CHAPTER 14

WHAT HAPPENS IN YOUR GUT DOESN’T STAY IN YOUR GUT

Anne’s first migraine occurred on her first day of middle school, which was more than 20 years ago. Her parents chalked it up to nerves. Anne coped with each headache by taking over-the-counter ibuprofen and lying down in a dark room until it passed. Fortunately, they were few and far between.

But when a blinding headache prevented Anne from completing the SATs, her doctor referred her to a neurologist, who prescribed Imitrex, a drug that specifically targets migraine headache. After that, Anne was always careful to keep a blister pack of this migraine medicine in her purse, because migraine medication often works best if taken at the onset of symptoms.

Anne’s headaches were usually preceded by changes in vision. Objects would begin to look uneven and jagged, as if she were viewing them in a broken mirror. This forerunner of headache is called an aura. Once Anne noticed a migraine aura, she had about 15 minutes to pop an Imitrex before excruciating pain would begin penetrating one side of her head.

If the Imitrex didn’t work quickly enough, she’d take the pain reliever naproxen a half hour later. The drugs usually relieved her headaches. The migraines were infrequent and easily controlled, for the time being.

Anne married right after college and gave birth to twins a year later. Once they were in school full-time, Anne began work as a paralegal at a new law firm in Montclair, New Jersey, where she lived. She shared her job with another local woman, which gave them both flexibility in balancing the responsibilities of work and motherhood.

Anne’s children and the law practice grew at the same time, and Anne began working longer and longer hours. Then her migraine headaches began to interfere with her work. First their frequency increased. She found herself taking migraine medication every week. Then the medication stopped working well.

Anne saw a headache specialist, who changed the medications and gave her a list of foods to avoid: aged cheeses, chocolate, citrus fruits, hot dogs, aged meats, wine, beer, vinegar, onions, nuts, and food containing the flavor enhancer MSG (monosodium glutamate) or the artificial sweetener aspartame. The doctor’s theory was that certain foods trigger migraines because they contain chemicals that cause blood vessels around the brain to constrict.1

Anne began to notice a connection between food and headaches, but headache control was not nearly as simple as just avoiding the foods on the list. Initially orange juice and chocolate seemed to be the main triggers. Then she discovered that cottage cheese was just as likely to trigger a headache as aged cheddar. When she avoided one group of foods, her headaches would improve for a few weeks and then get worse as new foods seemed to become triggers. She also realized that not eating anything for six hours might trigger a headache. This discovery just added to her confusion.

Unable to establish a clear set of migraine triggers, Anne gave up on dietary control. Her neurologist prescribed a series of drugs for headache prevention. Each one produced troublesome side effects, which ranged from fatigue to weight gain to anxiety, depending on the drug. She took a leave from her job. These headaches also placed enormous stress on Anne’s marriage. She seemed to have so many inconsistent migraine triggers that her husband began to doubt whether the headaches were real.

When I met Anne, I realized that the first problem we had to confront was her confusion about food. Like most people who suffer from migraines, she had numerous triggers, but the advice she’d received about diet had not been thorough enough. It was based on the idea that certain chemicals found in foods could trigger migraines directly, acting like drugs to change blood flow to the brain. Although that theory is frequently stated, it is not supported by research.2 As I’ll explain below, the mechanism of food-induced migraine is usually allergy, a reaction in which the immune system amplifies the effect of a trigger.

I first explained to Anne that food-induced migraine is a very real disorder. The Women’s Health Study, conducted at Harvard Medical School, followed 65,000 female health professionals for about ten years. Almost 15 percent of these women experienced migraine headaches. Among the women with migraines, almost half noted that specific foods triggered them. Having food as a trigger was strongly associated with greater migraine severity.³

Scientists have shown that food-induced migraine is actually an allergic disorder, not just a disorder of the brain’s chemistry. Consider these research findings:

• All four types of allergic reaction described in Chapter 3 have been identified in people with migraine during and between attacks.⁴
• Migraines are strongly associated with other allergic illnesses, like asthma and rhinitis, which may go undetected if they’re not searched for carefully.⁵
• Allergy desensitization treatment can decrease the frequency and severity of migraines.⁶

Although Anne was not aware of having nasal allergies, my examination revealed a telltale sign of allergic rhinitis: the lining of her nose looked swollen and pale. When I questioned her, she thought for a moment and then said, “Actually, my nose is stuffed up most of the time. I guess I’m just used to it.”

