All disease begins in the gut – Hippocrates
Studying Korean Natural Farming (KNF) has me learning about the soil microbiome and how important it is to plant health. Spraying topicals on a plant might bring temporary nutritional benefit or disease protection, but nothing affects its health more than the soil it’s grown in. And what affects the health of the soil? It’s microbiome. The life in the soil, in a healthy balance, will provide everything the plant needs.
When the balance is off it can create disease. If we spray a pesticide, we kill its chances to possibly balance itself, and we create a dependence on chemicals.
You could replace the words “plant” and “soil” above with the words “body” and “gut” with the same outcome. The miracle that is our lives, our bodies, our health, and our minds, functions just like the plant in the soil. And our bodies are interconnected with the soil.
What is a microbiome? It’s a community of microscopic organisms that live within our bodies and our soil. This includes bacteria, archaea, fungi, and protozoa. Not only do they keep each other in balance, but they also create a synergy when working well together. An overgrowth of one type of one community can cause health problems.
A compromised gut biome, one that is seriously out of balance, can have a major effect on chronic pain, especially arthritis.
Here are some ways the gut biome gets out of balance.
- Genes
- Medications
- Poor diet – food choices; lack of nutrition in food
- Chemical exposure
Let’s talk briefly about each.
Genes
We all have inherited certain genetic dispositions for ailments and allergies. No doubt you’ve heard of someone who drank and smoked all their lives and lived to a ripe old age. But that’s not us or we wouldn’t need to keep reading! Our inherited genes aren’t something we can control, but we can manage susceptibilities.
Medications
For years, common childhood ailments like ear infections have been treated with antibiotics. We’re surrounded by antibiotics from our soaps to OTC antibiotic gel for small scrapes. The abundance of antibiotics eliminates most of the bacteria in your microbiome. That leaves you with a predominance of the other players, archaea, viruses, fungi, and protozoa. This dysbiosis allows the others to grow disproportionately and the imbalance game starts. It also allows certain “bad” bacteria that are stronger than the good ones to dominate and then you find yourself back at the doctor’s office getting a stronger prescription antibiotic.
Poor Diet
The Standard American Diet (SAD) is typically high in processed carbohydrates and low in carbs from fresh vegetables and fruit. Even if you’re eating from the food pyramid recommendations, grains are a high percentage and most of us don’t eat whole grains, we eat what the food industry has passed off as whole grains and they provide too many carbohydrates. A high carb diet of grains encourages and feeds the growth of bad fungi and bad bacteria.
Also, food coming from the grocery store has a compromised nutritional value as the soils where they’re grown become more depleted. When pesticides are used, even “organic” ones, the microbiome of the soil changes just like the microbiome of our gut changes. The soil’s immune system is compromised requiring more and more pesticides to be used. The resulting vegetables and fruit that show up in our produce departments are compromised of nutrition adding to the compromise of our gut biome.
Chemical Exposure
Most of us have been and are daily exposed to chemicals. Even if you garden completely organically and live off-grid, you’re being exposed to chemicals. Some of these are blatant exposures. My siblings and I can recall the fun we had chasing the mosquito sprayer when living in Okinawa! It was probably spraying DDT and now we’re finding out that many of the landscape crews on military installations such as Okinawa used Agent Orange that was being stored there in barrels. It was a highly effective weed control! But even if you don’t think you’ve been overtly sprayed with now-banned chemicals, you’ve ingested them and breathed them throughout your life. These chemicals most likely have played roles in the dysbiosis of our guts.
How does this dysbiosis affect chronic pain, specifically joint pain? Our gut has a lining that when healthy forms a tight barrier that controls what gets absorbed into the bloodstream. In a healthy gut biome, this lining is thick and provides protection, but in a compromised gut biome, the lining can form cracks that allow toxins and bad bacteria overgrowth into the bloodstream. These create biofilms that can attach themselves to your joints. The body recognizes these growths of biofilm as hostile invaders and calls in the immune system, its army, for protection. The immune response does nothing to the biofilm, snugly attached to the joint, but causes inflammation and pain, and over time, damages the joint. This is called an autoimmune disease where our own immune systems are attacking our bodies.
