Fat Cells and Chronic Illnesses: Food as Medicine or poison.
Inflammation is the root cause of a wide array of health problems. Insulin resistant type 2 diabetes, periodontal disease, stroke, arthritis, and heart disease all have inflammation in common.
The majority of inflammatory diseases start in your gut. Chronic inflammation in your gut disrupts the normal functioning of many bodily systems. Pathological bacteria and body fat combine to produce an excessive heightened inflammatory response which drives the process that creates numerous body malfunctions.
Remember this fact, which arises in every and any discussion about disease: no disease is contracted by germs outside the body. That is simply a lie perpetrated by the establishment medical system to keep you taking pills, shots and surgeries that have no potential to correct any health problem, thus maintaining your diseased state.
Superantigens—toxic molecules produced by pathogenic bacteria such as staphylococcus aureus (staph)—play a role in the development of type 2 diabetes through their effect on fat cells.
Fat cells (adipocytes) interact with superantigens, triggering release of molecules called cytokines, which promote inflammation…
All staph bacteria make these toxic superantigens — molecules that disrupt the immune system. Superantigens cause the deadly effects of various staph infections, such as toxic shock syndrome, sepsis, and endocarditis.
When you have type 1 diabetes, your pancreas can’t make insulin. This vital hormone helps your body’s cells convert sugar into energy. Without it, sugar builds up in your blood and can reach dangerous levels.
The chronic inflammation caused by the superantigens also hinder wound healing in diabetic foot ulcers. These ulcers, which affect 15 to 25 percent of people with diabetes, are notoriously difficult to heal and can often lead to amputation.”
Inflammation Promotes Diabetes
Obese people have different intestinal bacteria than lean people. Lean people tend to have higher amounts of various healthy beneficial bacteria compared to those who carry a lot of excess weight, tending toward imbalance in favor of pathogenic bacteria. All individuals have both pathogenic as well as beneficial bacteria all the time. When they are in balance, the body can maintain homeostasis. Loss of balance enables malfunctions that manifest many symptoms, thus are called by many different names in allopathy, but they are all the same disease from the same root cause.
The human adenovirus-36 (Ad-36) — a cause of respiratory infections and pinkeye –-transforms adult stem cells into fat cells capable of storing excessive additional fat.
Staph and E. coli, trigger fat cells to produce inflammatory cytokines, .provoking the development of obesity-related diabetes.
The evidence for this:
- Obese people have a tendency to become heavily colonized with staph bacteria
- Staph bacteria is the most common bacteria found in diabetic foot ulcers
When both staph and E. coli have a dominant presence in the gut flora, the inflammatory cytokine response in fat cells are further amplified, thereby boosting the risk of diabetes.
The E. coli that resides in the gut produces LPS [lipopolysaccharide], a toxin, and every day a small amount of this toxin gets into the circulation, but it is generally cleared from the circulation by the liver. However, people over-colonized by staph bacteria are also chronically exposed to superantigens, which shut down the LPS detoxification pathway.
That creates a synergy between the ‘uncleared’ LPS and the superantigen. These two molecules cause inflammation and cytokine production. So in essence, their presence together creates a perfect storm for inflammation
Babies with high numbers of bifidobacteria (beneficial bacteria) and low numbers of Staphylococcus aureus, appear to be protected from excess weight gain.
This may also be one reason why breast-fed babies have a lower risk of obesity, as bifidobacteria flourish in the guts of breast-fed babies, unlike babies fed artificial formulas (basically poisons).
There is a Link Between Gum Inflammation and Heart Health
Your oral health can have a significant impact on your cardiovascular and heart health. For example, a study has shown that those with the worst oral hygiene increased their risk of developing heart disease by 70 percent, compared to those who brush their teeth twice a day.
Improved gum health was shown to significantly slow down the progression of atherosclerosis—the buildup of plaque in the arteries, which increases risk of heart disease, stroke, and death.
Results show a clear relationship between what is happening in the mouth and thickening of the carotid artery, even before the onset of full-fledged periodontal disease. This suggests that incipient periodontal disease should not be ignored.
