The Body/Environment Interface

Posted on November 2, 2015 by Dr. G

I am going to simplify a very complicated process: Where we interact with our environment will determine how healthy or how sick we are. There are 3 areas where we interface with our environment in a way that will impact virtually every system in our body. If we are able to adapt, then these areas will be healthy. If the environment exceeds our ability to adapt, then they will be unhealthy.  

Where and How We Interface With the Environment:

1. Gut and lungs: The air we breathe and the food we eat.  
2. Muscles, joints and inner ear: The terrain we physically put ourselves in correlates with so many of our bodily processes. This interface will determine different responses if you are in the desert, mountains, or sitting on an office chair in a building in NYC.
3. Skin and eyes: Artificial light and sunlight. Terrestrial (geologic) and synthetic electromagnetic fields. 
4. Psychological and social: How we think, feel, interact and socialize with others.

Today, the interface we will discuss is the Gut.

I want to discuss basic principles that can save us time and money.  What we discuss here can often be determined without doing unnecessary and expensive testing. You can usually tell how much experience a functional medicine clinician has by how many tests they order. The more tests they order, the less experience they have. A thorough history and a comprehensive wellness blood panel give so much information that doing saliva, stool and elaborate urine panels are not necessary. After years of experience, patterns emerge that tell us what is happening with you.  

As I have stated in previous posts, your gut is where you and your environment interact the most. I want all of my patients to understand how they function in an accurate but simple way. Here is a summary of what you will learn here.

1. What does cholesterol say about your diet?
2. What is inflammation and where does it go?
3. We know that the gut and brain are intimately connected, but why?
4. What do you do every day that can bring you closer to or further from GI diseases like IBS, Reflux, GERD, Crohns and Colitis?

 

An excellent professor, clinician, colleague and dear friend of mine, Dr. Christopher Turnpaugh, near Harrisburg, PA, describes blood flow from the heart like this:

Imagine your heart is the source of fresh, clean blood (imagine it to be like clean water from a spring), leaving the heart and descending down to its first stop, the GI tract. Once at the GI tract the clean water begins to pick up a whole lot of stuff. It picks up all of the nutrients from your diet, it also picks up the by products of immune function in the gut, large undigested proteins, bacteria (good and bad) and their byproducts, viruses, parasites, food additives and preservatives and anything else that passes through the barrier between your food and your blood.
The effect of the water picking up all of this “stuff” is like muddying the water. Well, we don’t really want to distribute muddy water throughout our body, so that water is funneled over to the liver where the “muddiness” is removed and the water is made clean again, rich in good nutrition from your healthy diet to send around the body.

 

This describes one of the many functions of the liver as an organ of detoxification.  

This system can be overwhelmed by many factors, one of which is the standard American diet, or the standard inflammatory diet, or the standard GMO diet, or the standard pesticide and herbicide rich diet…you get my drift.

Imagine the clean water from the heart is made exceedingly muddy due to stress, poor diet, lack of exercise, poor activation of the nervous system, etc. The liver, which I like to describe as a bridge from the inside of your body to the outside of your body, gets bogged down with too much “muddiness” to remove. The muddy water will remain muddy to a varying degree, resulting in muddy water being circulated around the body.

Remember the muddiness represents inflammation from the gut processing what’s coming in. Although some inflammation is essentially normal and expected, when it’s too much for the liver to clean up before it is sent around the body, that’s when trouble occurs. This inflammation is considered a threat by the body and the body will react to that threat with stress hormones and defensive immune activity. One of the effects of this are signals to the liver to make more cholesterol, because cholesterol is needed to handle removing “muddiness,” HDL and VLDL cholesterol as well as LDL cholesterol. LDL cholesterol is called “bad” cholesterol, which is stupid and should be stopped. LDL serves several functions, one of which is to meet the cellular energy needs of the stressful, inflamed environment. LDL is actually used to provide membrane integrity of our mitochondria–the power generators of our cells, most of which is found in the brain, heart and liver. It is also where most of the body’s energy production resides. That is correct, your heart, brain and liver are quite dependent on proper LDL production and turnover.

The muddiness (inflammation) will deposit itself in certain places as it circulates through the body. It will deposit itself in your joints, resulting in inflammatory arthritic changes and joint pain. It will deposit itself in your blood vessels, creating heart and cardiovascular disease, and it will deposit itself in the brain and liver, resulting in brain fog, neurodegeneration and a more compromised ability for the liver to clean up the “muddy waters,” resulting in a vicious cycle of degeneration. While all of this is happening, think about the medication people take when they begin to feel sick. None of these medications address or resolve what is happening.  

HDL, otherwise known as the “good” cholesterol, gets this “good” distinction because it cleans up the environment (circulation). Doctors mistakenly think that high HDL is a good thing, and it is certainly better than having too low HDL. But we have to ask ourselves, why is it so elevated? Is our blood so “muddy” that we have to produce more of this molecule as defense? If so, after a long period of time the stressful environment will result in the unnecessary overproduction of more stress hormones. The chronic production of stress hormones will then drive down the availability of this important protective molecule, HDL. You see, cholesterol is necessary for so many bodily functions, like energy production in the brain, heart and liver, sex hormone production (progesterone, testosterone, and estrogen), vitamin D production, and so many more hormones we depend on. Can you imagine taking cholesterol lowering medications? Think about the impact it has on this whole system. According to Dr. Steven Sinatra, Interventional Cardiologist,

“Blaming cholesterol for your disease is like blaming firemen for the fire.”

The areas of the brain most sensitive to the muddy, inflamed waters of the blood are the areas closest to the circulation of the brain (paraventricular), particularly the areas that will take action to protect and stimulate a protective response, the hypothalamus. The hypothalamus is the area where signals are sent to the adrenal or “stress” system (HPA Axis), altering cortisol, other stress hormones and the thyroid signaling system. It’s no mistake that when there is systemic inflammation (muddy water), we release more thyroid hormone which will signal the conversion of cholesterol to stress hormones, DHEA and sex hormones. Thyroid hormone, T3, is responsible in many ways for the turnover rate of cholesterol. If you are suffering from hypothyroid, as so many millions do, this is impaired and cholesterol does not get turned over by the liver and it becomes oxidized. Oxidized cholesterol is sticky (inflamed) and is dangerous. I always say i’d rather have high cholesterol without inflammation or stickiness than normal cholesterol with “stickiness.”  If the cholesterol is not turned over, we are at risk for elevated, oxidized cholesterol, too little sex hormone resulting in testosterone, estrogen and progesterone imbalances in men and women, and ultimately low cortisol.  

While all this is going on, the diet is a steady contributor to the muddiness continuing to overwhelm the liver, which overwhelms the circulation with immune reactions (inflammation and autoimmunity), and drives brain degeneration (depression, anxiety, attention deficit, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s), cardiovascular disease, hormone imbalances (low T, diabetes, menopause, infertility, hypothyroid), and bone & joint disease(arthritis, osteoporosis).  Meanwhile, the gut is becoming leakier and leakier creating more and more mud.  The list of connections could go on and on.  

The story this week is focused on the gut, and therefore food is the obvious driver of our demise.  But let’s not make the mistake of thinking it’s just food. As a matter of fact, there have always been poor diets, but there has never been chronic  disease like we have now. In the beginning of this post I mentioned all of the areas where we interface with our environment.  Food is one. The others deserve attention as well.  

Thanks for reading!

 

 

 

Think about how the the air you breathe, the light and electromagnetic exposure you have and the terrain you move across impact these systems and contribute to the vicious cycles discussed above and more important what ideas can you come up with to combat the negative impact and poor health. Use the comments section below to contribute some ideas.