9 Weird Things Killing Your Gut

In a recent breakthrough study, U.S. scientists discovered that gut microorganisms not only influence immune cell function, but actually support the production of immune cells that form the first line of defense against infection. Your gut is your immune system—two-thirds of your immune system, to be exact.

In fact, the gut is so complex and regulates so many bodily functions it's often called the body's "second brain." About 80 percent of the neurotransmitter serotonin is produced in the gastrointestinal tract—not the brain. Since large quantities of neurotransmitters are manufactured in the gut, that means your GI tract is largely responsible for your general physical and mental wellbeing.

"The bacteria that are in our gut help regulate metabolism, they talk to our genes," explains Elizabeth Lipski, PhD, CCN, academic director of nutrition and integrative health programs at Maryland University of Integrative Health. "When that's in balance, we have energy and our brain works better."

A few other fun gut health facts:
• We have 10 times more bacteria in our digestive system than cells in our body.
• 99 percent of the DNA our bodies are made of bacterial DNA.
• As a result of the Human Genome Project, scientists discovered we have fewer genes than a fruit fly, carrot, or pineapple! Instead, the genes we have are always talking to the microbes in our gut.
• Your gut lining is only one cell thick—much thinner than your eyelid—and replaces itself every few days.

It's clear a healthy gut is essential for happiness and health. But as it stands, about one-third of people today have some sort of digestive problem on a weekly or monthly basis.  As it turns out, a lot of conveniences associated with modern date life are actually killing gut health.


New to Nature Foods
Foods developed in labs, like denatured, industrialized fats and high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), are still somewhat of a mystery to our bodies. "Food is information. These new-to-nature foods give different information to our cells and microbiome," says Lipski, also author of Digestion Connection "Intuitively, we know that different foods have different effects on us; some make us feel energized, some drain us."

HFCS has been shown to require more energy for gut absorption, leading to possible gut leakage and widespread inflammation. Natural oils are important to build the structure of our cells, but denatured, industrial fats stripped of antioxidants and vitamins removed. "It's the life in food giving us life," Lipski says. "Most people are eating mostly dead foods."

Expert Tip: Eat organic to avoid HFCS, avoid industrial oils by avoiding processed and fast food as much as possible.

Carrageenan
Carrageenan seems innocent enough. Derived from seaweed, it's commonly used as a thickening agent in ice cream, yogurt, soymilk, and sour cream—even organic versions. It's completely unnecessary for use in food and dietary doses have reliably caused inflammation in the GI tract, triggering an immune response similar to that your body has when invaded by pathogens like Salmonella.
Expert Tip: Carrageenan must, by law, appear on the ingredients list. Avoid it in both organic and nonorganic foods.

Wheat
There's emerging research suggesting that wheat is bad, especially for susceptible people. But even if you don't suffer from celiac disease, wheat could be triggering acid reflux, inflammatory bowel disease, and other ailments. Why? We're not eating the same wheat our grandmothers did. Wheat has been so intensely and unnaturally crossbred in the last 40 years that significant changes in amino acids and gliadin protein, which could be making you hungry and damaging your gut health.

Expert Tip: Try the elimination diet to see if wheat's bothering you. Try replacing pasta with quinoa, which is technically protein-rich seed, not grain.

GMOs (Maybe)
A 2013 study published in Journal of Organic Systems found pigs fed genetically engineered food were much more likely to suffer from severely inflamed stomachs. So is that happening to people, too?
Glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, is the go-to chemical nonorganic farmers spray on GMO crops. So much is applied and taken up inside of the plant that the U.S. government keeps increasing the limits allowed in our food. That's bad news for your gut because glyphosate also acts like an antimicrobial, acting like a potent bacteria-killing in the gut, wiping out delicate beneficial microflora that protects us from disease. What's left? Harmful pathogens like Salmonella and E. coli.

Expert Tip: The number one way to avoid GMOs is to eat organic foods. If that's not possible, avoid nonorganic processed foods—most contain at least one of the most common GMO ingredients made from corn, soy, cotton oil, or canola.


NSAIDs
According to Lipski, taking nonsteroidal drugs (NSAIDs) like Advil, aspirin, and Motrin on a regular basis damage the gut lining, allowing microbes, partially digested food particles, and toxins to enter the bloodstream. (This is known as "leaky gut.")


