Superhealing: Engaging Your Mind, Body, and Spirit to Create Optimal Health and Well-Being (ARC) (21 page)

It’s easy to think of nutrition entirely as a matter of how well your body responds to the foods you eat. But food can affect your moods and thought processes, too, in either a positive or a harmful manner. Your mind and spirit will be adversely affected if for any reason you become malnourished. This means getting inadequate nutrition

because you’re not eating enough foods or the right foods or because you’re failing to properly digest and absorb nutrients. The bidirec-tional communication between your body and your mind, and your

body and your spirit, is a key reason for this.

Furthermore, emotional distress and negative thinking affect the

digestive system. Many of us worry about our caloric intake and fear

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possible weight gain, yet we think less about the “ingredient” of our emotions and how they affect the GI tract’s ability to properly digest and absorb food. An old adage advises, “Never eat when you’re angry or with an enemy.” Doing so causes physiological distress,

which affects our digestive processes. Eating while happy, relaxed, and content allows for appropriate absorption and assimilation of

the nutrients in our food. Eating while stressed, in contrast, leads to indigestion.

Stress causes the release of cortisol and other hormones that alter digestion, causing changes in blood flow to the intestinal tract and increasing the flow of digestive acids. Excess acid can impair the production of enzymes released by your liver and pancreas and impede

the flow of bile from the liver, which is essential for the digestion of fats. Stress hormones also influence muscle tone and tension. They can trigger muscular contractions throughout the body, including in the diaphragm, which is involved in breathing; in the muscles involved in swallowing; and in peristalsis, that moves food through the stomach and the large and small intestines. For these reasons, digestion is affected not only by what you eat but also by how you’re feeling when you’re eating and by what’s already present in your intestinal tract.

In the worst-case scenario, stress can be so severe that it leads

to the fight-or-flight response and entirely shuts down digestion so your body can use its energy elsewhere.

There are an extraordinary number of nerve cel s in the gastroin-

testinal tract, leads many to call it the peripheral brain. To activate your superhealing capabilities, you need to become ful y aware of

what this “brain” is telling you and learn to honor the gut-mind connection. Your sense of well-being (or lack of it) plays a significant role in digestion, absorption, and immunity, which are three of the pil ars of physical health.

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We are all aware of the unpleasant gut feelings that we can get

at times, such as nervous butterflies or the sensation of heartburn that we get when we’re feeling stressed. The common symptoms of

anxiety and depression involve the gut. In 1833, Dr. William Beau-

mont became the first to report on this phenomenon. He found that

upsetting emotions decrease the secretion of stomach acids and prolong the emptying of the stomach after eating. He made these observations while treating a man with a fistula, or an external opening, caused by an accidental gunshot injury.1

Several physiologists conducting research on dogs subsequently

identified that the vagus nerve, which extends from the brain stem down through the organs located in the neck and chest to the gastrointestinal organs in the abdomen, is required for normal interactions between the gut and the brain to occur.2

In fact, we now know that the intestinal tract contains more nerve cel s than the entire rest of the body does; the number is second only to the number of nerve cel s in the brain.3

Your GI tract’s nervous system also sends sensory information to

your brain that affects your emotional state, your memory, and other functions of thinking, including decision making. It produces 95 percent of the serotonin in your body, as well as other neurotransmitters once thought to exist exclusively in the central nervous system.4

Serotonin is a critical neurotransmitter that influences our sense of well-being and is a key mediator of the relationship between the gut and the brain. Low levels of serotonin have been implicated in a variety of psychiatric disorders, from depression and attention deficit disorder to anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder.5 Folate, a form of vitamin B that is found in leafy green vegetables (like spinach, broccoli, and lettuce), and protein foods that contain the amino acid tryptophan (like poultry, fish, eggs, nuts, and beans) boost the

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serotonin level, and so does the proper digestion and absorption of these foods.6

Certain foods have chemical properties that can make us more re-

silient against stress. We have all had the experience, for instance, of eating a favorite comfort food in response to a distressing experience and feeling better afterward. General y, foods that give us emotional relief contain large amounts of fat. To study this phenomenon, Bel-gian researchers enlisted the participation of twelve healthy people to determine whether the consumption of fat actual y changes the way

the brain functions when we’re sad. The participants were given either salt water or a liquid fat solution through a feeding tube. Then they listened to music characterized as emotional y neutral or sad while looking at matching images of neutral or sad faces, and they were

asked to rate their moods and their sense of fullness or hunger several times. Those who received the fat solution felt approximately 50

percent less sadness compared to those who received the salt water.7

Consciously choosing your foods for nutritional value and the sat-

isfaction they give you and consciously engaging in the act of eating are the foundation of physical health. Nutrition is not just what you eat; it’s a lot more than that. You receive more or less nutritional value from the same foods depending on your perception of your food

and how you’re feeling at the time you’re eating. If you’re stressed, angry, or unhappy, your gut will digest quite differently than it does when you feel happy, joyful, or at peace.

