Are Your Food Allergies Making You Fat?

YOUR DIGESTIVE SYSTEM may be making you fat. It’s hard to believe—but very true. I want to explain the bugs in your digestive tract, why they upset your gut’s immune system, and how they just might be behind those extra pounds.

I have observed this phenomenon in hundreds of patients. Recently, remarkable new research has confirmed this phenomenon.

I have developed very effective treatments for it, based on understanding the way in which all the body’s systems—the gut, the immune system, detoxification system, hormones and more—are connected. There’s powerful evidence that addressing these key causes of weight gain and illness can help you shed pounds.

For example, I’ve seen patients who lose significant amounts of weight, just by cutting food allergens from their diet. And I have also seen people lose 20 to 30 pounds, simply by balancing the bacterial ecosystem in their intestinal system.

One patient, a 38-year-old woman, had chronic inflammation, fluid retention, watch this video for more information.

So what exactly causes a leaky gut? Well, the next study may help explain just that.

How Your Gut Begins To Leak

The researchers of a study published in the July, 2007 issue of Diabetes, performed a complex but powerful study to tease out which comes first—the chicken or the egg.

What they did was quite ingenious. They took thin mice and then fed them a very high-fat diet.

High-fat diets change the bacterial flora in the gut. Toxin-producing bugs are promoted by the high-fat diet while anti-inflammatory and protective bugs die off. (And there are over 500 species of bugs in your gut all fighting for territory.)

In fact, our highly processed, high-sugar, high-fat, low-fiber diet—plus many drugs like antibiotics, steroids, anti-inflammatories, acid-blockers, and hormones—completely alter the bacterial ecosystem in the gut, leading to breakdown, inflammation, and a leaky gut.

Back to the study.

The researchers found that mice fed the equivalent of an American diet produced more of a bacterial toxin called LPS, which then leaked into the body through their leaky gut.

In humans, these toxins then latch onto immune cells, stimulating them to produce a firestorm of inflammatory molecules such as TNFa, IL-6, and IL-1 (cytokines), which in turn block your metabolism and produce insulin resistance, fatty liver, and obesity.

When you eat a bad diet, bad bugs flourish. Your whole gut ecosystem is upset and the outside world “leaks” in across a damaged gut lining.

Even more interesting, the researchers also found that even with a normal diet, injecting LPS into the mice led to the SAME problems—inflammation and obesity. These mice didn’t eat a bad diet. Just injecting toxins into them made them fat.

In fact, when you eat a bad diet, bad bugs flourish. Your whole gut ecosystem is upset and the outside world “leaks” in across a damaged gut lining. The result is not just obesity, diabetes, and heart disease, but so many allergic, autoimmune, and inflammatory diseases.

The researchers explain how giving antibiotics to rats and cleaning out the bad bugs can prevent diabetes. They explain that by adding soluble fiber to the diet, they can increase the population of the good bugs like bifidobacteria and decrease the bad bugs—leading to weight loss.

But it doesn’t just happen in lab rats. I have found the same effects when my patients take the special soluble fiber called konjac root or glucomannan. The good bacteria feed on the fiber and reduce inflammation.

And there is more to the gut story. It seems that you are not the only one eating lunch. The bugs in your gut also feast—and they control your fat storage and the calories you absorb. So people with healthy bugs in the gut lose weight, and those with bad bugs gain weight.

Let me review this briefly again, because these concepts are so far from what we normally think about the causes of obesity.

When you eat a typical American diet, you foster the growth of bad bugs in the gut. They then damage the gut lining and produce toxins that are absorbed into your system.

Because of the damage, partially digested food particles also leak into your bloodstream. Then your immune system reacts to the toxins and foods, producing a firestorm of inflammation.

That inflammation then leads to a fatty toxic liver and insulin resistance, which lead to higher levels of insulin in your body. And insulin is a fat-storage, disease- and aging-promoting hormone.

So an unhealthy gut makes us fat and sick because it makes us toxic and inflamed.

This is groundbreaking research that needs to shake up our thinking about how to help people lose weight and get healthy.

Now here are a few simple things to try if you are struggling to lose weight or feel better.

3 Steps To Eliminate Food Allergens And Re-Balance Your Gut Ecology

1. Try an elimination diet for 3 weeks. Cut out the most common food allergens, including