I also observed that her abdomen was somewhat distended and tender. This reflected another set of common symptoms that had passed under Anne’s radar: abdominal discomfort and gas. The Women’s Health Study found that symptoms like abdominal bloating occur in about a quarter of women with migraines and, like food sensitivity, are associated with greater severity of headache.

I explained to Anne that to really understand the root causes of her migraines, we’d have to start by analyzing the function of her GI tract.

She didn’t say anything, but the look on her face said, “I’m seeing you about headaches and you want to start with my gut?”

So I explained that whenever I evaluate a patient with multiple food sensitivities, the first question I ask is: What’s happening in this person’s gastrointestinal tract? The specific symptoms vary. The person might have headaches, eczema, hives, joint pain, mood swings, attention deficit disorder, hyperactivity, fatigue, abdominal pain, or dizziness.

If numerous foods are triggers, I will usually find a disturbance in the small intestine that’s been called leaky gut. What happens in the gut doesn’t stay in the gut. It travels throughout your body. Treatment that heals a leaky gut often heals food allergies.

The Surprising Truth about Your Gut

You think of your gut as the place where you digest food and absorb nutrients. That’s only natural. Digestion and absorption are your GI tract’s most critical activities. Your brain lets you know when they’re needed by sending you a signal that says, “Feed me. I’m hungry.”

But the jobs performed by your gut are actually much larger and more extensive than you ever imagined:

• Your gut is the largest organ of your immune system. Over two-thirds of your body’s lymphocytes are found in the lining of the small intestine. From that base they travel throughout your body sending signals that influence immunity in all other organs. Your small intestine is where oral tolerance begins. As I described in Chapter 3, oral tolerance is the normal, healthy way for your body to respond to food, absorbing the nutrients and not reacting to the allergens. It’s an active process, controlled by your T-reg cells.
• Your GI tract has its own nervous system, called the enteric nervous system (ENS). The ENS has been called the second brain. It contains as many nerve cells as your spinal cord and is in constant communication with your brain. In fact, crosstalk between your brain and your ENS accounts for some of the benefits of mind-body therapies in alleviating allergy. A fascinating experiment conducted in the Netherlands demonstrated that a mind-body training program could decrease the inflammatory response to gut-derived toxins.⁷
• Your gut is home to trillions of microbes, which include a thousand different species of bacteria, a few dozen types of yeast and an unknown number of viruses. Collectively, these are called the gut flora, or microbiome. Discovering how these microbes influence human health and illness has been a major quest of mine for over three decades. In the past few years, research into gut flora has blossomed into one of the most important areas of applied medical science. Creating a healthy floral population is the main goal of the technique I call reflorastation, which I describe later in this chapter.
• The gastrointestinal tract is an organ of detoxification. The intestinal lining is rich in detoxifying enzymes. Your gut and your liver work together to prevent noxious substances from reaching your tissues and to remove them from your body. Intestinal lining cells and the intestinal immune system create a protective barrier that defends your body against the damaging effects of toxins and allergens found in your gut.

These multiple functions of the digestive system interact with each other and with the food you eat to regulate your immune responses, your nutritional state, your metabolism, your pattern of sleep, and even your moods.

Leaky Gut Leads to Migraines

With leaky gut, there is excessive absorption of gut-derived toxins and food-derived allergens. The ability of the intestinal lining to create a protective barrier is compromised and oral tolerance fails, creating a vicious cycle. Exposure to food allergens now creates an allergic response that further inflames the lining of the small intestine and makes the leaky gut lining even leakier.

I’ve been writing and lecturing about leaky gut syndromes for 25 years. During that time, the recognition that leaky gut plays a significant role in allergy and inflammatory diseases has moved into the medical mainstream. At one time patients would tell me, “My doctor says there’s no such thing as a leaky gut.” Now the term appears in the most prestigious and conservative scientific journals.

European researchers have found links between migraine headache and leaky gut:

• Dutch scientists observed associations between migraines and gastrointestinal disorders. They state: “People who regularly experience GI symptoms have a higher prevalence of headaches . . . [U]nderlying mechanisms of migraine and GI diseases could be increased gut permeability and inflammation.”8 “Increased gut permeability” is the polite term for leaky gut.
• Josef Egger, the German neurologist whose outstanding research I described earlier in this book, provided a clear explanation for the links between food allergy, leaky gut, and migraine headache, which explains why headache may not develop until 48 hours after exposure to the food trigger.⁹ He suggested that eating a food to which you’re allergic causes inflammation in your intestines that makes the intestinal lining leaky. The leaky gut then allows excessive absorption of toxic substances produced by intestinal bacteria or derived from food. It is these toxins that are the ultimate cause of pain.

