When your food enters the small intestine, your liver produces bile to help you digest fats. If your digestion is not working well, your liver and gallbladder could also not be functioning well. This could leave you with undigested fat particles and another barrier harmful pathogens can break through because bile is antimicrobial.
With all of these possible breakdowns that can let harmful pathogens like bad bacteria and fungi like candida through, you could end up with an overgrowth of either (or both) in the small intestine itself. This is not good. If you have tried in the past to heal your gut with probiotics, but ended up feeling much worse, this is probably the cause.
Many of us do not have this problem. Our problem is farther on, and it is sneaky. It has to do with bad pathogens in our large intestine and all those large particles of food that we did not break down efficiently earlier on.
Without enough good bacteria to keep the bad bacteria in check, our large intestine becomes inflamed. This inflammation breaks down the single-cell thick lining of your large intestine. When it breaks down, large food particles enter our bloodstream. Here, your immune system stages an attack on these large food particles, leading to inflammation and swelling throughout your body. If this goes on long enough, your immune system confuses the food proteins with your body proteins and soon you end up with an autoimmune disease.
You don’t want to let things go this far. If you are feeling gassy, bloated, swollen/puffy, like your brain is in a fog, low on energy, sleepless, have skin issues like eczema or acne, have diarrhea or constipation, joint pain, have increasingly worse allergy symptoms, and/or catch colds and flu easier than you have before, it may be all in your gut.
Your digestion may be the cause of feeling not quite right medically, even though your labs show you are still “normal.”
This is the end of part 2 If you missed part one, read it here.
I know this is very simplified. I did it to give you a quick overview and not overwhelm you trying to figure out how all the parts work in and out of digestion.
Just from this little bit about your lower digestive tract, do you think you may be having problems with any of the parts I’ve listed? I’d love to see your questions in the comments below.
To your health,
Jennifer