NSAIDs block pain by blocking eicosanoids and cytokines that promote inflammation. "But they also indiscriminately block the ones that also promote healing," Lipski says. "By doing this, the body doesn't allow for the health maintenance, growth, and repair of gut cells."

Expert Tip: Lipski says NSAIDs are OK for occasional pain, but if you're suffering with chronic pain, look at the root causes. "Interestingly enough, leaky gut often plays a huge role in systemic pain in the body," she adds. "Many clients who have arthritis or autoimmune conditions, when they improve gut health or go on an elimination diet, often the pain just disappears, and often in just a couple of weeks."


Alcohol
Alcoholic drinks contain few nutrients but take many nutrients to metabolize. The most noteworthy of these are the B-complex vitamins. In fact, alcoholic beverages contain substances that are toxic to our cells. When alcohol is metabolized in the liver, the toxins are either broken down or stored by the body, according to Digestion Connection. Alcohol abuse puts a strain on the liver, which affects digestive competency, and also damages the intestinal tract.
Expert Tip: Avoid drinking regularly, particularly if you're suffering from digestive symptoms. If you have trouble quitting, see if you're showing these signs of addiction and get help.



Antibiotics
There's no denying that antibiotics have saved millions of lives. Still, they don't give your beneficial a free pass when they enter your GI tract, so the drugs often kill off the "good bugs" in your gut, too, damaging your immune system and gut health.


Expert Tip: While you're on antibiotics, take a product containing saccharomyces Boulardii, like FloraStor, and then continue for two weeks after ending antibiotics, Lipski suggests. It's a cousin to bread yeast and helps prevent yeast overgrown while re-establishing the gut microbiome. The end result? It helps reduce the risk of developing diarrhea and other complications arising from antibiotic use.

If you'd rather take probiotic supplements, make sure you take them in between antibiotic doses, not with them. (The antibiotics will immediately kill them off if you take at the same time.)



Chronic Stress
Stress really is toxic. Chronic stress causes your body to produce less secretory IgA, one of the first lines of immune defense. It also eases up on producing DHEA, an antiaging, antistress adrenal hormone. Your body also responds to stress by slowing down digestion, which reduces blood flow to digestive organs and produces toxic metabolites.


Sleepless Nights
Depriving yourself of sleep deprives your body of the repair time it needs. Lack of sleep leads to stress and higher cortisol levels, which has been linked to leaky gut. Getting less than 7 or 8 hours of sleep a night also deprives us of the parasympathetic/relaxation sleep cycle to fully repair high-energy gut tissue, Lipski says.


Expert Tip: Keep your thermostat below 70 degrees to keep your bedroom at sleep-friendly temperatures. Without a nighttime cool-down process, the release of sleep hormones melatonin and growth hormone is disrupted. Avoid these 9 other common hormone disruptors that could lead to low-quality sleep.  According to government surveys, most of us get one hour less sleep than is optimal. Add one more hour of sleep per night for 2 weeks and see if it makes a difference in how you feel.


For more ways to build a strong, vibrant gut, check out The 8 Best Foods for Your Gut.


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Community Gardens: Abundant, Popular…And Toxic?

There's no question that community gardens offer a bounty of benefits beyond just the broccoli, Brussels sprouts, and baby bok choi that overflow their raised beds every year. They help you get to know your neighbors, they're an easy way to get fresh produce into areas that sorely lack access, and they let gardening newbies learn from seasoned pros.
In fact, community gardens are so popular, the number has TK'ED in the past five years. But if you're organizing a community garden in your neighborhood, or at least thinking of getting your hands wet, er, dirty, for the first time, there's one absolutely crucial step you need to take: Get your soil tested before you ever drop a seed into the ground.

Researchers from the Johns Hopkins University Center for a Livable Future have just published a paper in the journal PLoS One, highlighting the need for better education among community gardeners, particularly in urban areas, about the potential for soil that could make them sick. The authors interviewed gardeners with a wide range of backgrounds and found that, although many gardeners were aware of risks like the neurotoxin lead, they weren't aware of a number of other potential soil contaminants that are just as risky, including mercury, arsenic, cadmium and chromium. The gardeners also didn't always research past uses of the sites on which their gardens grew. Doing so can help community gardeners get a better sense of what to test for, the authors write, since a garden might be situated atop an old gas station, which would necessitate checking for petroleum products, or near a chemical facility that may contaminate the soil.

