What is this leaky gut thing that you've mentioned, Meg? Sounds gross.

I've been learning a lot about digestion and leaky gut syndrome lately. I still only have a vague sense of it all, but I thought that writing it all out might help me to synthesize what I've learned, and it might help others understand what I'm talking about when I mention the term "leaky gut."

I think it helps first to review how a healthy gut should behave. The goal of the gut is to take our food, process it to separate out nutrients from toxins and other unhealthful little bits, and then to send the good stuff to the rest of our body for use and to send the bad stuff off to waste processing. It's important to note that not all of this sorting happens in the stomach. Our intestines provide a long conveyer belt through which nutrient processing continues.

Enzymes are important workhorses that spend their little lives sorting out parts. Different enzymes are perfectly shaped to deal with different sorts of starches and proteins and probably a bunch of other stuff as well.  Some enzymes (like pepsin) prefer the highly acidic environment of the stomach to do their work. Other enzymes (like trypsin) prefer a slightly alkaline environment. So if the ph value of any part of your digestive track is off balance, nutrients won't be processed as well as they should be.

Once things are processed into their important and unimportant parts, the body then needs to send the sorted items to the right places. The digestive lining (again, not just in the tummy but all the way along the intestines) have the job of letting the important stuff through and keeping not only the unimportant but also the dangerous stuff out. Think of the stomach lining like a tough guy bouncer type. Better yet, think of it like a whole slew of bouncer guys all standing shoulder to shoulder for wall to wall digestive defenses. Nutrients are allowed through so they can enter the blood stream and feed the body. Everything else (the unusable bits as well as things like the e-coli bacteria that came riding in with your undercooked hamburger or the food coloring from that cool-aid you drank) are shuffled off to buffalo (which means they're flushed out of your system). You can apparently get a decent sense of how your insides are doing based on your poop. If you're going, at a minimum, once a day, and your potty visits tend to be quick and easy, then your insides might be pretty healthy.  If that's not the case, then that's one indicator that something's wrong.

\So that's how it's all supposed to work. But there are lots of things that can go wrong along the way. (Remember, I'm still learning about all this so I might not be 100% accurate in my descriptions, but I think I'm getting the gist of what can go wrong.) For some folks who are predisposed genetically to celiac disease, there's a disconnect between the enzymes that they're carrying in their gut and the shape of the gluten proteins entering the gut. (There's an interesting series of posts from people who are gluten intolerant who claim to not be able to consume even a teeny bit of gluten in America, but when they visit Europe they're able to eat pasta and bread without any problems. One difference could be the amount of gluten in American wheat products vs. European. But another possibility is that Europeans grow a different version of wheat which contains a form of gluten that's easier to process than the gluten found in American grain. I didn't see any scientific answers on this one, but the number of folks claiming to have experienced the difference leads me to believe that it's not necessarily gluten that's the problem but a specific variant or mutation of gluten that's causing the problems.) Proteins can fold. I'm a bit foggy on all this, but it sounds like some gluten proteins are folding their little selves in such a way that celiac's enzymes simply can't process them. So instead of having nutrients separated from unusables, these tummies are left with those original proteins, unchanged. In other words, the initial processing system breaks down, leaving proteins in the system that aren't supposed to be there. These proteins can eventually cause lesions in the digestive lining. It's almost like the unbroken down proteins act as little irritants that eventually scrape away the health of the lining. Imagine putting broken glass in the washing machine when you're cleaning your clothes. You'd end up with shredded clothing. I think that's what's going on in the tummy of the person with celiac disease. And even if you don't get to the point where there are lesions, all that scrubby activity can still lead to inflammation and tummy pain.

Even those that aren't genetically prone towards celiac disease can still have problems with nutrient processing. If something happens and you lose a lot of your enzymes, or they become unhealthy (perhaps due to a yeast infection or a problem with your ph balance), then an otherwise healthy gut can become broken and have similar problems to a person with celiac disease.

And that's just the beginning of the problem. Things aren't going well inside the digestive tract, but now the walls of the digestive tract start to get worn down and sick and stuff that's not supposed to get through starts slipping through. All those bouncers standing shoulder to shoulder are getting doubled over with pain and while they're down, proteins and other stuff start slipping into the blood stream. They don't belong there, and the body knows it. It sends in the army, the auto-immune system, to start taking out the bad guys and protecting itself. This leads to more inflammation as well as all sorts of other reactions (like a runny nose, itching all over your body or localized to certain areas, arterial deposits, and possibly even bigger problems like type 1 diabetes, multiple sclerosis, and some other big time stuff.). Some of those proteins on the loose can even make it up to the brain where they cause problems such as autism symptoms, AHDH symptoms, mood swings, and depression.