Here, bacteria are again playing a preeminent role, as periodontal disease is the result of the colonization of certain bacteria in your mouth. This bacterial profile, by the way, is again linked to an imbalance of beneficial and pathogenic bacteria in your gut. Fermented vegetables, kombucha, apple cider vinegar and other sources of beneficial bacteria are important to reducing periodontal disease involving both bone and the tissue that is in contact with that bone. From this contact, bacteria and toxic inflammatory compounds can easily enter your blood stream. Once in your blood stream, these toxic compounds can harm the lining of your blood vessels, which can lead to both strokes and heart attacks. So, reducing inflammation is of primary importance for your overall health, and brushing your teeth regularly is one way to combat chronic inflammation in your body. The sooner you brush after eating anything, the more effective the prevention or rectification.
Findings such as these offer potent testimony to the fact that heart disease is a condition that can be prevented, most of the time, by leading a healthy lifestyle — which includes the simple act of brushing your teeth regularly to prevent periodontal disease, and optimizing your gut health by eating foods that allow healthy bacteria to flourish and keep pathogenic bacteria in check.
Diet and Environmental Factors Affect Your Gut Flora
It’s generally a wise choice to “reseed” your body with good bacteria, ideally by regularly eating non-pasteurized, traditionally fermented foods such as:
- Fermented vegetables eg. Kimchi, pickles, tempeh, tofu, sauerkraut
- Lassi (an Indian yoghurt drink)
- Fermented milk, such as kefir
- Natto, tofu (fermented soy)
- Kombucha fermented green tea
Fermentation is a process that’s used to produce some of our favorite foods and beverages — things like wine, beer, breads, cheese, chocolate, coffee and yogurt, for example. Throughout history, fermenting foods gave our ancestors the option of prolonging the freshness of produce that was available to them during the different seasons. Today, you can make a large batch of fermented foods, such as sauerkraut or yogurt, to have ready to eat in your refrigerator, that should keep a relatively long time.
Eating fermented (or “cultured”) foods is the most convenient way to obtain a daily dose of beneficial probiotic bacteria. Some of the many ways that fermented foods support overall health include improving digestion and cognitive function, boosting immunity, helping treat irritable bowel disease, providing minerals that build bone density, and killing harmful yeast and pathogens that cause issues like candida. Fermented foods also facilitate reduction in excess fat.
Keep in mind that eating fermented foods may not be enough if the rest of your diet is really poor. Your gut bacteria are an active and integrated part of your body, and as such are vulnerable to your overall lifestyle. If you eat a lot of processed foods for instance, your gut bacteria are going to be compromised because processed foods in general will destroy healthy microflora while sustaining bad bacteria and yeast. Your gut bacteria are also very sensitive to the following factors—all of which should ideally be avoided as much as possible in order to optimize your gut flora:
- Antibiotics, including antibiotic-traces found in meats from factory-farmed feed-lot meats and animal products
- Agricultural chemicals, especially glyphosate
- Chlorinated/flouridated water
- Antibacterial soap
- Pollution in any form
Your Diet Is Key for Reducing Chronic Inflammation
As you can see, the running thread linking a wide variety of common health problems—from obesity and diabetes to heart disease and stroke—is chronic inflammation. Clearly, addressing your oral health is an important step, but the real key to reducing chronic inflammation in your body starts with your diet.
Diet is the most essential part of a healthful lifestyle, and keeping inflammation in check is a major part of these benefits. It’s important to realize that dietary components can either trigger or prevent inflammation from taking root in your body.
For example, whereas transfats and refined white sugar will increase inflammation, eating healthy fats such as omega-3 fats found in wheat germ, flaxseed oil, krill oil, olive oil or the essential fatty acid gamma linolenic acid (GLA) will help to reduce it. To reduce or prevent inflammation in your body, you’ll want to AVOID the following dietary culprits:
- Refined/processed foods including sucrose/dextrose (white sugar), corn syrup and sugar substitutes.
