Food Over Medicine (8 page)

Beneficial bacteria in the GI tract are very important in regulating immune function. It is compromised by taking antibiotics, steroids, and other drugs, as well as by constipation and inflammatory bowel diseases. When enough beneficial bacteria are destroyed, leaky gut can result, allowing whole-food particles to enter the bloodstream, leading to compromised or overactive immunity, allergic responses to foods, and systemic inflammation. An overactive immune system and systemic inflammation can contribute to the development of asthma.

GM:
What causes gallstones?

PP:
It’s definitely diet related. Gallstones are made of cholesterol in nearly all cases. People end up with gallstones from eating a high-fat, animal-protein diet. Unfortunately, one problem we have in medicine today is the overriding view by a lot of doctors that body parts are disposable. “Oh, if it’s bothering you, we’ll just take it out.”

GM:
So the gallbladder goes.

PP:
The gallbladder goes, or maybe the spleen or the appendix go. I happen to think we have these body parts for a reason and we should work hard to preserve them. Unless the disease has progressed to the place where it’s horrific, most people who change to the diet we’re promoting would experience relief from the pain associated with gallstones and gallbladder disease. As long as they’re compliant, they’re fine. I’ve had members who say, “I eat one high-fat meal and I’m miserable,” and I tell them, “Good, that’s a good way to keep you on the straight and narrow. We don’t have to worry so much about you because you have an instant adverse effect from straying.”

It’s not unusual, of course, for people to have their gallbladder removed. Then they continue their dietary habits and find out they’re still just as uncomfortable because all of the fat and animal protein that they’re eating is so detrimental to their health. They’re usually fairly distressed to find out that some of their discomfort is coming from bile acids dripping right into the colon, which is why they still feel nauseous and sick. And the presence of bile acids in the colon increases their risk of colon cancer substantially. They were promised instantaneous relief from their discomfort; however, they end up with long-term increased risk of colon cancer and no relief from their symptoms.
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I would say that that probably happens 35 or 40 percent of the time following gallbladder removal.

GM:
So having your gallbladder removed increases your risk of colon cancer?

PP:
Yes. And we all acknowledge that there are situations where the gallbladder is just so diseased that you have to take it out, but doctors tend to be really cavalier about removing body parts. I think it’s always worthwhile to see if a change in diet, if somebody’s willing to do it, affects the situation. Sometimes it happens so quickly—I’m talking about a matter of days—that someone calls his doctor and says, “That surgery I had scheduled for next Friday? I don’t need to do it now because I’m feeling much better.”

GM:
Have you had Wellness Forum members who did that?

PP:
Yes. I’ve also had members who have had their gallbladder taken out. The unfortunate reality is that what we want as human beings, from both the doctor’s perspective and the patient’s perspective, is resolution. The doctor and the patient want it resolved, and there’s something satisfying about just taking it out. The disease is gone. It’s over with, and we can just put it behind us. That’s not really the case, but that’s the perception a lot of people have that lead them to engage in, or consent to, risky medical practices.

GM:
So if somebody has a diseased gallbladder, riddled with gallstones, and then he adopts the correct diet, will those gallstones just dissolve?

PP:
Sometimes they will, but usually they just stop causing problems. If the gallstones get caught in the duct, that’s when you may have to do something surgically, but not always.

GM:
And what about kidney stones?

PP:
Well, that’s the result of several factors. The first is increased calcium concentration, which comes about from the high calcium intake that people in this country have been convinced is necessary. We have a lot of people taking calcium supplements and, of course, consuming cow’s milk. The other cause of high calcium levels is the release of calcium from the bones to buffer acidity, the metabolic acidosis that results from consuming a lot of protein, fat, refined foods, caffeine, alcohol, etc. Combine the high calcium levels with dehydration, and our poor little kidneys are forced to concentrate more and more waste with less and less fluid. You can end up with some kidney stones. They can become a thing of the past, even for people who have a lot of them, if they just start drinking enough filtered water every day and eating a healthy, whole foods, plant-based diet.

GM:
How many glasses of filtered water?

PP:
I like for people to drink sixty-four ounces of water a day as a base. That’s for adults. Children should drink half their weight in ounces. And then you have to compensate for activities. Yesterday I ran, went to the gym, taught a hot yoga class, and then took a hot sweatbox class, so I probably had three gallons of water to compensate.

I’ve heard people insist that if you eat the right diet, you don’t need to drink water. I disagree. We need to remember that thirst is not an adequate or reliable indicator of the need for water. There are a couple of reasons for that. One is that we salivate when we eat, which disguises the thirst response. The second is that our bodies adapt to dehydration. Eventually, just as if you don’t eat long enough, you don’t feel hungry anymore, if you don’t drink water for a long enough time, you learn to live with dehydration and not necessarily feel thirsty. As evidence, consider the number of people who end up hospitalized for dehydration every year, in perfectly ordinary circumstances, when they could easily have reached for a drink of water.

One of the smartest people I know runs a multimillion-dollar company here in Columbus. A couple of years ago, at a meeting in New York, he passed out on the floor. They took him to the hospital; he was just dehydrated. Now, I’m sure that if this very smart, educated, wealthy guy thought that he was thirsty, he would have reached for something to drink. To insist that all of this would just be remedied if we would drink just when we’re thirsty and not worry about it the rest of the time is to miss the lesson in incidences like this, which are not uncommon.

GM:
Food poisoning is obviously a dietary issue, but is there one type of diet that makes you less likely to get food poisoning than another?

