Happy Healthy Gut (13 page)

How gross is that?

This scary disease can be passed from infected cows to humans through eating any cow products, including dairy. Symptoms include the breakdown of brain tissue and function, which result in the appearance of severe dementia. What’s even more frightening? It can develop over a period of forty years in humans.
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This leaves me, as well as many others, thinking that maybe there is something more to all of these current forms of dementia being experienced by our grandparents, parents, or partners.

Brain function aside, if you’re trying to figure out what food-borne disease has to do with your inflammatory bowel disease, I’ll tell you. In
The Food Revolution
, John Robbins writes that “we have learned that many cases of Crohn’s disease may be caused by a micro-organism known as MAP (Mycobacterium avium subspecies paratuberculosis) present in cow’s milk and not killed by pasteurization.”
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If pathogens are finding their way from the food we eat, to inside our digestive tracts, then it makes perfect sense that a digestive disorder would develop. It is well documented that many cases of IBS begin with a stomach flu or digestive illness of some sort. Maybe it’s not a diagnosis of exclusion after all. Maybe it’s a simple case of nasty food invaders gone wild! (No, that’s not a video game . . .)

Some pathogens have been found in fruits and vegetables too, often by being grown using fecal-contaminated water or by contamination during processing and packaging. However, they are found much more often in animal products. In fact, many meat, egg
and dairy distributors blame “food poisoning” on the handling of the food by whoever cooks or prepares it. While it’s true that there are proper ways of handing raw animal products, those products need to be infected in the first place. If you knew that the chicken you were purchasing was infected by
Salmonella,
would you still buy it? I’m guessing not. Yet everyday, a great percentage of meat taken home from the grocery store by unsuspecting consumers is infected. Here are some common symptoms of food poisoning:

• Abdominal cramps
  
• Diarrhea
  
• Vomiting
  
• Fever and/or shallow breathing
  
• Confusion and/or blurred vision
  
• General shock
  

By reducing or eliminating your consumption of animal products, you will greatly reduce your risk of ever being exposed to one or more of these dangerous bacteria.

Food irradiation was something I had never heard of until I started writing this book. The general public has no idea what this is. This is another example of how, like genetically modified organisms, important decisions are being made for us that concern our food, but there is no real public knowledge regarding the safety of its implementation on our health. At least food that has been irradiated is required to display a symbol (called a “radura”) to indicate that it has been as such. Even though there is a symbol for irradiation, not many people know what it means or why it’s there. This is the symbol indicating that a particular food has been irradiated:

Essentially, food irradiation is the treatment of some foods with x-rays, electron beams, or gamma rays, as a means of cold pasteurization. The purpose of this procedure is to destroy active
bacteria in order to control food-borne disease. Food irradiation has been approved for fruits, vegetables, poultry, red meats, and spices in the United States.
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In Canada? Wheat, onions, potatoes, flour, spices, and seasonings are all permitted to be irradiated.
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If a food has been through this procedure, it is obligated to display the international symbol for irradiation, along with a statement saying that it has been irradiated. This, at least, makes it much easier to assess which foods you are eating fall into this category,
if
you know what to look for.

Although both the U.S. Food and Drug Administration
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and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency have given irradiation the green light in terms of safety,
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there are many out there who question this practice, including myself. Essentially, your food is being exposed to unnecessary radiation. That’s equivalent to your doctor recommending that his or her patients undergo chemotherapy every now and again just in case they have cancer. We all know that radiation of any kind is not that great for you, hence the lead garments they put over your reproductive organs, and thyroid shields that are regularly used during routine dental x-rays. I don’t want my food to be irradiated, and I certainly feel that people should be aware that this is becoming standard practice for some foods. If manufacturers are irradiating food to prevent bacterial infections that may cause food poisoning, then you should be aware that food is not sterilized by this practice, nor is it not exposed to bacteria after the irradiation occurs. In other words, even though your food could have been fried for you, it can still harbour harmful bacteria that it picked up afterwards during packaging, storing, handling,
etc.
The whole practice sounds dangerous, and completely unnecessary.

When making an effort to rid your diet of anything that could be potentially causing you digestive distress, or even anything that just doesn’t fall into the category of conscious, clean eating, food that has been irradiated should definitely, in my opinion, be on your radar.

Arran Stephens, author of
The Compassionate Diet
, calls the introduction of GMOs “playing God with our food supply.”
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GMO is an acronym for “genetically modified organism” Unfortunately, you are definitely eating these altered foods. The most common foods that have been genetically modified to date are corn, soy, canola, and cottonseed. When I say “common,” I mean that in Canada and the United States, over 90% of these crops are genetically modified.
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That’s insane, considering there has never been any research indicating any level of safety in regards to what these foods might mean to their consumers in terms of long-term health.
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Other foods that are often modified are papaya, zucchini, alfalfa (hay, not sprouts), and sugar beets.
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“Currently, there is no way to monitor the long-term effects of GM food consumption on the population.”
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—Ontario Public Health Association

The way that genetic modification is connected to gastrointestinal issues is astonishing. Although scientists cannot be certain that GMOs are a major cause of diseases such as IBD, IBS, colon cancer, and other chronic gastrointestinal disorders, it hasn’t been disproven, either. If you hear the case for the strong connection, I’m sure it will make you think twice about consuming these products.

