By Dr. Mercola
If you could make one change in your life that would lower
your risk of chronic disease, help you lose weight, and make you
feel happier and more energized, would you do it?
The one change I’m referring to is cutting back on processed
foods. It’s widely known that refined junk foods aren’t good for
your body as they’re packed with sugar (including fructose),
synthetic and rancid fats, preservatives, genetically modified
(GM) ingredients, additives, and more.
Lesser known, yet equally important (if not more so), is the
role of poor diet on inflammation and gut health – two factors
that are intricately involved in virtually every aspect of your
health.
In short, nearly all processed foods are the epitome of what
you shouldn’t be putting in your body. The research
against processed foods is hard to deny, or ignore, any longer,
especially in light of a new study highlighting processed foods’
detrimental effect on your immune system and gut health (and
that of future generations).
Eating Your Way to an Early Death…
In a recent review published in the Nutrition Journal,1
Dr. Ian Myle of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious
Diseases explained that our modern-day Westernized diet is
setting the stage for immune-mediated diseases:2
“While today's modern diet may provide beneficial
protection from micro- and macronutrient deficiencies, our
over abundance of calories and the macronutrients that
compose our diet may all lead to increased inflammation,
reduced control of infection, increased rates of cancer, and
increased risk for allergic and auto-inflammatory disease.”
It's important to realize that dietary components can either
trigger or prevent inflammation from taking
root in your body. Chronic inflammation, meanwhile, is involved
in diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, stroke, cancer, and
much more.
Regarding your diet, for example, whereas synthetic trans
fats and sugar, particularly fructose, will increase
inflammation, eating healthy fats such as animal-based omega-3
fats found in
krill oil, or the essential fatty acid gamma linolenic acid
(GLA), will help to reduce them.
But this is only one mechanism by which processed foods
damage your health. When you eat processed foods, you may be
triggering the release of powerful antibodies meant to fight off
foreign invaders, which can actually cause collateral damage to
your body's cells.
In fact, eating a diet rich in processed foods and junk foods
can cause an ongoing mistaken internal attack on very necessary
components of your digestive system.3
Everyone is affected differently by this constant internal
antibody attack, otherwise, we'd all have autoimmune diseases.
But it is known that macrophages, one of the more powerful
tools your immune system uses to fight foreign invaders, can
also do wide-ranging damage to your body's tissues.4
The Nutrition Journal review focused on several others
as well, including:5
- Simple sugars increase inflammatory markers in your
blood while the “complex carbohydrate fiber (but not
starches), such as that found in fruits and vegetable,
appear to reduce inflammation”
- Another contributor to modern diet-induced immune
dysfunction may be the increased consumption of omega-6 fats
(found in vegetable oils) in lieu of omega-3 fats
- Recent animal and cell-culture models have found that
elements in gluten may stimulate inflammation and disrupt
your immune system
- In animal models, the combination of pesticide-producing
GM corn and
pesticide-resistant GM soy led to increased rates of
severe stomach inflammation
- The over-abundance of many processed and biologically
incompatible foods in the typical Western diet
simultaneously enhance inflammation while muting your immune
system’s ability to respond to and ultimately control
infections
What You Eat Can Make or Break Your Gut Health
Nearly 100 trillion bacteria, fungi, viruses, and other
microorganisms compose your body's microflora, and advancing
science has made it quite clear that these organisms play a
major role in your health, both mental and physical. For
example, beneficial bacteria, also known as probiotics, have
been shown to:
This is why I recommend a diet rich in whole, unprocessed
foods along with cultured or fermented foods. If, for whatever
reason, you are not consuming fermented foods at least a few
times a week, it's wise to consider supplementation with a
high-quality probiotic supplement.
When you eat too many grains, sugars, and processed foods,
these foods serve as “fertilizer” for pathogenic microorganisms
and yeast, causing them to rapidly multiply. One of the best
things you can do for your health, including your digestive
health, is eliminate sugars and processed foods as much as
possible.