And to make matters worse, not only is the stomach lining allowing stuff through that it shouldn't, but it's also not letting through all the stuff that it should. So you might recognize that something is wrong with your digestive tract and start taking vitamins, eating special foods, etc, but if that lining isn't fixed, it won't make one iota of difference. You have to heal the gut before it'll work properly enough to get the good stuff to where it's supposed to go to heal the rest of your body.

All of this is referred to as a leaky gut. Stuff is getting through your digestive lining that's not supposed to be allowed through. I think the term is gross and when I first heard it didn't sound at all to me like what it means. I think "broken gut" or "confused gut" or something like that might fit better with what's going on. But the term that's been coined is leaky gut, so that's what we have to roll with.

If you have a leaky gut, what do you do? The first step is to try to remove some of the foods that aren't being processed properly. This might mean changing your diet to remove gluten, casein, perhaps even eggs, nuts and other common allergens. This will help the gut to have a break from being bombarded with bad guys. Then you have to do things that will help it to heal. You can take colostrum (Yes, the same stuff that new mom's produce for their babies for several days after birth. That's the stuff that coats the baby's digestive tract and helps to protect it from just such problems as these.) either by pill or as a powder mixed in drinks. I've just recently read that glutamine can be helpful as well. And chicken soup, believe it or not, is supposed to work wonders. (When you make the soup, boil the chicken bones for a couple of hours because that's where the helpful stuff is and you need to boil it out into the broth.)

Probiotics (good bacteria) can also help. One way to get probiotics is through pills, but you can also eat yogurt (not the sugary stuff but something with acidopholus and the like). Fermented foods (sauerkraut or kim chi, for example) are full of healthful bacteria. Kefir and kombucha are fermented products and full of good guys. And green leafy veggies are important. Not only do they have nutrients that many people are lacking, but there's fiber in there that apparently count as prebiotics (I just heard about them for the first time today) because they feed other healthy organisms in the gut. I should quickly point out that one instigator of an unhealthy gut is often antibiotics. The antibiotics aren't targeted so they affect all the healthy bacteria in the tummy as well as the bad guys. If the good guys get wiped out often enough they may never get back to full strength without some serious, concerted help on your part.

And what we're learning at our house is that it also takes time. You can't change your diet one day and the next day expect to see immediate change. There are stories of that happening, but there are also stories of it taking a month or more to see good come from the dietary changes. In our household we're hoping that once digestive tracts are happy and healthy, we'll be able to add gluten and casein back into our diets. (According to the doc, casein is a possibility but gluten isn't. We'll see. I've heard from more than one person that once you're off gluten entirely, even just a little bit can end up making you really sick.) In the meantime I'm learning all kinds of stuff about how the gut works, and I'm discovering lots of great recipes that are helping me to get more fruits, veggies and nuts into our family's diet.

If you'd like to learn more, here's a really helpful video that our doctor recommended.



The first and third images used in this article from SCDLifestyle.com (I also recommend the article that the images came from. You can click on the link to get to it.) and the second photo is from JustonHealth.com.

Toxic Itch - Walking It Out

I've had seasonal allergies since college. My nose gets runny, my eyes and nose itch, and I tend to sneeze a lot in the mornings. It's miserable, but at least my allergies knew their place and didn't cross those symptom boundaries... until last year. Last year was the beginning of the all over, take me out of the game, body itch.

It often started with my scalp. Late last summer I worried several times that I'd gotten head lice. You wouldn't believe how much mayonnaise I smeared all over my head. (Mayonnaise is a non-toxic way to soffocate lice as well as many of their eggs. You coat your head with it, wrap your hair with a towel/rag/something, and sleep in it. When you wash it out in the morning, you'll wash the lice and their eggs out as well.) But after having a couple different people look through my scalp and not find anything, and given that the itching seemed to be fairly occasional and not limited to my neck and behind my ears (which is where lice like to hang out) I finally decided something else was going on. Besides, lice didn't explain the occasional hand itching or even the all over body itching that sometimes happened.

My hands were the other frequent victims of intense itching. I never saw welts or bumps, but they'd itch like they were very, very dry. They didn't look particularly dry, though. And putting lotion on them didn't seem to make any difference in terms of whether or not they itched.

And then there was the all over body itch. Sometimes when I was gardening or doing housework, I'd start to itch all over so badly that I'd have to run cold water over my hands to get them to feel better and then I'd lie down until the itching all over the rest of my body stopped. I tried benadryl, zyrtec and some generic allergy medicines but nothing seemed to help.