"While the benefits are far-reaching, gardening in urban settings can also create opportunities for exposure to contaminants such as heavy metals, petroleum products, and asbestos, which may be present in urban soils," Keeve Nachman, PhD, senior author of the study and director of the Food Production and Public Health Program with CLF, said in a statement. "Our study suggests gardeners generally recognize the importance of knowing a garden site's prior uses, but they may lack the information and expertise to determine accurately the prior use of their garden site and potential contaminants in the soil."
CLF is certainly not one to deter future gardeners—they're one of the founding members of the Meatless Monday campaign, so they definitely want to encourage people to eat their vegetables—but their survey does suggest that community gardeners take three important steps before the growing season gets underway:

• Know as much of your site's history as you can. Without knowing your site's history, you might miss out on potential contaminants that aren't included in a standard soil test. Call your city's department of planning to get the most thorough site history.

• Test your soil! Once you know what to test for, contact your local cooperative extension service to find a place where it can be tested. But be aware that testing for contaminants is different than testing for soil quality and fertility. You'll want to do both, eventually, but learning about contaminants requires the former. And if your plot is particularly large, take multiple samples from multiple locations, since contaminant levels can vary depending on location.

• Reduce your exposure. Even if your soil is contaminated, there are steps you can take to reduce your exposure, but the authors stressed that simply using raised beds doesn't protect you entirely from contaminated soils. You can be exposed by inhaling contaminated dirt or inadvertent hand-to-mouth contact while you're gardening. And the roots of plants in raised beds can extend into contaminated soils. Sometimes, even the wood used to build the bed may have been treated with a compound like arsenic. Even wind can blow contaminated soil into otherwise healthy beds. They recommend a few steps that will help minimize exposure to contaminated soils:

- Use mulch to reduce splashing contaminants onto crops when watering.

- Always wash your produce thoroughly and peel root crops if possible.

- Wash your hands after gardening.

- Leave your gardening shoes at the door when you're finished to avoid tracking in contaminated soil.

- When building raised beds, be careful with reusing wood. Use untreated wood only or consider something like stone or concrete blocks to avoid the issue of chemicals altogether. 

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Keep it Light: It's the Weed Weediest Time of the Year (To the tune of the well-known Christmas song)

By Carl Little, NCAT Sustainable Agriculture and Rural Communities Program Manager

It’s that time of year again. It seems to happen overnight. One day your market garden is neat and pretty, with all the rows nicely cultivated and mulched, and the next day you can’t even see rows, let alone any of the vegetables. It appears that somebody has come in the night and planted a huge crop of weeds in your garden. Okay, maybe it wasn’t overnight. Maybe it was that week you took vacation or maybe it was all those evenings you took a bike ride, went for a walk, went fishing, or, heaven forbid, sat on the couch and watched television because it was, “just too hot outside” to do anything but sit and catch up on the reruns.

The truth is that the newness and excitement of the spring planting and watching those plants spring up from the ground has now worn off. It’s like your kids’ Christmas toys in February. It’s too new to be ignored, but old enough that you just don’t want to play with it every day. But wait, you just mentioned your kids. By now, the newness of those Christmas toys has really worn off and, face it, they’ve been pretty slothful this summer. It’s time to build some character in those budding couch potatoes.

Okay, so now you have weeds on the one hand and slothful kids on the other. This is a match made in paradise. Round ‘em up, hand them some gloves to protect their tender little non-working hands, and teach them what is a weed and what is not. The task is simple: pull up everything that is a weed and leave everything that is not. You don’t need to get overly complicated and teach them the scientific names of the weeds. Heck, you don’t even need to teach them the common names. Just say and do this, “Hey, [insert child’s name], this is a [insert crop name and point to it], this is not [point to weeds]. Pull up these [point to weeds] and not these [point to crop].” The redundancy of pointing is very important here. I recommend doing this at least three times. Repeat with other crops as necessary.

If you don’t have children, no problem. The world today, and especially the U.S., seems to be full of the non-working types. Just send a few inquiries out to your friends and neighbors and offer some character-building lessons. Parents love character building and a chance at the TV. You just might get a few of them to stay longer than 15 minutes. By the way, your success rate at keeping them working goes up exponentially with the amount of money and lemonade you offer. I usually judge how much to pay based on the coverage rate of a gallon of a non-sustainable alternative. But no matter how successful you are at having kids bail you out of your last week of goofing off instead of working the garden, remember this: every weed they pull is a weed you won’t have to pull.