In fact, millions of people currently suffer from yeast
overgrowth and a host of other maladies related to an improper
balance of mircoorganisms in your intestines. And most
conventional doctors will not be able to identify the cause of
your symptoms if you suffer from such an imbalance. As explained
in the Nutrition Journal:6
“The notion that diet, stress, and environment can,
for better or worse, imprint upon the bowel has been around
since the ancient Egyptian pharaohs. However, only recent
focus and technologic advances have allowed accurate
elucidation of the mechanisms by which our lifestyle impacts
our microbiome and leads to dysbiosis.
In the gut (and on the skin), there is an optimal,
albeit not yet fully elucidated, balance of bacterial
species. Some strains of bacteria are needed to digest
dietary fibers while others produce valuable nutrients like
vitamin K.
Beneficial bacteria aide their hosts by occupying
space and/or modifying the microenvironment in ways that
prevent harmful bacteria from gaining a foothold. More
importantly, the commensal flora provides a type of training
to the immune system.
Like a sparring partner in boxing, the immune system’s
interactions with the normal commensal flora provide an
education that is indispensable when a pathogenic opponent
is encountered.
…Just as loss of honeybees from orchards or
addition of aninvasive species to a lake creates significant
harm for the surrounding biosphere, so too it appears that
small shifts in our microbiome caused by today’s unhealthy
diets can reverberate through human health.”
Planning to Have a Baby? What You Eat Now Impacts Your Baby
Later (Moms and Dads)
One of the most striking aspects of your gut health is its
power to influence not only your health but also that
of your children and grandchildren. Poor dietary choices can
actually become encoded into the gene expression patterns
(epigenome) of your DNA and your gut microbiome, leading to
permanent changes in the balance of bacteria in your body –
changes that may be passed onto your children.7
As noted in the Nutrition Journal,8
a mother’s diet may shape her child’s taste preferences in
utero, skewing them toward vegetables or sweets, for instance.
There’s also evidence that children inherit their microbiome
from their mother, and part of this may be “seeded into the
unborn fetus while still in the womb.”
If a mother has an imbalance of bacteria, she will pass this
imbalance onto her child and “thus fails to present the ideal
commensals for a proper immune education during her child’s most
critical developmental window… This developmental dysbiosis
leaves the offspring’s immune system poorly trained to fight off
infections and encourages autoimmune and allergic diseases,” Dr.
Myles noted.
Even a father’s diet plays a role in the child’s future
health, as “paternal epigenetics related to methylation of DNA
and histones can also be inherited by the offspring and could
alter early development of the immune system.” As Dr. Myles
explained:9 “Since
the information encoded upon DNA is passed from parent-to-child
and even potentially from parent-to-grandchild, cells that learn
bad habits like ignoring signs of infection or over-reacting to
antigens could combine with microbiome shifts to further worsen
a child’s immunologic development.”
Fermented Foods Are Your Friend
Now that you’re aware of the risks of processed foods, and
the importance of re-seeding your gut with beneficial organisms,
you’re probably wondering what, exactly, to do about it. The
first step is eliminating as many processed foods as possible,
in favor of whole, unprocessed foods like organic grass-fed
meat, raw grass-fed dairy, cage-free organic eggs, organic
produce, nuts, seeds, and healthful fats (like coconut oil). The
next step is to feast on fermented foods regularly. Fermented
foods are the best route to optimal digestive health, as long as
you eat the traditionally made, unpasteurized versions.
Fermented vegetables are an excellent way to supply
beneficial bacteria back into your gut, and, unlike some other
fermented foods, they tend to be palatable, if not downright
delicious, to most people. As an added bonus, they can also be a
great source of
vitamin K2 if you ferment your own using the proper
starter culture.
We had samples of high-quality, fermented organic vegetables
made with our specific starter culture tested, and a typical
serving (about two to three ounces) contained not only 10
trillion beneficial bacteria, but it also had 500 mcg of
vitamin K2, which we now know is a vital co-nutrient to both
vitamin D and calcium. Most high-quality probiotic supplements
will only supply you with a fraction of the beneficial bacteria
found in such homemade fermented veggies, so it's your most
economical route to optimal gut health as well.
Additional healthy choices include lassi (an Indian yoghurt
drink, traditionally enjoyed before dinner), fermented grass-fed
organic milk such as
kefir, various pickled fermentations of cabbage, turnips,
eggplant, cucumbers, onions, squash, and carrots, and natto
(fermented soy). Some of the beneficial bacteria found in
fermented foods are also excellent
chelators of heavy metals and pesticides, which will also
have a beneficial health effect by reducing your toxic load.
