Happy Healthy Gut (5 page)

As the bowel becomes more damaged, lactose intolerance may develop. Often, sufferers are diagnosed with IBS and then, after more extensive testing, are found to actually have celiac disease. Blood tests are often prescribed first to make a diagnosis of celiac disease, and are typically followed up by a biopsy of the duodenum.
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This disease is serious. Celiac disease leads to an increased risk of colorectal cancer if left untreated, and may lead to other complications, eventually resulting in death. Here are some facts about celiac disease from the National Foundation for Celiac Awareness:
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• “More than 3 million Americans have celiac disease.
  
• About 85% of Americans who have this disease are undiagnosed.
  
• 5–22%
  of patients diagnosed with celiac disease have an immediate family member who also has it.”
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Here are more stats and facts from the Canadian Digestive Health Foundation:

• “More than 330,000 Canadians have been diagnosed with celiac disease. More than 73,000 are children.
  
• Nearly 30% of Canadian children with celiac disease are initially misdiagnosed.
  
• 30% of celiac patients may develop a malignancy (non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma) if left untreated.”
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The cure for celiac disease? A gluten-free diet. That’s it! This is amazing and important knowledge. If you think you might have this disorder, please go get tested. It could save your life.

Acid reflux is a chronic symptom of mucosal damage caused by stomach acid or bile coming up from the stomach into the esophagus. When this process occurs several times a week, and/or begins to affect your daily life, it is called gastroesophageal reflux disease, or GERD.
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The most common adult symptoms of GERD are mild-severe heartburn, regurgitation, and trouble swallowing.
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Here are two statistics from
American Family Physician:
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• 10% of Americans experience heartburn every day.
  
• GERD affects approximately 25–35% of the American population.
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Here are some more stats from The Canadian Digestive Health Foundation:

• On average, five million Canadians experience heartburn and/or acid regurgitation at least once each week.
  
• 42%
  of GERD patients are dissatisfied with the outcome of drug therapy.
  
• GERD patients are absent from work 16% of each year due to their symptoms. In Canada, this represents a workforce productivity loss of 1.7 billion hours amounting to $21billion each year. Yikes!
  
• Increasing age is recognized as a primary risk factor for the development of GERD.
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Dietary changes are recommended, such as consuming a diet low in acidity and richness, including (plug for plant-based diet!) no red meat, dairy, alcohol, or overly acidic fruits or vegetables. Caffeine, peppermint, and anything tomato-based seems to be difficult to tolerate. Also, it is recommended that sufferers sleep on their side.

This last affliction is so incredibly common, and many people experience these symptoms without ever knowing that dairy is the culprit. In fact, as you have already read, celiac disease, lactose intolerance, and casein allergies can all be (and all have been) mistaken for IBS.

Let’s just face it: we are all somewhat intolerant to milk, particularly cow’s milk. In fact, it’s the lactose (cows’ milk sugar) and the casein (cows’ milk protein) with which we, as human beings, have a tough time. And why shouldn’t we? We are drinking another animal’s milk! It is not made for us to digest properly; it is meant for fattening up baby calves. It contains way more fat than humans could ever need, because cows get big. (As in approximately ten times the weight of adult humans.) If calves were fed human breast milk, they’d probably die of starvation! We don’t even drink our own milk, past the age of a year or two. Furthermore, the two types of milk are hardly comparable. Human milk is perfectly created for humans, with just the right amount of protein, carbohydrates, sugars,
and other nutrients. Everything in it is easily digestible and relatively low in fat, because most of us don’t reach a healthy adult weight of more than 110–180 pounds. Adult cows, however, generally end up anywhere between 1100 and 2500 pounds, and so definitely need more protein, more carbohydrates, and a ton of fat. It’s perfect for
them
. No other species shares its milk with another, except maybe in extreme cases, where an orphaned puppy has nursed from a new mother pig. (I know I’ve seen something like that on YouTube.)