Sugar can also cause an increase in intestinal permeability, which may be additive with the effects of allergy. The synergy between sugar and allergens may explain why so many people with food allergies find that eating sugar makes their allergies worse.

A colleague of mine at Purdue University, Laura Stevens, has done important research bringing to light nutritional aspects of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder in children. She’s written about the toxic effects of food dyes on the brain, which are well substantiated by scientific evidence. Laura and I have both found that exposure to dietary sugar or food allergens can make children more susceptible to the toxic effects of food dyes. We believe that increased intestinal permeability due to sugar or allergen exposure allows increased penetration of these food additives into the body, producing changes in behavior.¹⁰ Allergy and toxicity are therefore part of a vicious cycle in which allergy drives the forces that permit increased toxicity.

Testing for Leaky Gut

In order to fully assess Anne’s GI function, I ordered two tests. The first was a test for intestinal permeability: Anne would need to drink a special solution and then collect her urine to see how much of that solution was being absorbed. The second test was a specialized stool test designed to analyze multiple components of her gut flora and the efficiency of her digestion.

The results were definitive. Anne had a marked increase in intestinal permeability (that is, a very leaky gut). She also had a complete absence of two groups of normal bacteria called Lactobacillus and Bifidobacteria. You may know the genus Lactobacillus through its best known species, L. acidophilus. I discussed the potential benefits of Lactobacillus and Bifidobacteria taken as probiotics for relieving symptoms of nasal allergies in Chapter 11 and asthma in Chapter 12.

Finally, Anne had reduced levels of pancreatic enzymes in her stool, with an elevation of undigested dietary fat, indicating impaired pancreatic function and malabsorption. Poor digestive function was likely to account for a fourth set of abnormalities, which were found in the blood tests I ordered: Anne showed very low blood levels of vitamin D and zinc.

All these abnormalities were undoubtedly related to one another. Probiotics like Lactobacillus, for example, can support the maintenance of normal intestinal permeability.¹¹ Pain relievers like ibuprofen and naproxen have been shown to greatly reduce the levels of Lactobacilli in the GI tract. This may be one mechanism by which they produce the well-known side effect of damage in the gut.¹² For the best treatment response, we’d need to correct all these abnormalities.

Armed with this information, I prepared a plan for reducing Anne’s migraines by healing her gut. I call it the ARC program, which stands for:

• Avoidance
• Reflorastation
• Cultivation

I’ve used this program to treat many different kinds of allergic, inflammatory, and autoimmune disorders. It’s not a treatment for any one disease. It’s a treatment for one underlying cause of many different diseases.

The ARC of Healing

Stage One: Avoidance

The first step in healing a leaky gut is elimination of any exposure that damages the intestinal lining. The most common such exposures are drugs, infections, and foods.

• Drugs that increase intestinal permeability are mostly in the class called NSAIDS, which includes aspirin and pain relievers like ibuprofen and naproxen. A list of these is shown in the box on Nonsteroidal Anti-inflammatory Drugs (NSAIDs). Anne had used several of these to control the pain of headache.

  Anne’s path to healing: I advised her to stop pain relievers and rely on her migraine-specific medication while she completed other parts of the Allergy Solution program.

• Infections of the gut create a state of GI inflammation that increases intestinal permeability. For people with food allergy, the most important infections in my experience are caused by single-cell parasites, like Giardia lamblia and various amoebas, and by yeasts like Candida albicans.¹³ In earlier chapters I gave examples of patients for whom these infections caused allergic illness. I search for infections like these in every patient I see with multiple food sensitivities. Some of the most dramatic reversals of allergy in my years of clinical practice have resulted from the identification and treatment of unsuspected GI infections.
• Foods may create a leaky gut in two distinct ways:

• A typical Western diet, high in sugar and saturated fats, increases intestinal permeability and produces a state of systemic inflammation that’s been called metabolic endotoxemia.14 Daily alcohol consumption can also create a leaky gut with systemic inflammation.¹⁵ The Immune Balance Diet is an antidote for both of these. I designed it to be a foundation for gut healing.

