The secret cause of inflamaging lies deep in the gut

If you’re like most doctors of chiropractic, you see a lot of the same health issues in your patients day in and day out.

Do any of these conditions sound familiar?

• Fibromyalgia pain
• Chronic joint pain
• Chronic fatigue
• Weight gain
• Anxiety/depression
• Cognitive decline
• Rising blood pressure
• Rising triglycerides and cholesterol
• Either hypoglycemia or elevated blood sugar

As you are probably aware, an inflammatory component contributes to each of these conditions. Inflammation of sufficient intensity and duration to cause any of these patho-physiologies has been termed by researchers, “inflamaging.”¹ That term simply means that your patho-physiological age exceeds your chronological age, such as in the case of a 30-year-old looking and feeling like a 40-year-old, or a 50-year-old who feels stiff and sore, with no energy, and with both blood pressure and blood sugar rising for no apparent reason.

What drives inflamaging?

The fundamental causes of inflamaging always include an unhealthy gut microbiome. Hippocrates has been quoted as saying in 400 BC that “death sits in the bowels” and “bad digestion is the root of all evil,” showing that the importance of the intestines in human health has long been recognized. It was almost 2,000 years later when in 1683 Antony Van Leeuwenhoek, the father of microbiology, described “very little animalcules, very prettily a-moving,” which he had seen under a microscope in plaque scraped from his own teeth. For more than 300 years after Leeuwenhoek’s initial sighting of bacteria, the human microbiome – the one hundred trillion microbes that live in and on all mucus and epithelial surfaces of the human body – remained largely unstudied.²

Research shows the gut microbiota has far-reaching health effects, as it is involved in numerous aspects of normal physiology, including nutrition status, behavior and stress response and mediation of immune system reactivity.³

Consider these facts:

• More than 70% of your immune system resides in the lining of your intestinal tract and is activated from there by your microbiota to perform immune functions throughout your body.⁴
• Your microbiota contains 10 times as many bacterial cells as the number of human cells present in your body.
• Incredibly, there are 100 times the number of microbiota genes in your body than human genes.
• The surface area of your gut, if it were spread out flat, is the size of a tennis court — nearly 3,000 square feet.
• Your gut contains at least 500-1,000 different species, and a recent analysis involving multiple subjects suggests that the collective human microbiome is composed of over 35,000 bacterial species.

Research also shows there are direct axes (communication systems) originating from your  microbiota-controlled gut lining, including the gut-brain axis,⁵ gut-hypothalamus axis,⁶ gut-liver axis,⁷ gut-adipose axis,⁸ gut-pancreas axis,⁹ gut-muscle axis¹⁰ and gut-immune system axis.¹¹

Pause to appreciate the implications of this list. Your gut microbiota is far more than an inflammatory mediator for conditions in the gut, such as Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis and irritable bowel; it controls a broad array of inflammatory patho-physiologies from the gut.

Look at the list of conditions at the top of this article. As a DC, you are repeatedly confronted with chronic pain patients who may respond well to your chiropractic care, but likely not well enough. There is an underlying immune-mediated, microbiota-controlled inflammatory reactivity that can only be fully addressed with probiotic and prebiotic (synbiotic) supplementation.

Consider the remaining conditions on that list. Chronic fatigue? Hundreds of studies from the research literature link chronic fatigue to inflamaging initiated by inflammation in the gut wall. Weight gain? Research shows that weight gain, particularly abdominal weight gain, is almost entirely driven by the gut-adipose axis with input from the gut-liver axis, plus the interplay between the gut-hypothalamus, gut-liver and gut-pancreas axes.¹² Abdominal weight gain cannot be fully and permanently controlled without restoring a healthy microbiota via synbiotic supplementation.

Emotional instability,¹³ cognitive decline,¹⁴ elevated blood pressure,¹⁵ rising blood sugar¹⁶ and high cholesterol¹⁷ can all derive from microbiota-driven inflamaging. These inflammatory processes often begin in youth, long before they become clinically diagnosable. Truly, many of these conditions may trace their origin to childhood or adolescence, when imbalanced microbiota first cause any of the gut-related axes to go functionally awry.

With a less-than-ideal microbiota you are living in a constant state of low-grade systemic inflammation. Then, in accord with the principle that any chain breaks at its weakest link, that inflammation tends to rear its ugly head as your own individualized patho-physiologies.

There is a broad array of assaults on the microbiota. First, many individuals never develop a normal microbiota as infants, including:

• Those born via Caesarean birth
• Those who were not breastfed
• Those born through their mother’s microbiota-deficient birth canal
• Those who ingested fruit and other sugars early in life (when lactose is the sugar needed).

Following infancy, many other forces devastate the microbiota. “Ordinary” drugs are a big factor:

• Antibiotics
• Proton pump inhibitors
• Antihistamines
• NSAIDs

All of these devastate the microbiota. In our sick world, there are very few who do not take one or more of these drugs, take them routinely and think that doing so is “normal.”

Lack of sunlight and vitamin D (and a preponderance of blue/green frequency light in video screens and indoor lighting) also inhibit a well-developed, balanced microbiota.

• As the master control center, your gut-immune axis: Initiates the release or inhibition of pro-inflammatory cytokines
• Initiates the release or inhibition of anti-inflammatory cytokines
• Activates macrophages when the need is perceived
• Gets saturated with billions of mast cells, the most fundamental component of the innate immune response¹⁸
• Connects the immune system to the nervous system as mast cells cluster around sympathetic and parasympathetic nerve endings in the gut wall¹⁹
• Receives parasympathetic feedback provoked by the inflammatory cytokine interleukin-2²⁰
• Responds with an alarm reaction to the toxins produced by abnormal bacteria, fungi, yeast or viruses in the GI tract, triggering the release of the pro-inflammatory cytokines interleukin-1 and interleukin-2²¹

Final thoughts

When choosing a probiotic, quality is of the utmost importance; not just any probiotics will yield maximum benefits. Some popular probiotics are actually pro-inflammatory and must be avoided. In fact, Lactobacillus acidophilus, causes wheezing, especially in children, and can exacerbate asthma. Now that you appreciate a major cause of inflamaging, you and your patients need a synbiotic specifically blended to enhance the gut-immune axis, because you have no defense against inflamaging until you cultivate an immune-controlling microbiota. Supplementing with probiotics alone is not adequate. You must add prebiotics to create a maximally anti-inflammatory synbiotic. Think of the probiotics as a crop you are planting and the prebiotics as the fertilizer assuring proliferation.

GUY R. SCHENKER, DC, a Pennsylvania doctor of chiropractic since 1978, is the developer of the Nutri-Spec System of Clinical Nutrition, which eschews symptom-based nutrition in favor of individualized Metabolic Therapy. Nutri-Spec offers a stage of life diphasic nutrition plan (SOLID DNP) empowering each patient to live stronger longer.  He can be reached at nutrispec@nutri-spec.net or 800-736-4320.

References

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