That's when I finally decided to see a doctor about it. She just shrugged and said, "Well, you'll need to stay out of the wind." So I tried, but noticed that wind or no, the itching continued. Eventually I started to see a pattern to when the itching occurred. If I did anything that caused me to sweat a bit, I'd itch. If I was embarrassed or surprised and I flushed, I itched. I started to wonder if there were toxins in my system and they were coming out when I sweated. Some time in February I came across an article online that said that muscles can store toxins unless they're flushed out through exercise. I started to wonder if that was my problem. When the itching began, I stopped doing anything that would bring it on, meaning that I stopped doing yard work, I stopped gardening, I cleaned the house even less frequently than I already was. I did whatever it took to not itch and that mostly meant not moving around too much. Even running errands would sometimes set it off - just from carrying bags from the store to the car and loading it up. I decided that had to change.

I decided that I'd just have to deal with the itch. I started walking the dog once in awhile, and by March I was walking her daily, in the hope that I could get rid of the itchiness. In the beginning I'd force myself to go at least 5 minutes past the point of utter itchination. Since I was walking in pretty cold weather, it helped a lot that I could take off my hat, mittens or jacket since the cool air seemed to help stop the itching while still allowing my body to remove the toxins. The more often I walked, the longer I was able to walk each time before being hit with the itchies. By mid-April or early May, the toxins must have been out of my system because I stopped itching for several months. But I knew that I couldn't stop walking or the toxins would just build up again.

I've been walking (nearly) every day now since last March. I've had two incidents (one at the end of September and one in early October) where I started to itch again. It was only my hands one time and my head another time, so it still wasn't nearly as bad as last year. It's an easy and cheap solution to a problem that was threatening to change my life. Now that it's the fall again and I'm mostly itch free during the time of year when it was the absolute worst last time, I decided that I need to write about my experience and hope that my story will help others that are experiencing unexplained, hiveless itching.

Whole Grain Goodness

The following is reprinted from my previous website. I've reformatted it to fit into this multiply-sized space, I've updated it here and there, and I've fixed some misspellings).

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Whole Grain Goodness

Deciding to eat more whole grains is a big step for many people. But sometimes what is even more daunting is how to go about it. So below I have described a few of the things we have done.
The biggest step we have taken is to start grinding our own grain. We've made a few forays into the world of cooked wheat berries but I must admit that despite my best intentions, we don't eat them that way very often. So most of this page will have to do with grinding flour--how to get started and what to do with the stuff once you've got it.

Kamut -- Hard Red Wheat -- Pearled Barley -- Rye -- Spelt

Grinding Flour

Grinding flour sounds harder than it is and has a far greater payoff than you'd ever imagine. You can buy ground flours made from whole grains but you never know how long they've been sitting on the counter before you buy them. Their flavors simply aren't as fresh as when you grind the grain yourself and use it right away.

We happened upon grinding flour somewhat round-aboutly. We had been buying our pre-ground grains in bulk at Rainbow grocery (in San Francisco), but as the Y2K "threat" loomed we decided to buy some items (that we would use anyway) just in case. We figured it couldn't hurt to have a few gallons of wheat, rice, beans and popcorn lying about. We also bought a hand grinder (assuming that if the Y2K debacle was true, then we wouldn't have electricity to use to grind the grain. And if an earthquake came along instead, we'd be ready for that too). When we ran out of oat flour a few months before the New Year, we pulled out a 5 gallon tub of oats and gave the grinder its first run.

We found that hand grinding could be either relaxing or annoying, depending on whether we were in a hurry or not. Our 3 year old loved to play with the oat berries and turn the handle on the grinder. And it was impressive when we pulled out a tub of hard red wheat to see that not all grains grind the same. (The oats grind much quieter and more smoothly. The wheat seemed to be at least twice as loud and a tad harder to grind as it seemed to occasionally catch in the grinder.)

We began to get into a habit of grinding any time we were standing around talking to someone. That way we'd have flour set aside for later when we wanted to make cookies without having to stand there for a half hour grinding first. Eventually we broke down and bought a grinder -- a Whisper Mill made by Creative Technologies. We didn't research our purchase. We simply went with the electric grinder that was sold by the same company from which we'd bought the grain (Provident Pantry). It cost us over $200 (which floored us.... But by that time we were hooked on freshly ground flour.) If you'd rather do a little grinder research before shelling out your dough, you might want to check Walton Feed's page that compares different grinders.

