CHAPTER 12:
IT ALL ADDS UP
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“I was upset and self-conscious because my vitiligo—manifesting as splotchy white ‘disease-like’ discolorations—was on my hands, face, breasts, and other areas. I thought I would have to pile on makeup forever and spend eternity in a light booth. Yet today, I am absolutely astonished—I have an autoimmune disease for which my doctor says there is no cure, yet I’ve had NO vitiligo outbreaks since the Whole30!!!! This program has paved the way for huge positive changes in my family’s life. Thank you!”
—Jessica G., Vancouver, Washington
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We’re finished talking about all the food (and beverage) groups that we think make you less healthy. But we are not quite done.
We’ve discussed how these foods are problematic when eaten in isolation. They are psychologically unbalancing, hormone-imbalancing, gut-disrupting or immune-system-provoking; sometimes all four at once.
But we don’t eat these foods in isolation.
We eat them all together.
We have peanut butter on whole-wheat toast, with a glass of milk.
We eat three-bean chili with sour cream and cheese.
We eat cereal with soymilk for breakfast, make sandwiches for lunch, and eat macaroni and cheese for dinner.
The effects of these foods on our bodies and our brains are cumulative.
Insulin resistance and leptin resistance don’t happen overnight—it’s a gradual process. The gut doesn’t become chronically leaky from one meal—it often takes time for persistent permeability to develop. Chronic, systemic inflammation isn’t always an observable process—it’s silent, subtle, insidious.
Sometimes, as a result of your collective dietary habits and their long-term effects, your bodily systems start to break down.
Enter autoimmune disease.
WHAT IS AUTOIMMUNE DISEASE?
Under normal conditions, your immune cells won’t attack cells that are “self”—your own body. In certain cases, however, immune cells get confused and attack your own body, causing the damage we know as autoimmune disease.
There are more than eighty known autoimmune diseases, and many more that are suspected to be autoimmune in nature. Organs and tissues frequently affected include the thyroid, pancreas, adrenal glands, red blood cells, epithelial cells (arteries and gut), the myelin sheath or neurons, skin, muscles, and joints. Autoimmune conditions, several of which we’ve already mentioned, include multiple sclerosis (MS), lupus, celiac disease (CD), Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, Grave’s disease, rheumatoid arthritis, type 1 diabetes, and pernicious anemia.
EPIGENETICS AGAIN
Most autoimmune diseases are thought to develop from the interaction of an environmental factor with a specific hereditary component. It’s the whole “epigenetics” thing again—you may have the gene for celiac disease, but if you are never exposed to gluten your chances of developing the disease (and suffering from the symptoms) are slim to none. Environmental factors, infectious disease, and stress all play a role in “pulling the trigger” on a genetic predisposition to autoimmune diseases … but food may play the most significant role of all.
IT STARTS IN YOUR GUT
Do you remember the significance of maintaining an appropriate barrier between “outside” and “inside”? And how, when that barrier is compromised, we end up with a “leaky gut”?
As a result of that increased intestinal permeability, bacteria and their toxins, undigested food, and waste may leak out of the intestines into the bloodstream.
Remember that 70 percent to 80 percent of your body’s immune system is stationed in your gut.
So when this garrison of immune cells encounter stuff inside the body that doesn’t belong there, they react. Strongly.
Now, maybe that “foreign invader” is just a piece of incompletely digested chicken protein, allowed to “leak” inside the body accidentally. A leaky gut forces the immune system to attack things that could be totally harmless (like a useful source of protein) if they had stayed where they belonged. But since they didn’t, your immune system now identifies that chicken protein as foreign and attacks it.
This is one theory on how food allergies are born.
A leaky gut lets partly digested food go where it does not belong, triggering an immune response and potentially creating a reaction to an otherwise healthy food.
It’s clear that leaky gut syndrome is related to immune-mediated problems in the body. How this translates to autoimmunity, however, isn’t as well understood. The most researched theory to date (still under exploration) involves an additional mechanism called “ molecular mimicry ”: when something that is foreign looks a lot like something that is self.
See, parts of proteins in various foods and infectious agents resemble parts of various proteins in the body. (Remember the bad guys at the club door, wearing masks?) The theory is that when immune cells inside the body see a foreign invader that looks a lot like something that belongs to us, they may get confused and attack us instead of the foreign invader. This is far more likely to happen when your immune system is already overworked and stressed from dealing with all the stuff that’s coming in through your food, and going where it doesn’t belong.
MOLECULAR MIMICRY
In celiac disease, part of the wheat protein looks a lot like a particular virus, which looks a lot like a particular gut protein. The result of such mimicry is that when this wheat protein is eaten, the immune system is prompted to attack the gut. A similar mimicry among a protein found in grains and legumes, part of the Epstein-Barr virus, and part of the collagen in joints produces rheumatoid arthritis in genetically susceptible people, as the immune system attacks the joints. For type 1 diabetes, casein (milk protein) and other viral proteins mimic proteins found in beta cells of the pancreas, leading the immune cells to attack and destroy them, and leaving the body unable to produce enough insulin to manage blood sugar.
In theory …
Leaky gut can become a confused immune system, which can become an autoimmune disease.*
The good news is that most of these cumulative effects—the unhealthy psychological effects, the metabolic dysfunction, the gut permeability, the systemic inflammation, and perhaps even the symptoms of the autoimmune condition itself—are, in most cases, highly reversible.
Restoring good health starts with food.