Clean Gut

Alejandro kicks the book off with a story about following his gardener (Fermin) around the house as a little boy as he tended their plants. Fermin would take a quick look at the leaves and then spend the bulk of his time tending to the roots and soil.

Alejandro says that this was his first lesson in good medicine.

He says: “While I was in medical school the trend in modern medicine was to specialize and super specialize. Doctors became experts in one organ or even one part of one organ. More advanced technology helped not only detect problem areas, but also treat them. The advances of science were mesmerizing, and people held the practice of medicine in high regard. The great irony of our success, however, was that we only got better at painting the leaves. We went way beyond gardeners who paint the brown leaves green. We cut out whole branches and replaced them with healthier ones. Or built artificial branches and leaves altogether. We got so good at attacking individual diseases and symptoms we forgot to look at their root causes.”

Painting brown leaves green. Removing whole branches and replacing them with healthier ones.

In short: Dealing with symptoms vs. root causes.

The more specialized the medical community has become, the further away we’ve gotten from a systemic look at the ROOT causes of our issues.

And, of course, the point of the book is that our GUT = our roots.

If we want to thrive, we need to start with a clean, healthy gut.

Let’s take a look at some Ideas on how to do that.

P.S. Another helpful metaphor for the symptoms vs. root causes: Imagine a pot of water that’s boiling. If you take a symptoms approach, you might just drop in a few ice cubes at regular intervals to cool the water down from a boil. If you look at the root cause of the boil, you’d turn off the flame causing the water to boil.

Symptoms vs. root causes. It’s always wise to look at the roots…

P.P.S. Here’s how David Perlmutter captures the power of the gut in Brain Maker: “New, leading-edge science from the most well-respected institutions around the world is discovering that to an extraordinary degree, brain health and, on the flip side, brain diseases, are dictated by what goes on in the gut. That’s right: what’s taking place in your intestines today is determining your risk for any number of neurological conditions…

The digestive system is intimately connected to what goes on in the brain. And perhaps the most important aspect of the gut that has everything to do with your general wellness and mental health is its internal ecology—the various microorganisms that live within it, especially the bacteria.”

I’m ALWAYS blown away by the fact that our GUT has more neurons that our BRAIN.

Alejandro shares this in the context of talking about his own health challenges—at one stage at the peak of his medical practice when he was running around all hours of the day and eating poorly, he suffered from depression, irritable bowel syndrome and a bunch of other issues. He was on something like 7 prescriptions to deal with all of the challenges.

When he was diagnosed with depression, his psychiatrist pointed to his head and told him his brain was not producing enough serotonin.

In hindsight, Alejandro tells us, the psychiatrist should have been pointing at his gut.

Remember: Up to 90% of our serotonin is produced in our gut. (Nuts.)

Keep that in mind the next time you consider how to most effectively deal with your or a loved one’s depression.

Start with the GUT!

Antibiotics.

Although Alejandro makes it very clear that there are instances in which antibiotics can be life-saving (his own life was saved when antibiotics helped cure him from a double pneumonia infection), we need to be very aware of how much antibiotics we use and the deleterious effects on our gut.

Alejandro tells us that some of his most challenging cases are with patients who have a history of a ton of antibiotic use—particularly earlier in their lives. Part of a longer chat, but while killing the invaders, antibiotics also destroy the friendly stuff in our microbiome that needs to be restored!

For now, let’s focus on the fact that those preservatives that keep food on the shelf longer are basically acting like antibiotics.

The next time you’re cruising through the grocery store looking at all the food in boxes and jars and tubes, remember:

—> The longer the shelf life of what you’re eating, the shorter your life will be.

Let’s stay on the outer aisles at the store and eat the fresh stuff that spoils fast!

That’s from a chapter in which Alejandro traces a number of our most prevalent diseases to our gut: from heart disease and cancer to depression and auto-immune disease.

Lots of different symptoms. One primary root. (Echo!) The gut.

Then there’s nutrigenomics—how our nutrition turns on or off certain genes. What a fascinating branch of epigenetics.