We don't use store bought white flour at all (well, except for making play-dough and I've used it also for making pirogi) and only occasionally buy other preground flours (such as the occasional bag of garbanzo bean flour or quinoa flour). Our favorite general purpose flour so far has been hard red wheat. It's packed with flavor. In fact, we've had friends beg us for our chocolate chip cookie recipe only to have them be disappointed when we tell them to just look on the back of a bag of Nestle's chocolate chips. (They'd rather get a new recipe than start using better ingredients.)

We don't make our own bread. At least, not often enough to say that we do. (We might make bread a few times a year.) But we do make lots of cookies, pancakes, waffles, muffins and scones. We generally go through one jar (see the empty jar to the right of the Whisper Mill in the above picture) every week or so.

The Grinding Process

Turning berries into flour is quite simple. With a hand grinder you pour the berries in, turn the handle and the flour comes out. With the Whisper Mill, the process is the same though the experience is rather different. The Whisper Mill, despite the word "whisper" in the name, is quite loud. The flour also tends to get heated up a bit (though not enough, I don't believe, to remove nutrients or spoil the oils).

With both the hand grinder and the electric one, you can set the fine-ness (is that a word?) of the flour. In other words, if you're grinding something like corn and you'd rather make polenta rather than corn meal, or corn meal rather than corn flour, you can set the grinder to do exactly that.

Important things to think about:

* Berries have a habit of running for freedom. In other words, if you can spill some, you will, no matter how careful you try to be. So you may want to set the mill and bag/tub of berries inside a larger tub of some sort.

* When you grind the flour (with the mill, not by hand) you'll end up adding a bit of flour to the air which will settle back as a beautiful white dust all over everything in your kitchen. There are things you can do to keep this at a minimum (like make sure the container that the flour is shooting into is entirely closed. And don't try to grind too much flour at once).

* And as you transfer flour from the grinder to another container, you may want to put newspaper underneath the whole operation so that when you're done you can dump any fallen flour into the container as well.

Advantages of Grinding Your Own Flour

The greatest advantage to grinding your own flour is having fresh flour. It really does taste better. If you doubt me, then come over and try some of my chocolate chip cookies or some of Rob's waffles. Store bought flour is sometimes so old that it's rancid before you get it home. Whole wheat berries can stay fresh longer than whole wheat flour. (Remember, the whole reason that white flour became all the rage back in the early 1900's was because it was more nutritious, because it's not. It was because it will keep fresh several times longer than whole grain flour. But as far as I'm concerned, it doesn't matter how much longer white flour remains fresh, it's bad for your health and it tastes like glue.)

Another advantage that crosses my mind once in awhile as I'm grinding flour is that when I grind my own flour, I know exactly what bugs are (or are not) in my flour. I've heard that we eat several bugs a year that get ground into the food that we buy prepackaged. Yuck!

You can also grind as much, or as little, flour as you need. If you only need a half cup of some oddball flour twice a year, you can buy the grain whole (which will keep throughout the year) but grind the flour only when you need it (since it would probably be bad by the next time you needed it if its something you infrequently use).

And you can buy the grain in bulk which is cheaper than buying the preground stuff. (Granted, you have to shell out dough for that grinder, but if you go in on it with someone and share it, you'll save yourself a heap of dough.)

Eating Whole Grains Whole

You don't have to grind grain to enjoy its goodness. In fact, you've probably already had cooked, whole berries of grain and not even given it a thought. Brown rice is a whole grain cooked whole and steel cut oats are made from a whole grain that is almost whole (often only chopped into halves or thirds, not mashed or ground).

The Joy of Cooking has a quite helpful description of grains and how to cook them. Suggestions include toasting the grain first, cooking the grain in broth or some other liquid besides water, and combining several grains for flavor and nutrition. Some grains can be cooked in a relatively short amount of time such as rice and oats. Others require presoaking to help soften them. And grains can be eaten as is (such as in a porridge, what we American's would call "hot cereal"), as a side dish (as rice might be), or in a salad.

Different grains also provide different nutrients. Amaranth has more protein, iron, magnesium, and phosphorus than most other grains. Oats are known for providing fiber. Quinoa (pronounced keen-wa) is a complete protein. (Check out Gretchen's list of grains for more in-depth descriptions.)

Resources

Everything you've ever wanted to know about Scottish porridge (made with oats).

Recipes

Recipes from the low-fat vegetarian archive think apple-barley, kamut-biryani, and quinoa-vegetable-jambalaya

Descriptions of the grains with recipes to boot