How Come They're Happy and I'm Not? (12 page)

It's also important to remember that inflammation breeds inflammation—similar to how an itchy spot makes you scratch, which aggravates it and makes it more itchy.

When the digestive tract is inflamed over a long period of time, its repair mechanisms cannot keep up with this war, and the walls break down. When the walls break down, this is called gut permeability or what many people simply call “leaky gut.”

If you have a predisposition to heart disease, the inflammation from leaky gut travels to your coronary arteries and causes inflammation and blockage there. If your genetic book of life has the directions for an autoimmune condition like rheumatoid arthritis, the inflammation may go to your joints and cause pain and disfigurement. People with mood disorders have a tendency toward inflammation in various parts of the brain, and if leaky gut is present, then the likelihood of the inflammation reaching the brain and causing low mood and brain degeneration is much greater than if the intestines are healthy, happy, and intact.

The Digestion-Disease Connection
:

Inflamed Digestive Tract → Leaky Gut → Mood Problems,
Heart Disease, Cancer, Autoimmune Disease, Etc.

The idea that digestive problems lead to depression-causing inflammation is a key concept. Much of the work I discuss, including the allergy-elimination program, blood type diet, digestive repair, and anti-inflammatory work, is based on this concept.

Just as foods we are sensitive or allergic to can cause reactions in our digestive tract and lead to chronic inflammation, chemicals in our environment can also contribute to poor mood and physical problems.

We have long known the correlation between neurological problems and toxic chemicals—for example, the association between lead paint exposure and learning and behavior disorders in children. However, the conventional medical system does not really think about adult mood and behavior issues in relation to metal toxicity. Despite this fact, mounting information reveals that toxic exposures may accumulate over time to cause more subtle slow degeneration of brain and nervous system tissue, resulting in subtle sickness. As an example of the insidious nature of these metals, one study looked at 281 kids who had been exposed to lead and compared them to 287 non-exposed kids. The exposed children showed significantly more neuropsychiatric symptoms than average adults—but these symptoms occurred more than twenty years after their initial exposure.

The metals most frequently associated with depression are lead, mercury, and cadmium, and they are commonly found in our environment. We can trace the origins of these particular toxins to factories, dental work, welding equipment, cigarette smoke, and old galvanized water pipes. There's another source you may not expect: natural medicines such as Ayurvedic (from India) remedies and Chinese herbs have been implicated as sources (which is why it's important to purchase supplements you know are made with the highest quality).

Note: If you are not sure about a supplement's quality, ask a naturopathic physician or other like-minded practitioner who has looked into the companies and its sources and quality control for the supplements.

These sources are all around us, giving these metals easy access to our body. Once in our system, these metals tend to generate imbalances between pro- and antioxidant balance, which can lead to inflammation and neurological damage. They can destroy the function of enzymes and proteins in your body, especially the ones that contain sulfur. To give you one example of the clinical effect of these metal toxins, a review of medical literature has shown that
exposure to mercury can give rise to the symptoms and traits often found in autistic people. When metals attack molecules with sulfur groups (an element found in your nerve tissue), they negatively affect the function of your nervous system in many ways. Metals can cross your blood-brain barrier, and they have an affinity for the fatty sheaths of the nerves (myelin) and the outer covering of each cell (cell membranes). They destroy the proteins in the brain (enzymes) that are responsible for reactions like communication, detoxification, and repair. Metals can also cause problems with your brain's ability to maintain proper levels of serotonin, the neurotransmitter needed for good mood.

We know inflammation from digestive imbalance can cause mood issues. Well, heavy metals and other toxic chemicals can cause brain inflammation. To make matters worse, if inflammation has already set in, your brain cells become even more vulnerable to toxins. But don't worry; the body wants to clean this up for you. We will talk about how to help the body quell the inflammation and remove the toxins in the last section of this chapter.

Have you ever heard of monosodium glutamate, also known as MSG? You may be saying to yourself, “That's the stuff in processed foods and known best for its use in Chinese restaurants. It gives some people headaches, right?” Well, if you thought that, you are correct. MSG has something called glutamate, which is, in small amounts, a neurotransmitter. In larger amounts it's a toxic by-product of brain metabolism. The brain uses a very elaborate system to remove glutamate, but mercury, aluminum, and other toxins can easily damage the proteins the brain uses to do this, thus rendering the brain cells much more easily damaged. People who can't take the MSG likely already have a buildup of glutamate.

A patient's clinical history and certain specific symptoms may help the practitioner suspect toxicity. Check the following list of
the most common symptoms to see if any describe you. Certain compounds are specifically associated with disease conditions, which may clue you in as to which metal may be the culprit.

• Tremors
  
• Numbness
  
• Tingling
  
• Headaches
  
• Confusion
  
• Fatigue
  

Heavy Metals and Associated Conditions

Finding out the levels of toxic metals in your body can be useful to help decide if working on clearing them should be an option for you. While there is no perfect way to test for these toxic compounds, I have found the following methods helpful in assessing the need to address metal toxicity.

One type of mercury called methylmercury can collect in hair, making hair testing a valuable tool, but this test may not show the burden of other types of mercury often sitting in the body.