• Consuming foods to which you’re allergic produces inflammation in the GI tract that makes it leaky. The Power Wash and Re-entry protocols are intended to help you identify and eliminate those foods while adopting a varied and nutritious diet.

  Anne’s path to healing: Anne needed the systematic approach offered by Power Wash, Reentry, and the Immune Balance Diet to identify the best foods for her to eat. She discovered that dairy, yeast, and corn were her principal trigger foods. By avoiding them and eating a nutritious, well-balanced, and varied diet according to the principles outlined in Chapter 8, she brought the frequency and severity of her headaches down to a manageable level.

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Nonsteroidal Anti-inflammatory Drugs (NSAIDs)

Aspirin

Choline and magnesium salicylates

Choline salicylate

Celecoxib

Diclofenac

Diflunisal

Etodolac

Fenoprofen

Flurbiprofen

Ibuprofen

Indomethacin

Ketoprofen

Magnesium salicylate

Meclofenamate sodium

Mefenamic acid

Meloxicam

Nabumetone

Naproxen

Oxaprozin

Piroxicam

Salsalate

Sodium salicylate

Sulindac

Tolmetin sodium

 

Stage Two: Reflorastation

Gut bacteria can have a profound effect on intestinal permeability. Beneficial microbes stimulate your cells to produce a healthy intestinal barrier. Their absence is one cause of a leaky gut.

Belgian scientists explored the role of gut flora and leaky gut in alcohol addiction and withdrawal.16 Using a laboratory measure of intestinal permeability, they divided their study population of chronic alcoholics into those with high permeability and those with normal permeability. The high-permeability (leaky gut) group had higher scores of depression, anxiety, and alcohol craving than the normal-permeability group. The leaky gut group also showed greater levels of systemic inflammation and a distinct pattern of changes in their gut flora. Compared to alcoholics with normal permeability, those with high permeability were deficient in Bifidobacteria, which are known for their anti-inflammatory effects. These scientists propose that for some alcoholics (about half of the total), drinking alcohol alters gut flora to deplete protective bacteria, increasing intestinal permeability and producing systemic inflammation, which aggravates the psychological disturbances found with alcohol addiction.

Can Probiotics Help Leaky Gut?

Several teams of scientists have studied the impact of probiotic supplements on intestinal permeability in people under different conditions of stress:

• Italian physicians administered Lactobacillus rhamnosus strain GG to subjects with abdominal pain for eight weeks. Compared with the placebo, the probiotic improved intestinal permeability and produced a significant reduction in pain.17
• When scientists in Finland gave the same probiotic strain to subjects with eczema caused by food allergy, they demonstrated a decrease in intestinal inflammation and improvement in severity of eczema.¹⁸
• A German team administered two strains of Lactobacilli, L. rhamnosus 19070-2 and L. reuteri DSM 12246, to subjects with severe allergic eczema. The probiotic combination improved intestinal permeability and reduced GI symptoms.¹⁹

Several different types of probiotics can help to heal a leaky gut. My clinical experience has shown me that there is no ideal probiotic strain for this purpose. The effects differ from person to person. For some people, fermented foods like yogurt, sauerkraut, or kimchi may be the best sources of probiotic bacteria.

For others, specific probiotic supplements can make the difference. Although you can’t feel the leakiness of your gut, you can feel digestive symptoms like gas, bloating, and the quality of bowel movements. What you want from your gut is an absence of symptoms. When it works well, it does its job quietly, without talking back to you, and you barely know that it exists. The right probiotics for you can help you achieve that state. Any probiotic that aggravates gas, bloating, gurgling, constipation, or diarrhea is probably wrong for your gut.

I recommended two probiotics for Anne. One was a mixture of Lactobacilli that included L. plantarum. As its name implies, L. plantarum comes from plants and is found in naturally fermented foods like sauerkraut; several strains have been shown to tighten the intestinal barrier, reversing leaky gut in human clinical trials.20 The other was Bifidobacterium infantis, which has been shown to heal leaky gut in laboratory animals.²¹ B. infantis also stimulates activity of T-reg cells.²² You may remember from Chapter 3 that T-regs are lymphocytes that work to counteract and prevent allergic reactions. They are a critical component of the protective immune response that leads to oral tolerance.

The most rapid effect of these probiotics was to reduce Anne’s gut discomfort.

