Healing Long Covid Part 4: The Gut, Energy, PEM, and fasting

Understanding the Basics: What Can Go Wrong with Your Gut?

When it comes to gut health, there are three primary issues to be aware of:

1. Dysbiosis: This refers to an imbalance in your gut's microbiome, where there's an excess of harmful bacteria and/or a deficiency of beneficial ones.
2. Increased intestinal permeability (also known as "leaky gut"): Your gut lining is incredibly thin, just one cell thick, in fact. This lining is responsible for controlling what enters your bloodstream through tight junctions. However, when these junctions falter, unwanted substances like toxins and debris can slip through, triggering immune responses.
3. Inflammation: This is a result of the immune response that can wreak havoc on the gut's protective layers, including mucus. If left unchecked, this inflammation can spread beyond the gut, affecting other organs and even the brain, often leading to a sensation commonly known as "brain fog".

To maintain the balance between these three factors, we need to focus on the microbiome, the small intestine, and bile.

Unraveling the Microbiome

Your microbiome is a bustling community of approximately 39 trillion organisms. It generates as many nutrients as you consume through your diet and is home to more cells than the rest of your body. Did you know that 90% of serotonin and 50% of dopamine is produced in the gut?

An imbalance in the microbiome, or dysbiosis, can lead to leaky gut, inflammation, and ultimately, a deficiency of necessary nutrients, neurotransmitters, and hormones. This imbalance can affect every system in your body.

Furthermore, dysbiosis can cause the release of LPS, an inflammatory toxin found in the cell walls of harmful bacteria like E. coli. Your diet and your microbiome have a reciprocal relationship; what you eat shapes your microbiome, and your microbiome, in turn, influences your cravings and eating habits.

Your microbiome can undergo significant changes in response to your diet in as little as 24-48 hours. A healthy microbiome is a potent source of wellness, even outperforming many broad-spectrum multivitamins available on the market.

The Power of Short Chain Fatty Acids (SCFAs)

SCFAs are pivotal to your health. While you can ingest SCFAs, most are produced when the beneficial bacteria in your gut break down fiber. Too much sugar in your diet can compromise these beneficial bacteria, making way for sugar-loving species that release the inflammatory toxin LPS. Excessive dietary fat can also decrease the population of SCFA-producing bacteria.

SCFAs are incredibly beneficial for several reasons. They:

• Boost the number of mitochondria in your body, enhancing energy supply and muscle production
• Serve as the preferred energy source for all gut cells
• Exhibit strong anti-inflammatory properties
• Help reduce leaky gut
• Enhance mucus production, which protects the gut and provides a habitat for beneficial bacteria

The benefits of SCFAs extend to resolving health issues like inflammatory bowel disease, cancer, diabetes, weight gain, and depression.

Herbal and Lifestyle Support for a Healthy Microbiome

The biggest change you can make is in your mindset. When you eat, remember that you're not just feeding yourself; you're also nourishing your gut microbiome.

While probiotics can be beneficial, when it comes to prebiotics vs probiotics, the verdict is clear in the world of science.

Prebiotics, or dietary fiber, take precedence. These can induce significant changes in the microbiome within 48 hours. Excellent natural sources include vegetables, grains, and nuts. Alternatively, you can opt for simple, cost-effective prebiotics like resistant potato starch or raw banana flour, which can be mixed into regular cooking flours or smoothies.

Certain herbs can work wonders on your gut health by reducing leaky gut and harmful bacteria while promoting beneficial bacteria. Some of these power-packed herbs include:

• Ginseng
• Gynostemma
• Turmeric (curcumin)
• Goldenseal (berberine)

The Small Intestine: The Key to Nutrient Absorption

Think of your small intestine as the star performer in the nutrient absorption show. The protective mucosal layer is thinner compared to the stomach and colon, but fear not! The small intestine has its secret weapons - the villi. The villi and their associated layers of defence play a vital role in your body:

1. Goblet cells stationed halfway down the villi secrete mucus.
2. Paneth cells at the base of the villi release anti-microbial peptides to combat bacteria.
3. The production of alkaline phosphatase happens right here in the villi.

Alkaline phosphatase is a jack-of-all-trades enzyme with three main functions:

1. It detoxifies Lipopolysaccharides (LPS).
2. It prevents LPS from entering circulation.
3. It aids in reducing inflammation.

Your small intestine's health hinges on healthy villi. Damage to these villi can result from dysbiosis, leaky gut, and inflammation, leading to a whole host of problems - endotoxemia, chronic inflammation, malnutrition, and even chronic stress, fatigue, and insomnia.

Herbal and Lifestyle Support for a Healthy Small Intestine

Key areas to bolster your small intestine's health involve addressing mucus, inflammation, and leaky gut.