Health Benefits of Kimchi as a Probiotic Food
You’re probably familiar with sauerkraut, kefir, and yogurt,
but one fermented food that’s still relatively unknown to North
American palates is kimchi. Kimchi is a traditional Korean dish
made from fermented vegetables and a spicy blend of chili
peppers, garlic, scallions, and other spices. It's common to
find kimchi at almost every Korean meal, where it is served
alone as a side dish, mixed with rice or noodles, or used as an
ingredient in soups or stews. There are many reasons,
health-wise, to give kimchi a try if you've never had it -- it's
rich in vitamins A and C, for instance. But what makes kimchi
unique is its fermentation process, which leads to the
production of beneficial Lactobacilli bacteria. The Journal
of Medicinal Food explained:10
“Kimchi is a traditional Korean food manufactured by
fermenting vegetables with probiotic lactic acid bacteria
(LAB). Many bacteria are involved in the fermentation of
kimchi, but LAB become dominant while the putrefactive
bacteria are suppressed during salting of baechu cabbage and
the fermentation. The addition of other subingredients and
formation of fermentation byproducts of LAB promote the
fermentation process of LAB to eventually lead to
eradication of putrefactive and pathogenic bacteria, and
also increase the functionalities of kimchi. Accordingly,
kimchi can be considered a vegetable probiotic food that
contributes health benefits in a similar manner as yogurt as
a dairy probiotic food.”
In many ways, kimchi may be even better than yogurt,
as it contains other noteworthy superfoods as well, like
cruciferous vegetables, garlic, ginger, red pepper, and more,
which significantly boost its health potential. GreenMedInfo
lists nearly two-dozen studies showing kimchi’s benefits,11
and, according to a study in The Journal of Medicinal Food,12
kimchi has an impressive roster of health functionality that
includes:
Anticancer |
Antiobesity |
Anticonstipation |
Colorectal health promotion |
Probiotic properties |
Cholesterol reduction |
Fibrolytic effect |
Antioxidative properties |
Antiaging properties |
Brain health promotion |
Immune promotion |
Skin health promotion |
Health Goal: Swap Out One Processed-Food Meal for Fermented
Foods
Eliminating processed foods from your diet might seem
overwhelming, but it doesn’t need to be. Start slowly with this
“bite-sized” step: swap out one of your processed-food meals (or
even a snack) with homemade fermented foods. You can try a kefir
smoothie (blend kefir with frozen berries and, if you like, a
couple of
organic raw eggs) or a serving of fermented veggies or
kimchi. You can find
step-by-step instructions to make your own fermented vegetables
at home here. Just one-quarter to one-half cup of fermented
veggies, eaten with one to three meals per day, can have a
dramatically beneficial impact on your health.
If you’ve never eaten fermented foods, too large a portion
may provoke a healing crisis, which occurs when the probiotics
kill off pathogens in your gut. When these pathogens die, they
release potent toxins. If you are new to fermented foods, you
should introduce them gradually, beginning with as little as one
teaspoon of sauerkraut or kimchi with a meal. Observe your
reactions for a couple of days before proceeding with another
small portion, and increase your dose gradually, as tolerated.
Remember, many food preferences develop very early in life, so
the sooner you can introduce fermented vegetables to your
children, the better.
Traces of the flavors of the foods mothers eat are
perceptible in their breast milk and amniotic fluid. Babies
whose mothers eat foods like garlic, broccoli, or kimchi while
pregnant tend to be more likely to enjoy these foods later in
life. Once you’ve reached your goal of swapping out one
processed-food meal with fermented foods, make another goal,
such as swapping out your snack of chips or pretzels for raw
veggies and dip – or replacing your daily soda with a glass of
green vegetable juice. As you continue making changes, use
your momentum and increased energy to keep moving forward,
tackling
one
unhealthy habit at a time. Soon you’ll be rid of processed
foods entirely… along with all the health troubles that go along
with them.
Copyright 1997- 2014 Dr. Joseph Mercola. All Rights Reserved.