Digestive Wellness: Strengthen the Immune System and Prevent Disease Through Healthy Digestion, Fourth Edition (12 page)

Circle the following foods black:
Grains: wheat, bread, cereal, corn, rice, millet, buckwheat, bulgur, quinoa, amaranth, barley, oats, rye

Look at those circles. Is there one food group that dominates your diary? If you eliminated one of these categories from your diet, which would be the easiest to give up and which would be the most difficult? Sometimes the ones that are the hardest to give up are the ones that are causing us the most trouble. They temporarily make us feel better, even though they are really making us sicker. Why? Our bodies may
react negatively to cigarettes, dairy products, caffeine, sugar, wheat, pork, beef, citrus fruits, or any other foods, yet we crave them.

This week, focus on the foods you circled in red and eliminate all of them. Sugars ferment and can contribute to your digestive problems. Get rid of soft drinks, cookies, pastries, donuts, and sugar added to coffee or tea. We’re not talking about perfection here. Let’s just make some progress. Why? These foods make it harder for your body to be healthy. High-sugar foods deplete our nutrient stores. We need most of the B-complex vitamins, chromium, manganese, and potassium to metabolize these foods properly, but sweets don’t have any of these nutrients. So we take nutrients out of storage, and eventually our tissues become depleted.

After a couple of weeks, fruit begins to taste really sweet, which is just how it ought to taste. Once, I realized that it had been months since I had had any chocolate. I began to feel deprived, so I bought a big chocolate bar for my family and friends. I ate a few squares and was totally satisfied. I hope that eventually you can be satisfied with just a little bit, too. But if you can’t, you’re really better off without any. Once I was sick and was craving sweets like crazy. My doctor told me it was the bacteria—both good and bad—that wanted the energy. So starve those bad guys out. The helpful bacteria can adapt with real food.

In conventional medicine, a clinician makes a diagnosis and there are standard therapies for each diagnosis. In functional medicine, there is no cookie-cutter approach. Finding the underlying mechanisms of disease rather than focusing on symptom relief is the goal. Two people with the same diagnosis may need completely different therapies. At the same time, two people with completely dissimilar diagnoses may benefit from the same therapy. For example, irritable bowel syndrome, migraine headaches, attention deficit disorder, and fibromyalgia may seem like different diagnoses, but they may all have the underlying cause of leaky gut syndrome or food intolerances. On the other hand, three people with irritable bowel syndrome could have completely different underlying causes, including small intestinal bacterial infection, a deficiency of protective bacteria, too little fiber, food sensitivities, lactose intolerance, celiac disease, imbalances in neurotransmitters, or stress-induced IBS, to name a few.

So how do we begin looking for underlying mechanisms? I call it the DIGIN approach. In the following chapters we’ll explore each aspect of this model (see
Figure II.1
). I consider this section to be the heart of the book. No matter what the diagnosis, there is probably some aspect of this model that will help bring you back into better balance.

DIGIN is an acronym for the five primary categories of digestive imbalances:

D
igestion/absorption

I
ntestinal permeability

G
astrointestinal microbiota

Figure II.1
The DIGIN model.

I
mmune function and inflammation

Enteric
n
ervous system

By assessing each of these areas, you can discover how to best get your body back into balance.

The principles of repair in functional medicine are fairly simple. As one of the pioneers in the field, Sidney Baker, M.D., said: Get rid of what you don’t need, and get what you do need. The 4 Rs were originally put together by Jeffrey Bland, Ph.D., and Metagenics. Recently at the Institute for Functional Medicine, we’ve updated this to the 5 R Program, which includes:

Remove:
Nutrient-depleted food, processed foods, poor-quality fats and oils, parasites, metals, infections, foods that don’t agree with us. This is the critical first step.

Replace:
Processed foods with whole foods, nutrients, digestive enzymes, hydrochloric acid, bile salts.

Reinoculate (Repopulate):
Beneficial probiotics and prebiotics from food and supplements.