Makes me think of Tom Rath—author of Eat Move Sleep (+ Are You Fully Charged? + my favorite kid’s book (was just reading it to Emerson yesterday, in fact): The Rechargeables).

Tom basically lost the cancer lottery. Diagnosed with cancer at 16, Tom discovered that he has a rare gene mutation that shuts off a powerful tumor suppressor. As a result, he lost his left eye and has spent a week in the hospital every year getting tests to make sure his various cancers (in his eye, kidneys, pancreas, adrenal glands, and spine) are in check before getting a new 12-month lease on life.

AND… In the face of those bad odds, he’s THRIVING—a living case study that genes don’t exclusively determine outcomes.

We have the power to influence our genetic expression with every bite we take and every step we take and every good night of sleep we get and every minute of meditation and…

Let’s flip on the good switches and keep the not-so-good switches in the off position. :)

Gluten. It’s a silent enemy and one of the first things removed from the Clean Gut program.

As Alejandro points out, gluten sensitivity is scientifically connected to a TON of diseases. Knowing this, one would hope we’d REMOVE it from as many things as we can. Alas, the exact opposite is happening.

In Grain Brain, David Perlmutter says: “It is my belief that gluten is a modern poison.”

Gluten is found in grains like wheat, rye, and barley. (And, note, before the agricultural revolution, we ate miniscule amounts of wheat. Now, we eat 133 lbs of it a year. The genetically modified version of wheat we consume today has 20x more gluten than the prior model.)

Gluten is also such a good “binder, filler, shaper, bulking agent, texturizer, and stabilizer” (it’s Latin for “glue”) that it’s found in a TON of other things ranging from hot dogs to ice cream. And, “Most importantly, it is in the comfort foods we love the most, such as bread, pizza, rolls, buns, pancakes, cakes, muffins, pasta, pies, and pastries.”

If you or your family’s health is sub-optimal, experimenting with removing gluten might be a REALLY smart thing to do.

As Perlmutter says: “Remember, if you do nothing else recommended in this book but eliminate gluten and refined carbohydrates, you will experience profound positive effects.”

Removing gluten and other “toxic triggers” is Step #1 in the Clean Gut program:

So, all that leads to Step #1 of the Clean Gut program: REMOVE TOXIC TRIGGERS.

We need to give our gut a chance to heal. If we’re constantly bombarding it with toxicity, it simply can’t do that.

The most common toxic triggers that are the first to go? Gluten. Dairy. Processed sugar. Caffeine. Alcohol. (Followed by corn, grains, soy, and nightshades.) <— The book walks us through how to go about eliminating those and then reintroducing them to test what triggers us.

What DO we eat? Whole foods. Stuff found in nature and made of one ingredient.

One super simple way the Clean Team tells us to think about it is: “whole foods minus your toxic triggers.”

Those are the final words of the book (written by two leaders of the Clean team: Dhru Purohit and John Rosania).

Here are their guiding principles:

• What Not to Eat. It ALL starts with removing the toxic stuff. Most of the benefits people experience in the first 21 days of the Clean program (and most health programs), come from ELIMINATING the bad stuff. They say it’s like taking tacks out of your back pocket. Makes life a lot more pleasant. :)
• What to Eat. After removing the bad stuff, we bring in the good. We eat a bunch of the good stuff which helps us “crowd out” the not-so-good stuff. Remember: Whole foods minus your triggers!
• How to Eat. We want to eat the right food in the right way. Tips: Don’t “food bomb” where you eat a TON of different things at one time and think 80/20: 80% of your plate with greens/veggies + 20% for protein/fat. And, stop when you’re 80% full.
• Supplement Right. It starts with food and… “Supplements help plug the nutritional gaps that keep us from reaching our health goals.”
• Understand the Psychology of Clean Living. Notice your emotional triggers and break the cycles of emotional eating. See Habits 101 for some good WOOP if-then planning! :)
• Move and Chill. As Katy Bowman says, we move less than ever before but we rarely ever completely shut down. We need to MOVE our bodies. And, we need to chill!
• Create Community. Angela Duckworth tells us that the fastest way to build grit it to join a gritty community. Having support from people who share your goals + values = huge!

Well, that’s a super quick look at this great book.