Conventional medicine uses blood tests for heavy metals to look for overt acute exposure. What this means is if you were exposed to a lot of heavy metal a relatively short time ago, the blood tests will pick this up. But if you had a slow accumulation of metals that gradually changed your mood, the blood test will not be helpful, for the toxic metal had time to settle into your fatty tissue, like your nervous system, where it's causing the problems. As a result, checking blood for heavy metals is useful for current exposure, but does not show past exposure or total body burden.

To show whether you have metals trapped in your body tissue, a more accurate test is called a metal provocation test. This means you will first have your urine tested. Unless you have had a recent large exposure, this first urine should show very little or no metals. Then your naturopathic physician or other health care practitioner will give you a small amount of an agent called oral dimercaptosuccinic acid (DMSA) or sometimes you may have an intravenous infusion of a chemical called 2,3-dimercapto-1-propanesulfonic acid (DMPS). DMSA or DMPS goes into your system and pulls out some of the metals hiding there. After you take the DMSA or DMPS, you will have your urine tested again to see if metals are indeed hiding out. Based on this test, you and your clinician will figure out the best way to clear the metals out. We will talk about some of the ways at the end of this chapter.

Besides the ubiquity of metals in our environment, another concern is various commonly used chemicals that may also lead to depression in susceptible people. These often hail from the use of insecticides, herbicides, and thousands of other industrial and household chemicals.

Have you ever thought about why pesticides work? They work (and work pretty well, I might add) by disrupting neurological
function in the insect. A relatively large amount of pesticide kills an insect on contact. Since we humans are bigger creatures, we don't necessarily die immediately from exposure to food and environmental pest controls, but these chemicals do enter our fat and nervous tissue, and sit there over time, slowly causing trouble with our nervous, immune, and hormonal systems. Pretty much all of us have these chemicals in our system—and if you are predisposed to mood issues like depression, their presence tips the odds against you feeling good.

A 2006 article in the journal
Diabetes Care
revealed that people with diabetes have a much higher risk of being depressed—and people with depression have a much higher risk of getting type 2 diabetes. The study focused on more than two thousand people and determined that if people didn't have pesticides in their system, even if they were obese, the chances of getting diabetes were next to nothing. Let me repeat that: if there were no pesticides or herbicides found in a person—that person had virtually no risk of diabetes, even if obese! Let me ask you, did you hear about this in the news? I know I didn't—I know when there's a new drug that can help one in a thousand people, it makes news, but when breakthrough research suggests an industry practice is likely causing all cases of type 2 diabetes, this is not even discussed. Well, anyway, my point is that given the strong connection between diabetes and depression, it's not unlikely that toxic substances in our body play a strong role in the development of mood disorder.

If you would like to have a valuable, noncommercial, and free resource for information about toxicity, please see the Environmental Working Group information in the resources section at the end of this book.

Okay, this is where the rubber hits the road. You now understand the connection between an unhealthy digestive tract, food
disorders, stress, inflammation, and poor mood. You also learned about the clear connection between toxic metals and chemicals that can enter your body and cause disruption of the brain, immune system, and hormonal system. So, what can you do about it?

I have divided your detoxification plan into three steps. Step 1 is to be carried out pretty much every day—it's a lifestyle change, and it will keep your body clean and happy. Step 2 is to actively remove inflammatory foods, helping your body clean out and repair the digestive tract. Step 3, if needed, is to actively clean out heavy metals and toxic burdens like pesticides that might be hampering your mood from getting better.

This first step can be considered a lifetime, everyday kind of plan. For many people, even with severe issues of digestion and mood, this first step is quite effective, even by itself.

Drink at least 50 ounces of water a day, or about 1 ounce for every 2 pounds of body weight. For the person who is 120 pounds, that would be 60 ounces of water. If you are not sure how much you are drinking, then measure it out for a day or two to find out. I personally like to drink one or two large glasses of room temperature water in the morning, and then I carry my stainless steel 40 ounce bottle to drink during the workday. I have a little more at home in the evening. If getting up to pee at night is an issue, limit your water intake a few hours before bedtime. If possible, consider purchasing a high-quality water filter.

Fiber is important to clean out the body and remove inflammation. Studies of patients taking in fiber have shown dramatic decreases in CRP, the inflammatory marker we talked about earlier. Fiber is key, for it basically sucks up all the toxins, hormonal by-products,
and cholesterol released by the liver. One of the liver's many jobs is to clean the blood and dispose of the junk the body has accumulated from intake of food, liquids, drugs, and so on but doesn't need. It collects this refuse and sends it through the bile ducts and into the intestines. From the intestines, the junk leaves our body. If we do not have enough fiber in the intestines to suck it up and send it out, then we end up reabsorbing it into the body. This is why cholesterol also decreases with fiber intake.

One way to know if you are taking in enough fiber is to check your poop. Healthy movement is one easy, full-diameter bowel movement per day. The better your poops, the better your brain will work.

Here are some good sources of dietary fiber:

• Organic, unsulphured prunes
  
• 1 cup cooked greens like kale or Swiss chard
  
• 2 cups fresh salad
  
• 1 teaspoon fine-grade psyllium in 8 ounces of water once or twice a day
  
• 1 to 2 tablespoons of flax meal in your cereal or on a salad
  
• 1 organic carrot and 1 rib of organic celery
  
• 1 apple a day (cliché, yes, but effective due to the wonderful pectin fiber found in apples)
  
• 1 cup lentil soup