A few caveats: Remember that lesson, “pull this and not that?” It seems a child’s attention span doesn’t allow them to learn this lesson until they “pull that and not this,” and then they must see you writhe in agony over the lost possibilities and the sweetest tomatoes that will now never be tasted. You have to be overly dramatic here in your grief over the lost plant—it’s the only way they will learn. The second thing you will lose is the produce itself, especially berries, and peas, and anything sweet. Kale, not so much. Just chalk this up to building a future market.

Note: The author of this article is the father of six children, all of them sons, except five.

See more at the author's blog on small scale intensive farming.

INTERVIEW: We Talk to Natural Machine’s Lynette Kucsma About the Foodini 3D Food Printer

Last week we spotted a curious new 3D printer, called the Foodini, that could print edible designs. With our interests perked and our stomachs growling, we wanted to know more about how such a wondrous machine works in real-life and when we could get our own. We caught up with the Foodini maker Natural Machine’s Chief Marketing Officer Lynette Kucsma to find out. Lynette clarified that the Foodini is an open system that you can fill with ingredients to 3D print your own food. Natural Machines hopes to encourage home cooking and healthier eating with the Foodini. Keep reading to learn more about how the ever-popular, advanced manufacturing method that may soon be making its way into kitchens and restaurants.

Inhabitat: Does the Foodini 3D printer require prefilled capsules of food?

Lynette: It started a little bit over a year ago. There are four founders in the company and I came in around August. Prior to that, the three founders were working Foodini as a sweets or cake machine with the idea that you would buy prefilled capsules of ingredients that could make a cake or a tart or some type of chocolate. It would print the recipe for you.

They came up with that because two of the founders come from a baking background. Looking at the costs of getting cakes and sweets out, most of the money is in the shipping and getting them out on the market. They thought if they eliminated that channel by allowing you to print cakes at home you would save money on that.

I came on board around the August–September timeframe, looked at Foodini and said it’s really the same 3D printing technology underlying, why don’t we branch out to the savory market. We decided to start trying savory food and it actually worked out pretty well.

With all the concerns in the world about obesity and people eating too much processed food, a good kitchen appliance would help bring people back into the kitchen. It’s about promoting home cooking, which is sometimes the opposite of what people think when they hear 3D food printing.

Lynette: The original idea was also to have consumers buy prefilled so you wouldn’t have to prepare anything. Now what we did is turn the idea upside down. The Foodini will ship with vessels that are empty, so you put in the fresh food.

There are a couple of reasons for doing that. One is you can use fresh food, you don’t have to use anything with preservatives because usually with foods that have a long shelf life have preservatives to make it last. Hence the reason things start becoming unhealthy.

Secondly, there’s such a wide variety of tastes it would almost be impossible to bottle it all. For instance, you might like basil infused pasta whereas I like tomato infused one. With all the different mixes of ingredients you can use, it’s better to have an open capsule model.

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Put the internet to work for you.

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How Poor Planning Is Fueling Lyme Disease

A tiny, hard-to-spot tick often contains bacteria powerful enough to completely debilitate a person, but a tiny little mouse? Well, they can apparently take it.

A new study published in the journal Ecology found that a single white-footed mouse is able to play super host to hundreds of ticks at the same time while showing no ill consequences.

White-footed mouse populations are on the rise, too, thanks to one main reason: poor development planning. Fragmenting forests to create housing developments or box stores often evicts mouse predators like coyotes, foxes, and owls.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) say about 30,000 people are diagnosed with Lyme each year, but many experts agree tens of thousands more are unknowingly walking around with the ailment. Standard doctor's office tests are notoriously poor, missing up to 60 percent of cases.

According to an article in The Republic, forest patches smaller than 3 acres had an average of 3 times as many ticks as larger forest patches. And get this: As many as 80 percent of the ticks in the smallest patches were infected with Lyme, the highest rate seen! Experts in that article suggest that community planners should avoid creating forest fragments smaller than 5 acres. Otherwise, they could create a Lyme disease haven full of mice

When it comes to your own backyard, you've got options, too.

• Plant a beautyberry bush. They are native and believed to repel ticks.
• Create a buffer path of gravel between any wooded areas and your yard. Mice and ticks don't like to cross over that.
• Keep wood neatly stacked and in a spot that gets some sun. Moist, sloppy wood piles are an invitation for ticks.
• Consider raising free-range chickens and/or guinea hens in your yard. They are voracious tick eaters. 

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