Stage Three: Cultivation

Think of your gut as a garden. Weeding, seeding, and planting are not enough. You need to cultivate the soil. A nutritious diet, rich in plant fiber, is an essential step in healing a leaky gut. Other components of the Immune Balance Diet, specifically designed for the Allergy Solution program, provide additional enhancement of normal intestinal permeability, as demonstrated in laboratory studies. These components include:

• The anti-inflammatory spice turmeric, which flavors the Immune Balance Soup²³
• The tea flavonoid, found in oolong and green tea²⁴
• Sulforaphane, the broccoli compound found in the Immune Balance Smoothie when broccoli sprout powder is added; sulforaphane is also liberated from cooked broccoli by the addition of fresh daikon radish to the Immune Balance Soup²⁵

Sometimes supplements of vitamins or minerals are needed, especially when there’s a preexisting deficiency. Two supplements were important for Anne’s treatment: vitamin D and zinc.

Vitamin D, Allergy, and Leaky Gut

Lack of vitamin D impairs intestinal barrier function, contributing to leaky gut.26 Because food sources of vitamin D are few and its main source is sunlight, low blood levels of vitamin D are very common outside the tropics. It’s unclear whether vitamin D deficiency is a cause of allergies, but some studies indicate that vitamin D supplementation can alleviate symptoms associated with allergy:

• A study done at the University of Nebraska looked at the effects of vitamin D supplementation for people suffering from chronic urticaria (hives). Vitamin D at a dose of 4,000 international units (IU) a day reduced the number and severity of hives and the degree of itching, so that sleep quality improved.²⁷
• Patients with migraine headache and low vitamin D levels were shown to experience a dramatic reduction in migraine frequency when vitamin D supplementation was added to their migraine medication.²⁸ The doses administered ranged from 400 to 4,000 IU per day, depending upon the severity of the deficiency.
• Vitamin D supplementation for asthmatics allowed a reduction of up to 75 percent in the doses of inhaled steroids needed to control asthma. As blood levels of vitamin D went up, the rate of asthma attacks went down.²⁹ This study was conducted at 20 U.S. medical centers, coordinated by the National Institutes of Health, and published in JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association. It was widely reported in the media to show no benefits of vitamin D supplementation for asthmatics, but a careful reading of the results indicates that the press reports misrepresented the actual findings. If you have asthma and your blood levels of vitamin D are low, raising those blood levels can help you achieve better asthma control with less medication.
• Children with asthma due to dust mite allergy were given vitamin D supplementation (650 IU per day) in addition to allergy desensitization shots. The addition of vitamin D doubled the rate at which children were able to discontinue their use of inhaled steroids. Higher vitamin D levels seem to generate greater activity of T-reg cells.30

Zinc vs. Leaky Gut

Low blood levels of zinc frequently accompany a leaky gut. Zinc is an essential mineral with critical effects on immune function. Lack of zinc causes a breakdown of all barrier cells in your body, from the gut to the skin. Supplementation with zinc helps to correct excessive intestinal permeability and reduce gut inflammation in children with diarrhea.³¹

Scientists at Imperial College London demonstrated the potency of zinc in preventing the increased intestinal permeability caused by a powerful NSAID, indomethacin. Of all NSAID pain relievers, indomethacin does the most GI damage. The British researchers gave indomethacin to healthy human volunteers and demonstrated a tripling of intestinal permeability in just five days. When they co-administered a special form of zinc called zinc carnosine, there was no increase in intestinal permeability with indomethacin.³²

Zinc has also shown potential for asthma. When asthmatics with low zinc levels were given 50 milligrams of zinc a day for eight weeks, they showed a significant improvement in lung function and a decrease in symptoms like cough, wheezing, and shortness of breath.³³

What Are Prebiotics?

Probiotics are beneficial microbes taken as food or supplements. I’ve discussed their use in the treatment of nasal allergies and asthma. Prebiotics are something else: complex carbohydrates that your GI tract does not digest or absorb, so they travel intact through your small and large intestines and selectively encourage the growth of beneficial bacterial flora. Mother’s milk is rich in prebiotics that encourage the growth of Bifidobacteria. The prebiotics in mother’s milk are responsible for many of the health benefits of breastfeeding.

Fiber and resistant starch are components of solid foods with prebiotic effects. Resistant starch, as its name implies, resists digestion. It’s found in foods such as bananas, plantains, beans, peas, and sweet potatoes. Many commercial prebiotics contain inulin, which is derived from chicory.

