When It's Hard to Fix Gut Health
Sometimes people spend years or even decades trying to fix gut health issues without much success. Why is it sometimes so hard?
Dysfunction in the gut can be the result of many factors outside of the gut, and this is what gets missed a lot of the time.
Take small intestine bacterial overgrowth (SIBO) for example ...
SIBO is often the result of a slow-down of gut motility, the rate at which the "migrating motor complex" (MMC) moves things down the GI tract.
This allows partially digested food to sit too long in the small intestine and feed bacteria, fungi, and parasites.
The function of the MMC can be affected by things like traumatic brain injury or food poisoning that can result in damage to the nerves of the gut when the immune system attacks the food poisoning pathogen(s).
More commonly, the slow-down in gut motility is due to things like low stomach acid and/or cholestasis (liver/gallbladder congestion), both of which reduce the flow of bile and both of which can be caused by a variety of factors.
Bile is one of the main stimulators of gut motility, keeping things moving briskly through the small intestine so that bacteria do not have much opportunity to feed on your food while you're still trying to digest it.
Bile also has chemical properties that make it like a detergent that cleanses the small intestine of food and bacteria.
SIBO can have other causes as well, like exposure to mold toxins or molds like Aspergillus growing in the gut.
Another common gut health issue is dysbiosis in the large intestine--an imbalance of gut miccrobes with too many pathogenic ones and/or too few beneficial species.
Usually, high antibiotic use triggers dysbiosis by killing off the good guys, and then the bad guys often grow back faster than the good guys.
Chronic stress and/or insomnia is also enough to cause dysbiosis, as strange as that may seem.
Dysbiosis can also get started, or be maintained for decades, due to dysbiosis in the nose, sinuses, mouth, and/or lungs.
We swallow about two liters of saliva and mucus every day, so dysbiotic organisms "north" of the GI tract get washed into it all day long.
And if stomach acid is not high enough to kill everything, then the bad bugs gets into the small and large intestines.
Even bad water bottle hygiene (not thoroughly washing the bottle between uses) can result in "backwash" from your mouth contaminating the water bottle from which you are drinking and then multiplying and forming a biofilm on the inside of the bottle if the bottle is not vigorously washed between refills.
Ask me how I know!
I used to periodically experience gut symptoms that I eventually traced to not washing my drinking water bottles, so I improved my water bottle hygiene.
But then I forgot my water bottle hygiene for a while, and I believe that this was what caused me to get acute appendicitis requiring surgery 10 years ago.
Religiously wash your water bottles between refills!!
Dysbiotic bacteria and parasites can also live in the gallbladder, which then serves as another source of bad guys getting into the gut daily.
Sometimes when the immune system gets highly activated in the gut, inflammatory and autoimmune conditions can develop in the gut and/or outside of the gut.
But even more often, gut health issues can be "silent", causing no symptoms in the gut while being the cause other symptoms like anxiety, depression, brain fog, chronic fatigue, skin disorders, autoimmunity, diabetes, dementia, cardiovascular disease, cancer, and more.
Due to the potential complexity underlying gut health issues and the symptoms arising from them, fixing the situation often requires a "top-to-bottom" approach to rebalancing the microbiome and normalizing gut function.
It starts with a complete assessment of all of the potential root causes of gut health issues and then addressing them in the optimal sequence.
Often the optimal sequence is "top to bottom", but not always. And sometimes multiple factors need to be addressed simultaneously.
It all depends on the particulars of the situation.
As a result of not addressing the true root causes, or not addressing them in the optimal sequence, many people spend thousands of dollars over the years on probiotics, herbs, and other treatments without achieving relief or resulution.
Chronic gut health issues are one of the most demoralizing and emotionally devastating health challenges one can have because it can affect social life, confidence, brain function, energy levels, autoimmune disease, cancer risk, etc
If you have been struggling with gut health issues, or other health challenges that may or may not be a result of "silent" gut health issues, you may want to work with somebody that understands the complex relationships involved.
Ideally, that person would also be able to evaluate the role that your bio-individuality might play.
For example, some people have genetics that make them less able to control histamine in the gut or handle the lectins in legumes or grains.
These people may benefit from unique supplements or other types of remedies aimed at these specific vulnerabilities.
The bottom line is that detailed assessment and an optimally-sequenced and bio-individualized approach can save you a lot of time, money, and emotion.