PP:
One way you can avoid food poisoning is to avoid chicken, fish, pork, beef, and the other foods that are more likely to give you food poisoning. The second thing is that healthy people, even exposed to a pathogen, often don’t have any response to it. So if you’ve got really well-established colonies of beneficial bacteria in your system, even exposure to a pathogen may not make any difference. Generally, food poisoning results from consuming animal foods, with some rare exceptions like the one that happened a few years ago when spinach was contaminated by animals near the farm. The spinach was not the cause of the food poisoning; it was the nearby environmental abusers, like cattle ranches, causing the food poisoning.

GM:
Yeah, it always bugs me when the news media reports some scare, like E. coli in lettuce, without noting animal agriculture as a likely cause. They make it sound like it’s normal, like some lettuce from a bad seed just grows into pathological lettuce.

PP:
I have no idea what they’re thinking, but our best defense in any case remains maintaining colonies of beneficial bacteria, while limiting or eliminating the animal foods that generally expose us to the harmful bacteria.

GM:
Does eating soy yogurt help a person get those healthy bacteria? How do you get the healthy bacteria?

PP:
Well, first of all, you’re born with it. You acquire it during vaginal delivery.
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One problem we have is the overuse of Caesarean deliveries, most of them unnecessary. The baby’s normal way of acquiring beneficial bacteria, which is moving through the birth canal, isn’t happening as frequently, so the baby is acquiring bacteria from the hospital environment, which impairs the child.

Another way that the baby develops beneficial bacteria is through breast-feeding.
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So a Caesarean-born, bottle-fed baby has an automatic disadvantage. That child is at a disadvantage for the rest of her life. That doesn’t mean bad things are going to happen; it means they are more likely to happen. But let’s just say that a baby is vaginally born, is breast-fed, and has healthy bacteria. That child will be fine unless she does something to destroy it, like take antibiotics or birth control pills, develop constipation, irritable bowel or inflammatory bowel conditions, or celiac disease. Those kinds of conditions impact the beneficial bacteria in the GI tract. If you’ve had any of those things happen, you need to take strong, pharmaceutical-grade probiotics in order to fix it.

GM:
Well, most Americans have taken an antibiotic now and then.

PP:
Right, and this is something I get angry about. One hundred percent of all doctors surveyed will tell you that taking an antibiotic destroys beneficial bacteria. Yet in any metropolitan area, you can count on one hand the number of doctors who put their patients on probiotics to compensate for the destruction of the antibiotic regimen. We have a lot of folks out there who have taken not just one antibiotic regimen but twenty-five or thirty of them in their lifetime and never fixed the damage. They need good pharmaceutical-grade probiotics. You’re not going to replenish a destroyed colony by eating yogurt of any type. There aren’t enough of the critters in the yogurt to establish the colonies. Eating soy yogurt may help a little; people claim benefits from consuming probiotic-laced products, but they don’t really grow colonies. You get some temporary relief from the symptoms, but you don’t resolve the underlying issue.

Having a healthy colony of beneficial bacteria is crucial for your immune function, your ability to absorb nutrients from food, and your ability to keep the intestinal barrier healthy so that partially digested food and other pathogens and bacteria don’t get into the bloodstream.

GM:
And these pharmaceutical-grade probiotics, can you get them in health food stores?

PP:
You can get better ones from a doctor or another knowledgeable practitioner. A lot of the best companies don’t sell their products in health food stores for a couple of reasons. First of all, some people can hurt themselves with these products. For example, if a person with active Crohn’s disease walked into a store, bought a really strong product, and took it home, he might end up in the hospital as a result of taking it. It could increase their diarrhea considerably, and a Crohn’s patient definitely doesn’t need more diarrhea. I found that the best probiotics manufacturers sell their products through practitioners rather than through health food stores.

GM:
Let’s discuss the causes of irritable bowel syndrome, ulcerative colitis, and Crohn’s disease.

PP:
Absolutely diet and lifestyle. For some people, there’s also a psychological component in the case of irritable bowel; while the syndrome is biological in nature, there is some evidence that it can be brought about by psychological factors.
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There are two ways in which our thoughts and emotions can impact GI health. The first is that we actually have a nervous system in our GI tract called the enteric nervous system that operates independent of our autonomic and central nervous systems. This is what causes you to have a “gut feeling” about something. This is what causes you to have diarrhea or a stomach ache in response to stress or something of that nature. Butterflies in your stomach are your enteric nervous system acting up a bit. Also, there are certain psychological profiles of people who are more inclined to develop and maintain irritable bowel, even when you do all the right things to fix it. They continue to have it, sometimes because they get secondary gain from hanging on to the disease. Some of these people had trauma or were rewarded for sickness as children. They got excused from going to school if they had a tummy ache. Or they got excused from dinner and were given ice cream instead. So some people learn secondary gain from using gastrointestinal disorders of an undefined nature and those people grow up sometimes to have irritable bowel syndrome. There’s a little bit more of a complex causation with irritable bowel than with other ailments. On the other hand, I can say with a great deal of confidence that inflammatory bowel diseases are at base the result of diet and lifestyle choices.

GM:
Is dairy one of the main culprits?

PP:
Dairy is a big culprit. Animal foods are also a culprit, as are high-gluten foods: barley, rye, oats, and wheat.

GM:
Now you’re talking about good, healthy, vegan foods that could cause trouble.

PP:
Nuts are good foods, too, but if you go into anaphylactic shock when you eat them, you wouldn’t say they’re particularly good for you. High-gluten foods are really deadly for these people. They have to maintain complete abstinence from barley, rye, oats, and wheat in order to maintain the complete remission from their disease. The good news is that people with inflammatory bowel diseases who follow the dietary recommendations we give them—a low-fat, plant-based diet, which is phased in over time—achieve excellent results.
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