The standard medical response is to shut down the immune system, so it’ll stop falsely attacking itself. This creates a cycle of disease that requires more and more chemical intervention because the body can’t heal itself. Standard treatment drugs, steroids, non-steroid anti-inflammatories, antibiotics, and a host of much stronger pharmaceuticals all exacerbate gut biome dysbiosis furthering the cycle.
So, what can you do about it? Well, the simple answer is to stop the leaky gut or intestinal permeability before it causes too much damage to the joints and tissues and get the gut microbiome back in balance. But it’s just not that easy to achieve. It’s all a part of putting the puzzle pieces together. You need to find out what’s causing the compromised gut biome and those answers aren’t easy to find.
You can do testing to help you identify what is out of balance (Biohm gut test) and you can do food allergy testing to see if the problem lies there. But sometimes it’s just a mystery – maybe it’s your genetics or maybe you chewed on lead paint as a child. The mystery might not ever get solved with the technology that currently exists.
Even if you’ve had chronic pain for years, it’s not too late to make simple changes to help reverse your problems. If you’re currently taking prescription medications, counterbalance the dysbiosis they’re contributing to by taking a quality probiotic that also includes prebiotic and fungi. Experiment with them and find what works best in your body with your circumstances.
Next, address your diet. You don’t need to go on a super restrictive diet although there are some elimination diets (GAP’s, FODMAP) that are showing good results. You can do these diets yourself but are best tried under the supervision of a Functional Medicine Practitioner. Just because it works for one person it doesn’t mean it’s the secret sauce that’ll fix yours.
One thing you can easily try on your own is eliminating refined sugar and flour completely for about three months and see if you notice a difference when you start to reintroduce them. You may not get 100% remission from your chronic pain, but improvement gives you another piece in figuring out your chronic pain puzzle.
My personal journey over the last year started with a desire for weight loss to help alleviate some of the stress put on my joints from carrying too much weight. For me, the keto diet was the easiest without having to do a lot of counting. I joined a few keto Facebook groups to give me some support and even though it was extremely hard to give up certain foods (🥖🍞🥯!!!), I found I could do it short term. And I lost weight. But while I think it was really good for me to learn how starchy my diet was, and to become fat-adapted (meaning I burn fat for my energy, not sugar), it’s not a long-term eating solution for me. I found that I needed lots of fresh vegetables and so I’ve adapted to a more Ketotarian type of diet. I still eat plenty of meat, but I make sure it’s high quality and less of a focus in my meals.
I am still on this journey of weight loss. I’ve lost enough not to be obese, but I still want to lose another twenty pounds. Remember, for every one-pound overweight you are, your knees feel the force of three pounds. So, twenty more pounds loss for me means 60 fewer pounds of force on my knees.
But the amazing discovery has been how much flour and sugar has been causing inflammation in my body. I occasionally eat bread or a dessert and when I do, I notice the results immediately as inflammation starts flaring up. It becomes easier not to want those foods when pain, swelling, bloating, and indigestion can be directly correlated with them.
I also make sure I get probiotics by taking a quality supplement and I’m experimenting with fermenting vegetables. Fermented vegetables are rich in probiotics that don’t require you to take a pill and help to remind you that food is nutrition.
So, if you want a simple way to help decrease chronic pain, give your gut some love! Find a good complete probiotic supplement, try to eliminate flour and sugar and begin to incorporate new vegetables and fermented foods into your diet. Take these steps to start you on your journey towards better health and less dependence on medications.
My new gardening passion is growing a variety of vegetables for fresh eating and fermenting!
A diverse diet creates a diverse and healthy gut microbiome.
I hope you’ll join me on this journey to better health and happier gardening!
Join the community! We’re stronger together.
Join the Pain-less Gardening Facebook group to meet other gardeners seeking natural solutions to chronic pain. Click the image below or visit The Disabled Gardener Facebook page to check it out!
