You Are What You Eat - Life and Death Begin in the Colon

There is a lot of buzz in the health and wellness community about the GAPS protocol, or GAPS diet.   GAPS stands for Gut and Psychology Syndrome. It is a term that Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride, who also designed the GAPS diet, invented.  The notion that mental health and gut health are connected is the driving factor behind this movement, as well as Zenus’s flagship product, Microbiome Boost.

It’s time to talk about the colon, often referred to as our gut.

What is the colon?

When it comes to health and sickness, one need look no further than the condition of the gut.

Zenus’s flagship product, Microbiome Boost, was developed decades ago to address the particular modern problems we have with the gut. And throughout the ensuing years, more and more has been learned about the entire digestive system, the immune system, and their symbiotic relationship.  While the GAPS diet is trending currently, the ideas have been around for a long time.

Further, we’ve learned what has gone so terribly wrong such that the list of debilitating diseases now fills vast medical tomes while thousands of pharmaceutical drugs are invented that don’t cure them.

A Short Introduction to the Gut

The short answer to the disease problem is: accumulated and impacted waste, poison and toxins in the gut that the body has been unable to get rid of.

But before we can properly understand the significance of that statement, it’s necessary to gain a basic understanding of what the gut is and does in the whole system of body processes that we call life.

In the dark, oxygen-free zone of our large intestines, a vast community of life is flourishing.

There are more than 100 trillion microbes living there, and if you gathered them all together, they would weigh more than our brains. These microscopic organisms insert themselves into the running dialogue between the brain and the gut and in the process, help determine how stressed out we get, when we get sick, how quickly we recover and have a tremendous influence on our physical and psychological health.

The gut is a much more complicated system than most people realize. People think it is this machine that processes, transports and absorbs foods. In reality, it is an extensive sensory system, signaling system and immune system. We have all been endowed with a nervous system that is sandwiched between the layers of our gut that has between 50 [million] and 100 million nerve cells. It’s about the size of the spinal cord if you pushed it all together.

It has its own intelligence. It wants to eliminate things that don’t belong there — bad bacteria, bad bugs or toxins from rotting and putrefied foods. If you ingest something wrong, it gives the signal to throw it up, and if you have a bad bug in your large intestine, it generates diarrhea. The reason it is so perfect is it has evolved over billions of years. Even the most primitive marine animals had something very similar in principle.

What we know for sure is that this community plays a major role in the processes of digestion, metabolism, gut health and immune defense mechanisms. But of special interest is the connection between microbes and the human brain.

There have been some very intriguing studies in the last few years that show communication between the microbes and the brain can play quite a big role in the generation of emotional behaviors.

There are receptors throughout our bodies that respond to signals from the microbes or the metabolites that they produce. For example, certain microbes can influence the production of the serotonin molecule, which plays a role in appetite regulation, food intake, well-being and sleep. That gives the microbes a tremendous ability to influence overall health states.

Also, some microbe signals can activate the vagus nerve endings in the gut, which are like an information highway to the brain.

Every emotional state has a reflection on the gut level. The pattern for an angry stomach is contraction, more acid secretion and an increase in blood flow to allow the stomach to do this extra work. When we experience emotions such as stress, fear, anger and anxiety — there is a release of stress hormones like adrenaline and nor-epinephrine that circulate in the blood making your heart beat faster and causing sweaty palms.

We are learning now that they also influence the behavior of the microbes in your gut because they have receptors for these chemicals. Studies have shown that the release of these chemicals can change the gene expression profile of the bacteria in the gut, causing their virulence genes to be unregulated.

Yet all of these emotional states reflected on a gut level are tied into and even worse problem, which may well be the most basic problem of all…

That, of course, means that 70% of what we ingest is rejected by the body. It’s marked for excretion. It has no nutritional value. It can’t be broken down and absorbed into the bloodstream. It’s foreign. It’s synthetic. It’s not real food.

Try as it might, overwhelmed as it is, the body is not able to get rid of it all. What it can’t excrete remains impacted on the gut walls where it rots and putrefies.

Then, to defend itself from the absorption of the resultant poisons into the bloodstream, the body coats the gut walls with mucus. Unfortunately this also prevents the absorption of actual nutrients to a large degree.

You can see where this is going.

Now we’re ‘over-fed and ‘under-nourished’.

And even worse, the gut becomes a haven for bad microbes and bacteria because their menu of choice is poisons and toxins.

That’s why we now say ‘life and death begin in the colon’.

Once this is understood, you have started on the road to health and wellness, because now you know where to start: Target 1: Restore health and balance to the colon and improve your mental health.  Sound familiar?  This is exactly the philosophy of Gut and Psychology Syndrome (GAPS).

This video will point you in the right direction.

Be sure to check out our flagship product - Microbiome Boost