Italian researchers from the Laboratory of Experimental Biochemistry at the National Institute for Digestive Diseases in Bari fed inulin-enriched pasta to healthy volunteers who had no GI problems. It enhanced intestinal permeability and actually made “normal” laboratory results become even more normal.34 HIV infection, the cause of AIDS, produces a marked increase in intestinal permeability. Prebiotics can help to reverse the leaky gut of people with HIV and improve their immune function.³⁵

Because Anne had low blood levels of vitamin D and zinc, I had her supplement with vitamin D3 and zinc carnosine. I also recommended that she add a prebiotic powder to the Immune Balance Smoothie. There are many types of prebiotics available. For intestinal healing and allergy reversal, one choice is to use one based on a complex sugar called galacto-oligosaccharides, which is the main prebiotic in human breast milk.

By the time she began supplementation, Anne had already removed the food triggers for migraines from her diet and had significantly decreased the frequency and severity of her headaches. Adding probiotics, prebiotics, zinc, and vitamin D helped her to restore normal intestinal permeability over the next three months.

Within six months there was a dramatic reduction in her food allergies. As her gut healed, she became able to eat numerous trigger foods without developing any symptoms.

Anne’s treatment was not a treatment for migraine headaches. It was a treatment to heal a leaky gut and alleviate food allergy. Restoring normal intestinal permeability freed her of her headaches.

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The Allergy Solution Program for a Healthy Gut Microbiome

Leaky gut and the depletion of beneficial intestinal microbes through exposure to antibiotics and pesticides in food, and from a lack of dietary fiber and diversity, is an emerging factor in the rise of allergies. The solution is a whole-food, plant-based way of eating that I present in this book, which is designed to greatly improve detoxification, boost antioxidant status, and restore a healthy gut microbiome, with the help of probiotics and prebiotics.

The race to uncover the mysteries of the human microbiome and the profound implications for our health is one of the hottest areas of medical inquiry today. What has been discovered thus far offers a tantalizing glimpse into how we evolved together with these microbes and share our bodies and the earth with them. Our health destiny may very well depend on how well we can nurture our relationship with this community.

How can you maintain a healthy diversity of bacteria in your gut?

• Eat a varied, high-fiber diet that is rich in fruits and vegetables. The flavonoids found in fruits and vegetables act like conductors to encourage the growth of diverse bacteria. Fermented foods, like sauerkraut, kimchi, and yogurt, and raw foods also tend to increase diversity of gut bacteria. Resistant starch, found in bananas, plantains, beans, peas, and sweet potatoes, encourages the growth of a diversified microbiome.
• Avoid unnecessary exposure to antibiotics. Eighty percent of the antibiotics used in this country are fed to farm animals, not given to people. Select meat, eggs, and dairy products from animals that have not been treated with antibiotics.
• Eat organic as much as you can, and avoid genetically modified foods. Organic farming increases the diversity of bacteria in soil, which then affects the diversity of the bacteria you ingest with your food. Pesticides and herbicides kill more than pests. They can also kill good bacteria and encourage the growth of harmful bacteria. Unless you’re scrubbing for surgery, avoid antibacterial soaps and shampoos. They just encourage the growth of resistant organisms and impact negatively on healthy bacteria.
• You may also benefit from probiotics. Before you start taking them, or any supplement, consult a doctor or nutritionist who’s experienced in their use.

 

Conclusion

Your gut does far more than simply process food in and out of your body. In this segment we learned how the long and winding digestive tract can play a surprising role in allergies. Medications, infections, and food can lead to a disturbance in the small intestine called leaky gut and contribute to allergies. Something as simple and common as sugar can lead to a leaky gut.

We met Anne, the paralegal, whose case illuminated a fundamental truth that sometimes gets overlooked about allergies and our health: that the body is intrinsically interconnected. Her migraine headaches, an extremely painful and often debilitating condition, were actually a manifestation of what was going on within her digestive system: a leaky gut. I led her through my ARC of Healing: avoidance, reflorastation, and cultivation to address her leaky gut and alleviate her headaches.

We drilled down to glimpse the tremendous scope of the work the digestive tract performs. Your gut is the largest organ of your immune system. It is home to trillions of microbes and is a key facilitator in detoxification. As such, the gut regulates your immune responses, your metabolism, your sleep, and your moods. We examined the research on fostering a healthy gut with nutrition, probiotics, vitamin D, and zinc. This is quite a lot of data to digest, so please bring this book with you to discuss with your doctor.