One company that has been largely responsible for the genetic modification of our food is Monsanto Corporation. Monsanto has developed such chemicals as Agent Orange and DDT, both highly toxic to humans.
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They also manufactured the Bovine Growth Hormone (rBGH, the chemical that is added to milk in the United States in order to increase milk production in dairy cows) that was discussed in chapter six. However, they are most widely and recently known for their product called Roundup, and their brilliant subsequent product, Roundup Ready seeds.

Roundup is an herbicide that farmers use to spray their crops with, in order to kill weeds. The active ingredient in Roundup is glyphosate. Glyphosate works by making unwanted weeds diseased.
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Because most farmers who use Roundup also use Roundup Ready seeds (which are designed to withstand the effects of Roundup), the crops are blanket-sprayed with the herbicide and the farmer does not have to worry about his crop feeling the effects. Sounds like a good idea so far . . .

Roundup Ready seeds are crop seeds, such as corn, that incorporate a gene that codes for Bt toxin,
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which is designed to rupture the gut of insects that attempt to consume the plants, resulting in death. Essentially, these crops contain built-in pesticides, and the two products together are used to increase crop yields by minimizing damage caused by weeds, insects and other small critters.

Here’s the problem: if these foods are designed to carry a chemical responsible for causing intestinal damage in insects, then perhaps we are also susceptible to the effects. Enter the enormous influx of gastrointestinal issues that North America has been facing since the mid-1990s
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. . . the exact time when genetically engineered foods were introduced to the masses. Is this just a coincidence? We are all consuming those modified crops that have been heavily treated with an obvious poison. Also, most factory-farmed cattle are fed genetically modified corn and soy, or corn and soy that have been sprayed with Roundup. We are getting a double whammy of GM food that has been covered in pesticides and herbicides through our consumption of both produce and factory-farmed meat. It’s a cycle of chemicals being infused into our crops, animals, and now us.

What are we doing to ourselves?

Our bodies were not designed to recognize genetically modified organisms. This creates a panic in our immune system that leads to inflammation. As you read in chapter four, inflammation is the leading cause of chronic disease. Monsanto engineered a way, in just two decades, to synthetically engineer almost all of America’s corn and soy supply.
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Just for big-picture clarification, there is corn and/or soy in almost all processed foods. That means that if you are eating processed food on a regular basis, along with 90% of Canada and the United States’ population, you are consistently consuming genetically modified organisms. Again, we have no idea what this means for our health, or that of future generations. In
No Happy Cows
, John Robbins writes “tens of millions of people are unknowingly eating these inadequately researched foods daily. It’s a mass experiment, except that there is no control group.”
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GM foods are scary. If my lunch has anything to do with a scientist holding a test tube, I’m out. Even though Monsanto claims that these products are not harmful, they also made such claims about their other best-sellers, DDT, Agent Orange, and rBGH. (Remember the slogan, “DDT is good for me?!”)
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Is there any coincidence that The United States and Canada have become home to these relatively new western diseases that are now so mainstream?

While antibiotics are definitely important, they have their time and place. If you have an infection that absolutely will not go away on its own, or if you have a serious situation in which antibiotics are a must, then that is when they should be used. Unfortunately, they are not only used in those situations, and because of our blatant overuse of them (sigh), we are now in trouble. (I’m sure there are Canadians reading this and thinking of Canada’s “Not all bugs need drugs!” campaign.)

Many of us are guilty of making a beeline to our family doctor or walk-in-clinic and demanding antibiotics at the first sign of a sniffle or cough, and too many doctors just hand them right over. It’s that easy. The problem with today’s ridiculous overuse of antibiotics is serious. More and more bacteria are becoming antibiotic resistant, which means a large variety of these life-saving concoctions are becoming useless. It also means that people are more and more commonly being treated with two or three rounds of antibiotics in order for their infections to be successfully treated.

This, in turn, wreaks major havoc on our intestinal flora. Antibiotics kill all bacteria; good and bad. Our tummies harbor millions of good bacteria, designed to break down food. If all that bacteria is slain through routine use of antibiotics, our guts get thrown off their delicate balance, which is why antibiotics are routinely known to cause things like diarrhea, nausea, and yeast infections.

If you are suffering from a chronic digestive disease, particularly one that can cause routine infections, such as diverticulitis or IBD (colitis or Crohn’s disease), then you are no stranger to antibiotics. But this situation creates an awful circle of events . . . having to treat an infection with antibiotics, only to leave your immune system thrashed from it (most of your immune function comes from your gut),
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which finally leads you to a predisposition to more infection.