Understanding the mind – gut connection.
I think once you understand that everything cell, tissue, organ, hormone, dental cavity is all connected to each other, you will see your aches and pains in a different way.
Having a sore knee, doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s stemmed from the knee itself, it could be a case of referred pain from a sore and tightness in the shoulder.
More people are understanding this, that pain sensations connect from other places. A good osteopath will body scan you to find out if your hips are out that could be the cause of the neck pain.
Now we need people to understand that the gut and the brain are connected as well, along with other cells and organs.
You know the saying “gut feel”
For example did you know that every tooth you have is connected to a different organ in your body? That having a toothache could be a sign that your liver is not working well???
Reading a book “The mind-gut connection” explains all of the hidden conversations within our body. The signals they send to each other. We just need to listen to our body more to understand and work out what it is trying to tell us and not let our ego’s get in the way. Our bodies were made to heal naturally by sending signals of what it needs for us to feed it in the way of nutritionally dense food with the right vitamins and minerals.
Think of pregnant women with their cravings! Their gorgeous little human inside of them is taking the nutrients they already have, leaving the mother depleted, so therefore she gets a craving of a certain food type to replace what’s becoming depleted.
However in saying that mother’s have to be careful of the ‘sugar’ craving they get, this could really be a sign that her brain needs some food and the best type of macronutrient for that is good fats – avocados, pure cream, coconut, these are all tasty and full of goodness.
The cravings we get at night is because we are up way past our body clocks bedtime, and having light hit our skin receptors, it is thinking it’s daytime and that’s when we should be eating. We have just put our bodies into a situation it is not meant to be in – this signal should be to remind you to go to bed, it’s dark, you should be resting.
So functional medical doctors know that the effects of an unhealthy diet and of chronic stress on the gut microbes, the gut based immune system, and the leakiness of the gut can come from products that come from chronically diseased animals. You need to not only think you are what you eat, but it’s what you eat – ate!!
If the beef you eat is not grass fed, it’s been fed corn and other feed, that has had pesticides in it to fatten up the cows, or they live in severely modified conditions to also help fatten up, that is what you are eating.
Now that science proves we need to eat animal fat to help our cholesterol, control our weight and blood pressure etc, we need to be careful that the meat we eat, is grass fed and that the food it has eaten hasn’t got pesticides in or on it, because within the cow/lamb/chicken etc it stores it’s toxins in the fat cells and then what we eat is primarily full of toxins, creating our system to carry on the toxins, which leads to gut health issues. This is not good for our gut microbiota and not beneficial for our health.
If animals have been living in chronic stressful conditions, their brain-gut-microbiome axis has been severely modified, they’ve been fed foods not suitable for their digestive system, so this is what we eat and affects our own health.
Plant based items too can be full of pesticides and the soil they are grown in are not of nutritional levels, magnesium in the soil could be depleted so therefore those green leafy vegetables you eat for increasing magnesium levels (to help with stress, muscle repair, blood pressure etc) are not as optimal as you may think.
It’s highly likely that the changes in the diversity of microorganisms living in the soil, in the gut microbiomes of the declining bee and butterfly populations (as farmers spray for them to die), and in the microbes living in our own gastrointestinal tract. – There is collateral damage being done to our gut health.
No wonder people are becoming sick.
We all realise that the amount of people within our world now suffering obesity, the amount of autism spectrum disorders and neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases are increasing, I do believe what doctor Emeran Mayer has quoted “we need to question the ever increasing doses of antibiotics to keep farm animals functioning and chemicals needed to fight today’s superweeds, superbugs and supergems.”
All of these added chemicals definitely affect our bodies, we were not made to process these poisons.
If you are unable to buy organic vegetables, buy from a farmers market or grow them yourselves, then rinse them in vinegar and then filtered water.
*If buying from a local farmer’s market, be sure to ask the stallholder how the vegetables have been grown – has the soil been fed with magnesium?
Please be selective on the meat you buy, ask your butcher it’s origin, here in Australia the standards are better than in America.
It’s great to see people eat well, and from those that ditch the fast food trans fat loaded burgers, to eating their own cooked steak, they still need to be mindful that the steak they cook isn’t full of toxins from what the cow has been fed in the first place.
Unfortunately this does cause issues on your gut health, then only to have side effects on either your hormones or other organs within your body.
As I mentioned everything is connected. I had acupuncture the other day and my chinese medicine doctor was sticking needles into the inside of my elbow and near my wrists, down the inside of my calfs, this was all to do with digestive flow from my stomach.
My metabolism isn’t working properly and this can be due to my gut health and my naturopath has also linked it to a bit of Vitamin D deficiency in the liver, which is where your metabolism is produced from. If this is not working, everything slows down.
So again everything is connected, if one of your systems is out of whack, if you are feeding your body environmental toxins from food sources, yes this will affect your weight, mental clarity, moods, energy, blood pressure and much much more.
Please don’t give up on a healthy diet, just learn more about it instead, education is a powerful thing.
To your health,
Kerrie
Professional Health and Fitness Coach
