Gut Health
Your gut plays a central role in your health—it determines whether your immune system responds aggressively or remains calm. When your gut lining is irritated, it can trigger systemic inflammation and lead to serious diseases.
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Oh yes, how things change. About ten years ago, you were considered more or less a crank on the German-speaking health internet if you believed that «health is made in the gut».
Health is made in the gut?!
Meanwhile, thousands of new scientific papers on this topic have been published. Nowadays, researchers even go so far as to postulate that the gut can be causally responsible for the development of neurodegenerative diseases, such as Parkinson's. Let's briefly recall an edubily article: What seems completely exaggerated is the suspected mechanism—that the protein alpha-synuclein, responsible for massive damage to the Parkinson's nervous system, can apparently migrate from the gut through the nervous system—for example, via the vagus nerve—to the brain.
Well. Of course, this is a slap in the face for all those reductionists out there who always want to break health down into individual pieces. The truth is: it doesn't matter whether someone has cardiovascular disease, suffers from neurodegeneration, experiences muscle wasting, or has brittle bones,
they are always (!) systemic diseases.
Of course, this also means for the athlete that they cannot be fully capable if the system is not functioning optimally. An athlete interested in optimizing their performance should therefore read and do exactly the same as someone who simply wants to be healthy again. And vice versa.
One way or another: that the gut also determines whether someone gets sick or is simply allowed to be healthy has even reached the mainstream. In a public health broadcast, doctors and scientists seriously argue that you can no longer ignore the gut when it comes to the development of disease.
What many people still don't quite understand: your gut determines whether your body's entire immune system is set to aggressive or calm. Because if you irritate the 30 to 40 square meters (!) of your gut lining around the clock, if your immune system constantly believes there's a huge bacterium sitting on your doorstep, you simply cannot be systemically healthy.
Because then your immune system is always irritated. And throughout your entire body. An irritated immune system does more than just become sluggish—it doesn't just rob you of energy, but also makes you somewhat (quite) depressed—we call this sickness behavior. Additionally, the harmless bacteria in your mouth can suddenly be recognized as villains, resulting in gum inflammation, or your poor knees can become victims of an overactive immune reaction (arthritis). In some people, the brain itself gets inflamed (no joke!), and then you only participate in life in fragments.
Inflammation itself, especially over such a vast surface as the gut, is problematic and can have serious consequences. The background is that your gut constantly interacts with antigens. These are foreign proteins, for example from bacteria or food. Your immune system in the gut must decide at every moment whether these represent an invader or whether everything is okay.
When things go wrong, your body produces antibodies against them. Since antibodies are typically produced against proteins, it's certainly possible that your body produces antibodies against proteins from food, for instance. This particularly affects those proteins that are not well digested. One such highly problematic—that is, highly immunogenic—protein is the well-known wheat gluten, also called gliadin.
Our digestive enzymes struggle to break down this protein properly due to its unique protein structure and amino acid sequence. The result can be that these protein fragments interact too intensely with the immune system in your gut. Antibodies can be produced that flood your bloodstream with every bread consumption.
Unfortunately, antibodies often don't recognize just one target—the gluten fragments themselves—but several. We call this cross-reactivity. The problem is that many of your body's own proteins, which enable our lives, have very similar sequences. That's why these gliadin antibodies also bind to your own proteins. The result is often a creeping autoimmunity whenever you eat pasta.
Once antibodies bind to target proteins, things get messy. Antibodies impair the function of proteins through their binding. On one hand. On the other hand, they attract additional immune cells and «mark» the «enemy» so your immune system can attack with full force. In other words: if this happens, your body can no longer function normally.
There are components in modern diets that humans didn't eat for much of their evolutionary history because they're not edible in the wild. Many of these are storage proteins from plants. These storage proteins don't want to be eaten and protect themselves through aggressive anti-herbivory defenses. Many modern dietary approaches (Paleo, «Wheat Belly», lectin-free diets, carnivore diet, Wahls Protocol, Paleo AIP, etc.) target this exact problem.
Our digestive enzymes in the gut struggle to break down these proteins properly. The result can be an unnoticed and ever-present antibody reaction against these components. And this ruins our lives without us noticing it. Anyone who eats grains all day long (wheat, corn, oats, rice, and so on), who loads up on legumes, or constantly consumes large amounts of plant storage proteins may be constantly at odds with their own immune system.
Then life becomes difficult and you're constantly «fighting» against some enemy out there. Even though the «enemy» is actually being fought right in your belly. There's currently a blog post from us on this topic. Enjoy!