Lactose is the sugar in dairy products. Those who are lactose intolerant lack the enzyme (lactase) to break down this sugar for proper absorption. When the lactose reaches the large bowel (colon), it causes gas, bloating, diarrhea and abdominal cramping.
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Here is some more information about this crazy common affliction from Ohio State University:

• “30–50 million Americans are lactose intolerant.
  
• Lactose is used as the main ingredient in over 20% of prescription medication. (Including, ironically, meds for acid reflux and gas.)
  
• Symptoms most commonly begin 30 minutes to 2 hours after consuming foods with lactose.”
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• Here are some more facts about lactose intolerance from The Canadian Digestive Health Foundation:
  
• “Lactose intolerance affects more than seven million Canadians. This is likely an underestimate as many individuals do not associate their symptoms with lactose-containing foods or are asymptomatic.
  
• Since only 10% of symptomatic patients are clinically tested (294,000 people), it appears that Canadian physicians underestimate the daily impact of chronic lactose intolerant symptoms.
  
• 25% of patients clinically identified as lactose intolerant have celiac disease. In Canada, that means that 73,500people
  have undiagnosed celiac disease, which is the causal agent for their lactose intolerance.
  
• A digestive disease patient may consume ten grams or more of lactose each day from their (prescription) drugs.”
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  Seems a little counter-productive, doesn’t it?
  

The treatment? Stop consuming dairy. It’s that simple. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy! More information on most of these diseases can be found at the National Digestive Diseases Information Clearinghouse (http://digestive.niddk.nih.gov/index.aspx) or at www.ibsgroup.org. The latter website also offers forums in which IBS and other intestinal disorder sufferers can sign up and lend support to each other. These web links are also listed in the Resources section, at the end of the book.

Question:
Have you been tested for any of the above digestive disorders? Do you think one of them sounds like what you may be experiencing? Talk to your doctor, but don’t go to your appointment empty-handed. Keep a food journal. Write down specific symptoms. If you know a certain food bothers you, such as wheat or dairy, make a note of that. The more information you can provide your doctor with, the better he or she can help you. Take care of this now, or it will get worse. If the idea of seeing a doctor just throws you off your game, then inquire about obtaining an appointment with a local naturopath, or a registered holistic nutritionist.

How is it that we can often become so desensitized to discomfort and exhaustion? I wonder if, for many women, it starts when we have our babies, and then just never leaves us entirely. I think when I was younger, in my teens and later before pregnancy, I had such a high metabolism
that I didn’t notice that not being “regular” made me feel unwell. Much to my daughter’s dismay, a constant saying in my life has been “my guts ache.”

When I became pregnant, I was used to being bloated and tired. When I had newborns, I was exhausted, and finding time to sit down and actually eat an entire meal was a hit or miss opportunity at best. By the time my children were toddlers, I had adjusted to the reality of iffy energy and had started my journey into the land of chronic headaches, constipation, and gut aches. And I thought this was all pretty normal. Don’t all women go through these phases?

Around the age of thirty, I once had such severe abdominal pain that my hands and feet went completely numb. It was incredibly frightening, and my husband called an ambulance for me. I was taken to the emergency room at the local hospital and checked out. The attending physician told me that I had experienced a flair-up of irritable bowel syndrome, and that the pain had made me breathe very shallowly, which in turn had caused the numbness in my extremities. I was sent home with no other information.

Okay. IBS. It was just another gut ache.

Then, by the time my children were teenagers, the gut aches intensified and became a daily event for about eighteen months. During this time, there were several occasions where I found myself sitting on the toilet in extreme pain. It literally felt like I was labouring in childbirth. I imagined having a prolapsed intestine . . .

