You: On a Diet plus Collins GEM Calorie Counter Set. Michael Roizen F.
the lactose in your intestines, producing a lot of gas.
General GI disorders: Problems like irritable bowel syndrome, which causes gut-related symptoms like diarrhea and abdominal pain, are caused by sensitive nerves and result in inflammation in the intestinal walls. For example, we usually all pass the same amount of gas a day (about fourteen times, or 1 liter total), but some of us sense discomfort from that gas more than others do.
Psychological responses: Food aversions can develop if, say, a person had a bad vomit-inducing shrimp dinner one night. The response would be to associate the shrimp dinner with the painful aftereffects and avoid it.
Of course, there are a number of extreme-end GI problems like infections, parasites (worms are the world’s most successful weight-loss technique-but we don’t recommend the Fear Factor diet), and violent and even lethal allergic reactions to food. The point is that we all may have degrees of intolerance in ways we may not even recognize. And we need to start listening to what our small intestine is trying to tell us about what we eat. Once you recognize that the general sense of “feeling off” can be caused by the foods you eat you can identify—and work to eliminate, reduce, or substitute-the substance that makes your gut twist like an animal balloon.
FACTOID
For those of you who’ve stayed up wondering, here’s the reason why your gas may smell and other people’s gas may not: Think of your body as a refrigerator. If you let food sit in there, it’s going to smell after a while. In your body, sulfur-rich foods like eggs, meat, beer, beans, and cauliflower are decomposed by bacteria to release hydrogen sulfide-a smell strong enough to flatten a bear. Avoiding these foods is the ideal solution, but when stinky gas persists, the best solutions are leafy green vegetables and probiotics (specifically lactobacilli GG or Bifidus Regularis), which work like baking soda in your fridge to reduce odor. Beano can sometimes work with beans, but soaking the beans ahead of time is useful as well.
Here, we’ll look at how inflammation happens at the gut level, and then, in the next chapter, how that can lead to inflammation at the total-body level.
Inflamed Gut: The Intestinal Firefights
At the intestinal level, foods can cause inflammation of your intestinal wall through such things as allergies, bacteria, or other toxins. When food incites inflammatory responses in your gut, it’s as if a grenade has been launched throughout your digestive system (see Figure 4.1 on page 81). Then in response to this already damaging grenade, your body tosses more grenades to create an apocalyptic digestive War of the Worlds. The effect is that the more inflammation we have in our intestines, the more toxins can enter our bloodstream.
During this firefight along the digestive border, your body perceives a foreign intruder and assigns its special forces—mast cells and macrophages—to eliminate the culprit. These are the cells that start an immune-response process throughout your body by ingesting foreign elements and alerting the rest of your body’s protecting cells that intruders have entered the area. Foods that don’t agree with your body’s sensibilities are seen as foreign invaders, so the macrophages attack these foods and tell everyone that this war is going on. This causes your whole body to start firing away at these foods and at innocent bystanders—and thus causes inflammation in your bloodstream. In that way, eating unhealthy food is really like having a chronic infection that triggers an immune response, which then causes inflammation.
One of your body’s goals is to get glucose into your brain cells—to feed those brain cells so that they can function. But inflammation in your body prevents sugar from getting to those cells, so you end up wanting more glucose and eating more sugary foods, which then increase inflammation and starts the whole cycle again.
FACTOID
Probiotics like lactobacillus GG or Bifidus Regularis repopulate your small intestine’s bacteria with healthful bacteria, especially after a course of antibiotics. The good bacteria calm down the dangerous ones-meaning that they can help you have less GI irritation, less gas, and less risk of an inflammatory uncivil war breaking out.
While we should be concerned about decreasing our body fat, we should also concentrate on decreasing our body’s inflammatory response so we become more efficient in managing potential complications of our waist size. There’s some genetic component to inflammation (some us have more than others, and smokers tend to have higher levels of inflammation than nonsmokers). Most important, the process of gaining weight is often a process of inflammation. YOU-reka! When you decrease your body’s inflammatory response, you will decrease your weight and waist as well.
The more inflammation you have, the less efficiently you use your food calories, and the worse you feel. The worse you feel, the more bad foods you eat to try to make yourself feel better. The more bad food you eat, the less well you can respond to the normal stresses of life, and the more inflammation you experience. And the more inflammation you have, the higher your risk of developing:
diabetes
high blood pressure
bad cholesterol numbers
and all of the other conditions that contribute to your increase in size and your decrease in health
Plain and simple: Inflammation ages your body by making your arteries less elastic and by increasing atherosclerosis (the rusting of blood vessels). Inflammation also makes it more likely that your DNA will be damaged, and a cell will become cancerous. And it increases your risk of infections. If the inflammatory mediators are fighting in the arteries, they can’t be defending elsewhere, and this situation increases the risk that your body will turn on itself, causing an autoimmune disease in which you attack your own tissues (for example, some forms of rheumatoid arthritis and thyroid disease).
FACTOID
We have two main sources that power nature’s rear-propulsion system. Gas comes from the air we swallow (20 percent) and the digestion of foods by bacteria in our intestines (80 percent). These bacteria love digesting sugars, fiber, or milk (if you’re lactose-deficient). The result is lots of gas made up of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and methane (which—duck!—is flammable). You can reduce swallowing air by avoiding cigarettes, gum, and carbonated beverages, or by eating and drinking more slowly.
Inflammation stresses your body
Inflammation fattens your body.
Obesity isn’t just a disease of doughnuts and baked ziti. Obesity is a disease of inflammation. As we travel through the rest of our digestive journey, well be stopping at three digestive landmarks to see how foods influence inflammation and how inflammation influences fat:
Your Major Interstate of Food: Your Small Intestine. This approximately twenty-foot-long organ (it’s about three times your height) serves as your second brain, deciding which foods agree with your body and which foods cause your body to rebel like sixth graders with a substitute teacher.
Your Parking Lot of Fat: Your Omentum. The omentum, which is located next to your stomach, serves as your primary storage facility of fat, where you park some or (in really bad cases) all the excess foods you eat. Ideally, the garage is empty. But as we gain weight, some of our bellies are housing four stories of Winnebago-worthy fat. Most important, the omentum serves as our body’s ultimate stress gauge: YOU-reka! As we’ll explain in a moment, bigger bellies indicate higher levels of inadequately managed chronic stress—which causes chronic levels of inflammation.
Abdominal Pain Is a Pain