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The rapid turnover of cells that build our intestinal lining means that making better dietary choices can help most people feel better fast.
By: Amy Denney
If you’ve got digestive issues, you know how quickly a meal can leave you feeling miserable.
Fortunately, that misery is often due to damage that can be quickly repaired since the tissue that lines the gut—the intestinal epithelium—replaces itself in less than a week.
But there’s also a cumulative effect, which makes it hard to predict exactly how fast and easily one might recover from assaults to the gastrointestinal tract when there’s a long-term pattern of unhealthy eating.
Understanding Gut Barrier Damage
While your gut lining (intestinal epithelium) may seem beyond the reach of the outside world since it is deep inside your body, anything you eat comes in direct and relatively quick contact with it. And in our era of processed foods, not everything we eat is actually food. Some of it is stabilizers, emulsifiers, and artificial flavor and colors. And even the actual food ingredients are often processed far beyond their natural constitution.
The consequence is that some of the “food” you eat isn’t so much fuel for your body’s functions as it is an inflammatory assault. Inflammation is your body’s response to invaders like bacteria and viruses, and injuries. And when the body encounters some of these unnatural food-like substances, it treats them as potentially dangerous.
Even otherwise healthy foods can create problems if your gut lining has structural issues or has developed holes. The intestinal epithelium’s job is to act as a barrier that protects your body from bacteria and unwanted substances from entering the bloodstream, but it also has small openings to allow nutrients and water to enter the body and sustains us. Large holes or tears, however, allow bacteria and undigested food particles—from even nutritious foods—to escape to places they don’t belong, which can ignite an autoimmune response in the body.
Common symptoms that your gut lining is eroded include abdominal pain, bloating, indigestion, and food sensitivities, though there are other possible explanations for these symptoms. Additionally, a compromised gut barrier has been associated with obesity, diabetes, arthritis, chronic fatigue syndrome, asthmas, fibromyalgia, and liver disease.
The epithelial tissue has a high cell turnover—completely renewing itself every five days. That’s why nutritious meals can have a soothing effect. Even if you have a lot of gastrointestinal symptoms, a few days of eating better is often enough for the first sign of improvement, Dr. David Brownstein, holistic family physician, told The Epoch Times.
“One of the big reasons this is happening is because Americans have not been educated on food choices,” he said. “The first step is always eating a healthier diet.”
Make Simple Swaps
Addressing gut symptoms can begin with an honest assessment of whether the foods you are eating could be doing harm. One way to conduct that assessment is to change the way you eat. Dr. Brownstein suggests two dietary strategies that can improve your nutrition and help repair the gut lining.
One is flipping the food pyramid, which a large swath of Americans used to guide food choices starting in childhood. The controversial U.S. Department of Agriculture tool was meant to guide healthy eating from 1992 until it was replaced with MyPlate in 2011. It put emphasis on eating mostly breads, cereals, and potatoes while limiting fats and oils.
“That’s been a disaster,” Dr. Brownstein said. “Americans are not dumb, but we were given the wrong advice for the majority of my lifespan. We need fats and oils. We can’t live without them. We did eat a lot of carbohydrates, and most of the carbohydrates in our country are made by refined food sources…these are devitalized foods. They fatten up our body, and they make us nutrient deficient and sick.”
That leads to his second strategy: eat only unrefined sources or sugar, flour, salt, and oils. Unrefined food is food that most closely resembles its natural state—it’s minimally processed, in other words.
While refined foods may be satiating, Dr. Brownstein explained they aren’t giving the body the fuel and building blocks it needs, including molecules necessary to keep the gut lining from degrading.
“If we eat refined foods that have very little to no nutrients in them, our body has to use its own nutrient stores to help break that devitalized food down and we become deficient. Deficiency leads to breakdown in the immune system and in the gut barrier,” he said.
Taking Back Control Through Diet
There’s broad agreement that toxic food ingredients are damaging the gut. Artificial sweeteners, glyphosate—an herbicide broadly applied to crops—and emulsifiers all appear to poke holes in the gut lining. Emulsifiers, usually of a more damaging synthetic nature, are used in processed foods to keep ingredients from separating (like oil and water) on store shelves.
A 2021 study in Science Advances showed that a 10-week diet of processed food in mice broke down the gut barrier. On the flip side, a diet of non-processed food—particularly high fiber—had protective effects, the study found.
In spite of growing evidence of their harms, processed foods remain the largest section of supermarkets. They have excellent shelf life, are made from cheap ingredients, and offer tasty convenience that can be hard to resist.
While they might cost less, Dr. Brownstein said that these cheap foods will undoubtedly increase the expense of American healthcare.
Some experts, like gluten expert Dr. Tom O’Bryan, suggest removing certain key inflammatory foods. He told The Epoch Times his approach involves rapidly eliminating or reducing five things: gluten, dairy, sugar, stress, and lipopolysaccharides.
“There’s no one thing that’s going to fix everyone. It’s just not possible,” Dr. O’Bryan said. “When you understand the concepts, you’re going to get so much more value out of everything you do if you understand why you’re doing it.”
Stop Throwing Gasoline on the Fire
If you look online, there can be a seemingly limitless list of things that can help heal the gut lining. There are precise diets, supplements, and other lifestyle adjustments that are commonly used. Still, Dr. O’Bryan said eliminating those top five culprits can help most people stop throwing gasoline on the fire of gut inflammation.
Gluten
A protein found in wheat, gluten is in a great deal of products. But it’s an indigestible protein; our body cannot completely break down gluten. Undigested gluten makes its way to the small intestine where it can cause damage and a range of symptoms including bloating, diarrhea, headaches, or skin rashes.
Dairy
Some people are unable to absorb lactose, the molecules found in dairy, which can lead to uncomfortable digestive symptoms. Further, the pasteurization process—used to kill microbes that can spoil milk—may be destroying important enzymes.
Refined Sugar
A 2020 study in Cells found mice fed a high-sugar diet had disrupted gut barriers and immune responses. A newer University of Pittsburgh study published in June 2023 discovered mice with inflammatory bowel disease fed a high-sugar diet died within nine days.
“The colon epithelium is like a conveyor belt,” said senior author Dr. Timothy Hand, associate professor of pediatrics and immunology at Pitt’s School of Medicine and UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, in a statement. “It takes five days for cells to travel through the circuit from the bottom to the top of the crypt, where they are shed into the colon and defecated out…We found that stem cells were dividing much more slowly in the presence of sugar — likely too slow to repair damage to the colon.”
Stress
Excessive psychological stress has been shown to disrupt the epithelial mucosal layer of the colon. Since some stress is normal, this is a complicated area of research. But evidence suggests stress can change the microbial makeup of the gut microbiome, which is the community of bacteria, viruses, and fungi that aid the body in digestion and other functions. Certain microbes work to protect gut lining integrity.
Lipopolysaccharides (LPS)
Produced by bacteria, LPS has been associated with inflammation since the early 20th century. Large spikes of LPS can cause septic shock and endotoxemia—both potentially fatal diseases that strike fast when the immune system unleashes proinflammatory cytokines.
When present chronically, LPS compromises the gut barrier and then enters the bloodstream. Potentially, LPS may play a role in many low-grade inflammatory diseases such as diabetes, obesity, non-alcoholic fatty liver diseases, chronic kidney disease, cardiovascular disease, and inflammatory bowel diseases, according to a 2021 review in the International Journal of Molecular Science. Diets high in saturated fats are associated with LPS.
“The first step and where people start noticing change pretty quickly is when they stop throwing gasoline on the fire. You can feel better pretty quickly, because all disease starts in the gut,” Dr. O’Bryan said, adding that the gut will go back to feeling miserable anytime you “go back to an inflammatory lifestyle.”