- Oxidized cholesterol (cholesterol that has gone rancid, such as that from overcooked eggs)
- Foods cooked at high temperatures
- Trans fats, hydrogenated oils like oleo margarine, canola and other cheap cooking oils
- All junk/fast foods/TV dinners/pasteurized/denatured/microwaved foods
Replacing processed foods with whole, ideally organic, foods will automatically address most of these factors, especially if you eat a large portion of your food raw, steamed or lightly cooked. Equally important is making sure you’re regularly reseeding your gut with a variety of beneficial bacteria, as discussed above. The ideal way, again, is by adding a variety of non-pasteurized traditionally fermented foods to your daily diet.
Maximizing your vitamin D levels is another important aspect of optimizing your gut health and immune function. Vitamin D is as effective as animal-based omega-3 fats in countering inflammatory bowel diseases like Crohn’s and ulcerative colitis for example. One of the reasons for this is because it helps your body produce over 200 anti-microbial peptides capable of fighting all sorts of infections. In simple terms, if you are vitamin D deficient, your immune system will not activate to do its job. And since vitamin D also modulates (balances) your immune response, it helps prevent overreaction in the form of inflammation. Ample vitamin D can be derived from 2-hours of sun exposure daily. Sun exposure is healthy and is not carcinogenic unless exposure is extreme. Like all good things, you must seek balance and moderation. By the way, it is the ‘sunscreen’ chemicals that are the carcinogens.
Grounding or earthing is a powerful strategy
Another simple lifestyle strategy that can help prevent chronic inflammation is grounding or ‘Earthing’. Stated in the simplest terms possible, earthing is simply walking barefoot; grounding your body to the Earth. Your skin, in general, is a very good conductor, so you can connect any part of your skin to the Earth, but if you compare various parts, there is one that is especially potent, and that’s right in the middle of the ball of your foot; a point known to acupuncturists as Kidney 1 (K1). It’s a well-known point that conductively connects to all of the acupuncture meridians and essentially connects to every nook and cranny of your body.
By looking at what happens during grounding, the answer to why chronic inflammation is so prevalent, and what is needed to prevent it, can be understood. When you’re grounded there’s a transfer of free electrons (negative ions) from the Earth into your body. And these free electrons are probably the most potent antioxidants known to man. These antioxidants are responsible for beneficial changes in heart rate and blood pressure, decreased skin resistance, decreased levels of inflammation and lessening of blood viscosity.
This can have a profound impact on cardiovascular disease, which is now the number one killer in the world. Virtually every aspect of cardiovascular disease has been correlated with elevated blood viscosity. It turns out that when you ground to the earth, your zeta potential quickly rises, which means your red blood cells have more charge on their surface, causing them to repel each other, lowering viscosity.
This repulsion makes blood cells less inclined to stick together and form an unwanted clot. Additionally, if your zeta potential is high, which grounding can facilitate, you not only decrease your heart disease risk but also your risk of multi-infarct dementias, loss of brain tissue due to micro-clotting in your brain.
Conclusion
Remember, the micro-organisms living in your digestive tract form a very important “inner ecosystem” that influences countless aspects of health. More specifically, the type and quantity of organisms in your gut interact with your body in ways that can either prevent or encourage the development of chronic inflammation, which is at the heart of many diseases, including heart disease and diabetes. The composition of your microflora may even dictate the ease with which you’re able to shed unwanted pounds.
Since most of us are exposed to factors that destroy beneficial gut bacteria, such as antibiotics (whether you take them for an illness or get them from contaminated animal products), chlorinated/flouridated water, antibacterial soap, agricultural chemicals, or pollution, ensuring your gut bacteria remain balanced should be considered a vital ongoing process.
Cultured foods like yogurt, kombucha and kefir, some cheeses, and fermented vegetables are good sources of natural, healthy bacteria. Make cultured or fermented foods a regular part of your diet. This can be your primary strategy to optimize your body’s good bacteria. Older cultures in the world do this routinely, but Western cultures typically do not, attributable to lack of education.
Replacing processed foods, white sugars and de-branned or GMO grains with whole foods is a critical step to address chronic inflammation. Optimizing your vitamin D levels and making sure you’re getting plenty of omega-3 fat in your diet is also important, along with grounding, to keep inflammation in check.
ShamanIAm