Around the same time period, my daughter came home a couple of times and told me she couldn’t eat anything that used to have a face. This stopped me cold. How could I eat anything that used to have a face?! (This reminded
me of the time when I was small and learned that an egg was the “big cell.” I came home and told my mom I couldn’t eat “the big cell.” And I didn’t for a few years . . . and then like we all do, I found a way to ignore where meat and eggs come from. I preferred to think of all the meat in the grocery store beginning and ending in that little cellophane wrapped package in the cooler. If I didn’t think about it, it wouldn’t bother me.) So, we all started dabbling in eating vegetarian fare. We would eat a couple of plant-based meals a week, but most of my meals still had meat, poultry and fish, and I still had lots of cheese and creams.

And my guts still hurt.

This just became the norm, along with being bloated and having frequent headaches, right through my forties and into my fifties. Then, one day when I was driving home from a lunch out with girlfriends, my stomach really started to hurt way more than ever before. It took about an hour to get home from that lunch, and by the time I arrived back to my community, I knew I had to go straight to the hospital. After a CT scan, I got a diverticulitis diagnosis, and spent the next five days in the hospital; four of them in a bed in a hallway. That was just over a year ago, and I have been struggling with diverticulitis symptoms ever since. The biggest challenges are getting enough fiber, having daily bowel movements, and being hydrated enough. Constipation is deadly, and I have been living a lifetime with chronic constipation.

After watching my daughter switch to a vegetarian diet and seeing her progress and immense improvement, I decided to give it a try too. I was a little bit worried about not fitting in with the others at the dinner table, or becoming a problem at home. My spouse is not a
vegetarian, but not only does he not care that I have given up meat, he completely supports me. He makes me well balanced dinners when I come home from work, and is always researching new recipes to use for me. My refrigerator is often stocked up with a wide variety of vegetables, fruit and nuts from his shopping trips.

If you are going to adopt a plant-based diet, I want to inform you about week one, as my daughter did for me. The first week I was meat free, I had low to no energy and several headaches, and for the first few days, my constipation continued. My insides were so, so bloated and my bowels were in shock. By the end of the first week, I felt more energetic and the headaches stopped and the bowel movements became so amazing, that they would make Dr. Oz proud! So stay focused and expect some symptoms of detoxification for a few days. You are ridding your body of a substance that has been clogging it up for your entire life. You will get past it, and reap huge rewards almost overnight. If you have a digestion issue, whether it be one of the diseases that is discussed in this book, or something entirely different that you feel will benefit from the absence of meat, do this. Eat whole and plant-based foods. As long as I stay on the wagon, eating a plant-based diet gives me my life back, and for the first time in decades, I can honestly say that I feel great. My guts no longer ache.

“Less elastic akin, arthritis, poorer memory, and even heart conditions are often attributable to inflamed tissue.”
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—Brendan Brazier,
The Thrive Diet

I
t has been said that at the root of every chronic disease lies inflammation. Inflammation is caused by our white blood cells attacking problem areas when we hurt ourselves, are battling viruses, or when the body identifies something foreign that needs to be addressed. When we are constantly feeding ourselves inflammatory foods, which our body rightly recognizes as a problem, this reaction becomes the norm. After a certain period of time, chronic inflammation leads to diseases, such as diabetes, heart disease, digestive diseases, colon cancer (often attributed to chronic inflammation of the colon), arthritis, asthma, and Alzheimer’s disease.
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In order to try and reduce your chances of developing one of these diseases, or to treat a current disease of this nature, you must get rid of anything that might be contributing to unnecessary inflammation.

A good example of purposeful inflammation reduction is the elimination of dairy from the diet of someone experiencing asthmatic and/or seasonal allergy symptoms, as well as those suffering from chronic ear infections. Numerous studies have shown that by eradicating dairy (which is very inflammatory) from their diets, people can lessen their symptoms of these chronic medical nuisances, or even completely ditch them altogether.
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In fact, it is common practice for a pediatrician who deals with childhood allergies and ear infections to recommend that the child cease to consume dairy completely. In my case, I know that about thirty minutes to two hours after consuming dairy, my stomach will begin to bloat and cramp. Bloating is a symptom of inflammation. The following lists are my go-to foods and my cease-and-destroy ones: