Donna Gates – Body Ecology 101

We never like to be the bearers of bad news, but the foods most popular to the American or Western diet are detrimental to gut health and will destroy your digestive ability. For starters, many of these foods weaken your immune system and provide a hotbed for systemic infections that can eventually invade the entire body. Inflammation, Autoimmune issues, weight gain and a host of other problems quickly become chronic when these foods are regularly eaten.

Such foods include sugar, gluten, casein (an indigestible protein found in all dairy), grains and starches that feed yeast (candida) such as rice, beans, white potatoes and sweet potatoes… and all processed foods or refined oils.

The problem with these foods is they cause intense cravings that are hard to battle on your own. How do you remove these foods from your diet without caving under the pressure of those cravings or feelings of deprivation? The answer lies in staging a multi-front attack across 7 universal factors of health, known as the Body Ecology 7 Universal Principles.

Did you know that your body is home to more than 1 trillion microbes including bacteria, viruses and fungi? These tiny organisms outnumber your human cells 10 to one. So it’s no small matter to talk about how these invading organisms are affecting your body and health. There’s more of them in you, than you!

Luckily you can turn the internal tide to ensure that beneficial bacteria holds residence and prevents harmful organisms from colonizing. But don’t expect that it’s as easy as popping a probiotic pill every day. Not enough of the beneficial microflora in a pill will survive the trip through your stomach acids to make it into the digestive tract. Instead, you want to consistently eat probiotic rich foods and beverages.

Adding fermented foods and beverages to your diet will help begin to turn the tide. But only if you give the beneficial bacteria a fighting chance once they’ve made it into your gut. And that requires an alkaline environment, which brings us to the next obstacle…

Even slight changes to the body’s pH can profoundly affect body function and even prevent certain chemical reactions that can only occur at a specific pH. For example, a lowered muscle pH leads to a decrease in muscle permeability, which blocks nutrients from entering cells.

This compromises nutritional absorption and as the body becomes more acidic than alkaline, it becomes fertile ground for diseases to develop. Additionally, too much acidity may allow parasites, yeasts, cancer cells and other toxins to proliferate in the body.

What we begin to see is that an acidic environment encourages harmful invaders to flourish, which in turn compromises digestion. Foods rich in nutrients that can fight invaders, fortify the body and alkalize your inner environment cannot be adequately absorbed, and so the vicious cycle continues. Best of all, the secret to alkalizing your inner environment is to design your day-to-day diet around a specific type of food combination, as outlined in the Body Ecology Principle of Food Combining.

Stress can be chemical, environmental, physical, or even mental. Stress includes lack of sleep, a cup of coffee in the morning, or overtraining at the gym.

When the body is stressed, it releases a hormone called cortisol. When cortisol is released in excess, the body becomes more acidic. The Body Ecology Principle of Acid and Alkaline tells us that when the body becomes acidic, it is prime real estate for pathogenic microorganisms. Remember, these are inflammatory agents and can lead to permeability.

High cortisol levels also indicate that the sympathetic nervous system, otherwise known as the fight-or-flight response, has been activated. When the sympathetic nervous system is constantly running, digestive function slows down considerably. When digestive function slows, this leads to unwanted fermentation in the gut and can also create a more acid state within gut.