How I Would Treat Inflammatory Bowel.

This approach is applicable to garden variety colitis to full-blown and chronic Crohn's or ulcerative colitis, as well as other forms of intestinal inflammation.

Photo by Dan Meyers on Unsplash

Background

Gastrointestinal distress and inflammation is one of the most common ailments people carry with them in the modern western world.

We have a tendency to fractionate this category of disease, which makes them seem less common or distinct from one another.

• Heartburn or GERD

• Indigestion or dyspepsia

• Esophagitis

• Gastritis

• Enteritis

• Colitis (including inflammatory bowel disease and Crohn’s)

In reality, these organs are all hollow tubes connected to one another in a continuous gastrointestinal tract. The assumption that you are causing harm to only one of these parts and not the other is simply an artifact of how we sense and report our symptoms.

Secondarily, it’s also an artifact of how doctor’s conceptualize and diagnosis disease. Both these factors bely the reality that gastrointestinal distress is one of the most common complaints.

In my family, amongst my friends, and even in my own personal case…gastrointestinal complaints are the most common. I suffered from Ulcerative Colitis myself for about 4 years, while one GI specialist after another mucked up trying to “manage” this disease.

Eventually, I cured it. Symptom free for almost 4 years now.

How I Cured Inflammatory Bowel Disease.

What’s Harming Our Bowels

The comprehensive list of factors contributing to this harm is quite long, including everything from water supply to posture and breathing habits.

The most concerning contributors would be the most obvious: things we put in our mouthes.

Some of you are probably thinking: but my doctor says my IBD is genetic or autoimmune and not related to diet.

I know, I know…I’ve been there myself. I was taught this song-and-dance as well.

But, think about it this way…

Would you believe me if I told you that the quality of the air you breathe has no impact on your lungs? That stale or polluted air has no negative impact on your airways?

Of course not.

Same reasoning applies to your gut.

Our gastrointestinal tract has dual duties:

1. Extract energy and nutrition from the external world.

2. Eliminate the waste so it does not build up in our bodies and cause us further harm.

My gastrointestinal specialists told me that as far as diet is concerned, avoid red meat and focus on more vegetables. Don’t worry about spices, or alcohol, or grains, etc.

This didn’t work. In fact, it made things worse.

So what about our diets should we be concerned about?

1. Energy and nutritional density.

   1. The more work our gut has to do to unlock and extract energy and nutrition, the more it is depleted of its own resources.

   2. This includes things like preservatives, which have the primary function of preventing biodegradation of food products. Guess what…digestion is the biodegradation of food products. So preservatives in food necessarily exhaust and even harm our gut.

   3. Fresher foods are superior, since they come with many of the enzymes needed to digest them.

      1. If we consume foods that are depleted of enzymes, then our body and gut has to deplete itself to produce the necessary proteins needed for digestion.

2. Waste, toxins and un-digestibles.

   1. When people consider diet, they mostly focus on what they eat. There needs to be more attention paid to how they eliminate waste, and how to best facilitate this process. Retained waste is harmful.

   2. Diets high in plant fibers (greens) can harm the gut. They literally scrape the lining of our gut. In small amounts, this can be positive and promote healing and mucous production. In large amounts, this can cause disease.

   3. Pesticides, preservatives, and the like are everywhere in our primarily mass-produced dietary landscape. Yes, including glyphosate. Yes, it’s bad for your gut.

3. Allowing the dysfunctional parts to rest.

   1. This has dietary implications, since different foods vary on which part of the tract it primarily gets digested in.

   2. Furthermore, due to the temperamental differences of the food (and your body), there are interactions that can be harmful or beneficial.

      1. A general example would be that a person with a hot temperament would need to indulge in cooling foods to balance the stress on an overheated organ, and vice versa.

4. Finally, there are foods that interact or impede the work of other foods and parts of our body.

   1. An example I like to discuss is the relationship between spices and the anti-inflammatory effects of melatonin (including the melatonin you consume, and the melatonin made by your gut.)

   2. Doctors typically tell people with heartburn to avoid spices, assuming that its the spices impact on the sphincter between the stomach and esophagus.

   3. What doctors don’t know is that melatonin exerts some of its effects by interaction with capsaicin receptors, which also bind capsaicin (the painful part of spices). Which means, if you eat spicy food, the melatonin’s anti-inflammatory effect is dulled or negated.

There are other things which harm our bowels (and the rest of our body), and some things which help our bowels, which have nothing to do with what we eat…and more to do with how we live.

Including activity, habitat, and how we feed our souls. These are all considerations in the 4 pillars of the foundational health model. All of which rest on understanding your temperament.

The Foundational Health Approach

How I’d Treat Inflamed Bowels

For this example, I will be using the colon (or large bowel) as the target of our treatment. But, many of these techniques can also be applied to other parts of the gastrointestinal tract, with modifications.

This is going to be a multi-modal approach. I will also make the assumption that the target of our treatment has a hot temperament. At the end, I will mention a few notes on how cold temperaments may differ in treatment.

First, stop the harm.