The Gut – The Root Cause of Modern Disease?
For the longest time, people thought of the gut as a system to simply absorb nutrients and eliminate waste. It was simply thought of as a food processor that had little to do with heart disease, mental health, autoimmune disease, arthritis, fatigue, dementia, aging, fertility, skin issues, cancer or obesity. However, that has all changed.
The gut is not just a tube that moves food one end of the body to the other. It’s our body’s first line of defense between us and the outside world. But more than that, it’s a complex system, teeming with trillions of living microscopic organisms, a community of bacteria, viruses, and fungus, called the ‘microbiome’, who are crucial to a whole host of bodily functions.
We’ve realized that all health starts in the gut.
Now, what we’re seeing is that it all comes back to this one place. This is where the immune system lives. This is where we control serotonin, which controls our mood, controls our energy levels, our focus. This is metabolism. The way that we interact with our food, the way that we process our food, the nutrients that we find in our food, and how we make the most of those nutrients. Even cancer prevention starts with gut health. So, when you go down the line and you look at the way that we process our food, metabolism, our immune system, our mood and energy levels. I didn’t even mention this yet but I really need to. The interaction with our genes. You go down the line and you look at all these things and what you realize is that this is what defines health. This is an all-encompassing list of everything that is relevant to human health. It all starts right here in the gut.
Why is the gut or the digestive system so important?
It’s because to me, I look at the roots of the body. So if you look at a plant, a plant is grounded by its roots and through the root system is where the plant absorbs all of the nutrients. So if the leaves of the plant are sick, you’re not going to treat the leaves, you’re going to go and look at the roots and see, well what’s happening with the roots, is it getting all the minerals that it needs? Why is the plant sick? So the same way, if the body is sick, we need to look at the root, and our root system is the digestive system.