Mucus: Plants like slippery elm, marshmallow root, and aloe vera are rich in mucilage, which aids in reducing inflammation and promoting beneficial bacteria.

Inflammation: Spices like turmeric, ginger, and garlic pack a potent anti-inflammatory punch. Remember to pair turmeric with black pepper and a fat source (like ghee) to improve its bioavailability.

Leaky gut: Berberine and licorice root can work wonders for leaky gut. And when it comes to overall gut health, glutamine powder could be beneficial, especially in cases of substantial tissue damage.

Emergency Gut Shake Recipe

When your gut is feeling under the weather, whip up this quick gut shake:

• Flesh from one aloe vera leaf
• 1 tsp glutamine
• 1 tsp turmeric
• Black pepper
• 1 tsp ghee

Bile: The Digestive Wizard

Ah, bile! This magical substance is responsible for much of your digestion, most notably for emulsifying fats. This not only aids in fat digestion but also helps control harmful bacteria. But bile is not a one-trick pony; it does much more:

1. It reduces leaky gut and bolsters detoxification through the activation of the PXR enzyme.
2. The main ingredient of bile, bilirubin, is the body's secret weapon against oxidation.
3. Bile binds to the amino acid taurine to prevent tissue damage, which plays multiple roles in our body, including reducing stress and anxiety, upregulating GABA, and counteracting histamine.

Bear in mind that taurine is found mainly in meat, and cooking methods can significantly reduce its content. Bile is stored in the gall-bladder but is produced in the liver. Too much stress and inflammation can hamper bile production.

Herbal and Lifestyle Support for Better Bile Production

Incorporate bitters, leafy greens, beetroot, and dandelion into your diet to support your liver and boost bile production. Ginger tea and herbal bitters can give a pre-meal bile boost. Deep breathing is a lesser-known trick to stimulate bile production by massaging the liver through diaphragm movement. Vegetarians or those who eat purely cooked meat should consider taurine supplementation.

The Migrating Motor Complex: Your Gut's Cleaning Crew

When you eat matters as much as what you eat, thanks to the migrating motor complex (MMC). The MMC is a 90-minute pulsing process that sweeps your gut clean of undigested food, debris, bacteria, and toxins, with bile acting as the mop to the MMC's broom.

The MMC cycles kick in about 3 hours after your last meal and work more efficiently when you're awake. That grumbling tummy? It's often the MMC at work – a positive sign! Constant snacking or impaired MMC cycles can lead to issues like Small Intestinal Bacterial Overgrowth (SIBO) and Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS).

Herbal and Lifestyle Support for Optimal MMC Cycles

To maximize your MMC cycles:

• Delay your breakfast
• Have an early dinner
• Aim for 4 hours between meals
• Avoid snacking
• Avoid going to bed with a full stomach

Remember, late-night eating can disrupt glucose processing and pave the way for high blood sugar and metabolic disease.

Exercise: The Gut's Best Friend

Exercise is not just about shedding pounds or building muscles; it's integral for a healthy gut. Exercise boosts mitochondria in all cells, including those in your gut. When you exercise, your body produces lactate and hydrogen ions, and it's the mitochondria that help burn them for energy. Without sufficient exercise, you have less mitochondria, leading to acidity and inflammatory oxidation.

Moreover, exercise enhances antioxidant production, improves endotoxin clearance, and balances the nervous system to reduce stress. And did I mention that exercise can increase bile flow by up to 10x!

Exercise also benefits your microbiome by increasing species diversity and promoting Short-Chain Fatty Acid (SCFA)-producing bacteria, which produce energy and dampen inflammation.

A Note on IBS

IBS is no longer a mysterious set of symptoms with an unknown cause. Since 2018, it's been linked to the overactivation of the enteric (gut) nervous system, happening due to a specific combination of high serotonin, histamine, and elastase.

Serotonin is a constant in the gut, regulating many functions. Histamine gets released in response to various individual triggers, including food like nightshades, gluten, dairy, and fat. Elastase, a protease enzyme, facilitates protein digestion.

For thousands of years, traditional medicine systems have advised against combining heavy quantities of proteins and fats. However, humans have always been capable of consuming reasonable quantities of these in combination. So, what's triggering the IBS epidemic? Enter the elastase inhibitor SERPIN-BL.

SERPIN-BL, produced by the beneficial bacteria Bifidobacterium longum, removes elastase, thus halting the IBS reaction. So, to combat IBS:

• Avoid combining large quantities of protein and fat in meals
• Use a Bifidobacterium Longum probiotic to increase SERPIN-BL
• Use mast cell stabilizers to reduce histamine response, such as:
• Buckwheat
• Resveratrol (found in grapes and wine)
• Vitamin C (found in fruits)
• Nettle
• Chamomile
• Nearly all spices, including ginger, garlic, turmeric, black pepper, cinnamon, and cardamon