like I said, Resveratrol. Those are going to be good things to help you get out of this inflammatory self -attack. Now, there are certain peptides as well that may be helpful for you. Things like Thymosin. There's different types of Thymosin, but Thymosin, in this case, Thymosin Alpha 1. I would recommend, if you're going to touch into this, work with a doctor. Make sure you're working with a professional. Another one called Thymolin. That can be very helpful as well. It's going to help calm down the self -attack. Then you get into something called KPV, we mentioned early on. Then there's another one that we can also look at here called LL37. Again, lots of care with these peptides. KPV is probably a safer one if you decide to take it under your own control, as opposed to Thymosin or Thymolin. LL37, hit and miss, which reminds me, I forgot actually, on the innate alarm, that's your second phase. This is the phase if you're dealing with high calprotectin flares, known toxins, mold, gut dysbiosis, that SS31 can be a good one for you. KPV, and also something, instead of Thymosin Alpha 1, we have a Beta 4. That's another one that can help in this phase. But again, any of these immune-modulating peptides, you want to be very careful with, because if you don't know what you're doing, you don't know what part of your immune system is overreactive right now, you could throw yourself way off the deep end. Again, I've seen some practitioners who have been, grossly, I cannot under, I cannot bold that enough, grossly irresponsible with peptides, who took people who are well-managed, threw them into a full flare, and nearly killed them. Okay? Be careful if you're using peptides on your own. Next to that, let's talk about the repair and the tolerance stuff. Thought I'd drop this bad boy. There it is. Repair and tolerance. What does this mean? So, if you're in the repair and phase, we're talking about things like leaky gut. So, if you're inflamed, you got leaky gut. But if you have a weak mucous layer, you're prone to bleeding, you're prone to inflammation, you find that everything in your gut just feels awful. It's delicate all the time. You have food sensitivities that are chronically ongoing, or you've done things like a GI map, and you go, oh, my secretory IgA. That's called secretory IgA. This is the path of your immune system responsible for the mucous layer, so the inside of your intestines. If you find that is low on your tests, like it's underperforming, you're probably having reparative issues and some tolerance issues with your gut. So, you're somebody who might respond well to drugs like mesalamine, again, budesonide, or another one called sucrophate is another one that we can often see there. It's not as common though. On top of that, LDN. This is low-dose naltrexone. If you're finding you're taking these and you're responding really well, then the natural alternatives you can look at are going to be some really cheap over-the-counter stuff like L -glutamine. Now, I've had clients go, I'm taking a pill a day. It's like 250 milligrams. I've had people taking as much as 40, even as high as 60 grams per day, which is like, I'm not going to do the math in my head right now. It'll be embarrassing, but it's many, many times more than one pill. It's several, several scoops a couple of times a day split up into doses. Now again, we're cautious because any of these things can throw you off the deep end if you're not careful. But other great things that can help with the gut lining, the tolerance stuff, if you're well responding to LDN and budesonide, et cetera, then other things we can look at will be things like zinc carnizine. Zinc carnizine is a form of zinc, which is directly associated with helping buffer the gut and the gut lining. We can also look at things like butyrate, or my preferred version is called tributyrin. It's the more bioavailable. There's a great company by Stephen Wright called Healthy Gut. He actually has a tributyrin X supplement. It's bound with a redox oil, so I really quite like it. Very potent, three times more potent than the butyrate, and it's coded to get where it needs to go. It'll get into the colon. So there's really good stuff there. Other ones you can look at are colostrum or any gut, we call them mucogenic, so mucous membrane builders. So your marshmallows, DGL, slippery elm, those are going to be good ones. Sometimes we can even look at certain probiotics, or Saccharomyces boulardii is another great supplement if you are a repair tolerance type person. There's another thing, it's an amino acid chain. It's synthetic, but I'll put it under the natural because it's amino acids. It's called lorazetide, and this can help pair and really reduce the leaks in the gut and pull those gap junctions together, reducing your overall immune responses. Now, if you do want to go to peptides, you're a peptide person, this is where the BPC comes in. That's BPC-157. It's made in the gut, and it helps with the gut lining, angiogenesis, building the tissues back, the works. We can also look at your KPVs, your TB4, again, that's the thymosin beta-4. It's another one we can look at, or again, cycles back to LL-37. Again, being careful. I've seen some ridiculousness with peptides, but they can be in the right hands. Wonderful tools. Wonderful if you choose them well. I would say of this whole list, the lower risk ones that you would look into on your own would be things like KPV and BPC are going to be your lower risk peptides for sure. But the thymosin, there's TB4, TB4-FRAG, thymosin alpha-1, beta-1. There's all these different things you can look at. But I am extremely cautious of peptides. And for me, they're a last line of defense. Some people jump to them. I think it's grossly irresponsible. That's my thoughts on that. So we've gone through our four lanes. If you are a histamine allergy person, you're experiencing symptoms of flushing, itching, et cetera, and you take like a Benadryl or an Allegra or something over-the-counter and feel better, then you want mast cell control, quercitin, stinging nettles, et cetera. If you're an innate alarm person, so high cal protecting, you're prone to flares, you know there are toxins from your gut or from your environment like mold, and you're responding well to either antibiotics or you're responding well to steroids, then we're talking curcumin and binders, those types of things. If you're in the attack, your tissues are over-inflamed, you're experiencing ulcers, strictures, fistulas, blood, pus, you're flaring up quite often, you respond well to steroids or primarily biologics, then we're going to curcumin, boswellia, omegas, vitamin D, et cetera. And then if you're the repair tolerance, you've got your list of glutamines and zincs and butyrates and probiotics, et cetera. That can be very helpful natural alternatives. Here's why this matters. You'll notice there are different paths of the immune system. One of your questions might be, why can't I use butyrate for all of it? I'm not saying you can't, but this is why. If you picture your immune system like an octopus, each arm does a different thing. If arm number one is overactive and you give it a drug meant to suppress arm three, that's why it doesn't work for you. Well, I tried that drug, it didn't work. Okay, well, someone who's active in arm three might benefit from that drug. You won't. You need one that suppresses arm one. So by identifying your symptoms and the drugs that typically work, you can find alternatives that work on those same pathways, giving your body some natural relief. It can work in addition to, in tandem with, or in lieu of a pharmaceutical. So it gives you lots of options to play with. Now, if you're well over that hill, you're flaring up, you're like, my life is out of control, I have 50 bowel movements a day, you haven't tried drugs, get the drugs. Talk to your doctor, get what you got to get, and then we can work on controlling as we go. Now these supplements, you'll notice throughout this context, this is plant-based medication. We're talking about managing and regulating your inflammatory pathways and your immune responses with over-the -counter supplements. That's it. This is management. This is not curative. This is not long-term. This is a better alternative for those who don't want drugs, don't need drugs, but still would like some control. You still need to get to your root cause and you still need to figure out what's driving your IBD, your diverticulitis, or whatever condition specific you're dealing with, there's a root cause there. By getting through your history, understanding your symptoms, testing your environment and yourself, we can identify what those roots are, give you some good management tools, but unless you fix that root cause, you're managing for life. And that's not the goal. The goal is to fix it, give your body what it needs to heal long-term so you never need these drugs again. Because these conditions are not autoimmune, genetic, or random. They're very causative. And frankly, the more you look at it, the more predictable they get. So it's not as complex as the world makes it look and everybody is wrong, except for me and a handful of others. And we're trying to get the message out. If you're watching on YouTube and you're listening on the podcast and you're looking for help, there's a link right down below. You can literally send me an email or just book in and we'll have a conversation and see what we can do to get you that help. 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 and 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.