EATING WITH AWARENESS

AND JOYFUL APPRECIATION

Do you eat your meals in the awareness of the present moment,

paying close attention to your food, or are you distracted, even multitasking, while eating? There is good evidence that mindful eating 140

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improves our satisfaction and our satiation. When nutrients are absorbed, hormones are released that send signals to the brain of a

sense of fullness and nonhunger that lasts long after a meal is over.8

Eating with gratitude and in pleasant surroundings improves the

way your body digests and absorbs food. Eating while in a negative state of being or in an unpleasant environment is more challenging and taxing. Therefore, it’s important to prepare yourself emotional y for your meals. If you’re stressed, sad, tired, despairing, or angry, take a few moments before you eat to alter your mental and emotional

state of being. If you’re feeling any type of distress, it is imperative to take a few deep breaths, relax, and center yourself. Consciously shift your attention to a higher thought about an issue that’s troubling you, or deliberately choose to think about something else.

Then, since nutrition is a matter not only of what you eat but of

how you’re feeling while you’re eating, it is important to eat with awareness, slowly savoring each mouthful. Eat with attention, clarity, and awareness.

SUPERHEALING RECOMMENDATIONS

FOR MINDFUL EATING

I highly recommend the following principles for eating:

Take one or a few deep breaths and give thanks for your food before eating. Bless all who touched the food, from seed planter to meal preparer.

• If you’re cooking, cook with love. There’s nothing more

scrumptious than a home-cooked meal made with love as a

main ingredient.

• Eat when you’re happy. Don’t eat when you’re sad or upset in

any way, if you can avoid it.

• Pay attention to every morsel of your meal. Be present and

savor it.

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• Minimize distractions. Do not eat in your car, while watching

TV, or while using your computer or phone.

• Slow down, chew thoroughly, and enjoy eating.

MAINTAINING YOUR COMMUNITY

OF INTESTINAL FLORA

I had taken a short course of antibiotics to resolve a case of bron-chitis I couldn’t shake. I knew my illness could be attributed to sheer exhaustion, since I’d been working two jobs for more than fourteen months and my body was reeling from my failure to take better care of it. The combination of overwork and not enough sleep had taken

its toll on me physical y, emotional y, and spiritual y, and something was wrong.

One day, about a month later, I ate a small slice of delicious fruit-cake soaked in Jamaican rum. About an hour or so later, I began to feel a very gentle gnawing in the middle of my lower abdomen. Soon it felt like my intestines were going to rupture. The gas in my gut was expansive and felt like a balloon stretched to its limit. It was the most unbearable pain of my life.

Months later, after several on-again, off-again bouts of the same

severe abdominal pain, I was real y sick. I did everything I knew to alleviate my condition, but every natural therapy I tried caused the severe abdominal pain to return with a vengeance. Nearly a year after it had started, what began as a monthly bout of severe abdominal pain and distress ultimately engulfed the entire month, during which I writhed on the floor in pain. I couldn’t do anything but moan.

It turned out that I’d developed irritable bowel syndrome from a

yeast overgrowth triggered by the antibiotics. It wasn’t until I learned how to rebalance my gut flora that I successful y recovered. Once I had my diagnosis in hand, I cleaned up my diet: I entirely avoided 142

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ingredients known to nourish yeast, and I supplemented what I ate

with probiotics, the bacteria that maintain the healthy balance of microorganisms in the gut, such as the
Lactobacillus acidophilus
found in yogurt and fermented food.

Did you know that the number of bacterial cel s living in your GI

tract is estimated to be ten times more (over 100 trillion) than the entire number of number of cel s in the rest of your body? An important and remarkable aspect of the GI tract is the dynamic nature of the diverse bacteria and other organisms, known as intestinal flora, dwelling within it. The average GI tract contains 500 to 1,000 different species of bacteria. These microbial life forms residing in the gut make it the most complex environment that exists in your body.9

An analysis of the DNA in the GI tract found that it contains 3.3

million genes from the microorganisms living there, which is a vast number compared to the 23,000 genes present in the cel s in the rest of the human body.10 You’re going to hear much more about this

topic in the future, so I want to give you the inside track on this area of emerging scientific knowledge. Our understanding of the importance of keeping the community of microorganisms in the gut in

balance is rapidly expanding.

Some intestinal flora is damaging to our health, such as the in-

fectious bacteria
Streptococcus
(strep),
Staphylococcus
(staph),
Sal-monel a
,
Clostridium botulinum
,
E. coli
, and
Candida albicans
yeast.

However, the vast majority of gut flora is believed to play a positive role in maintaining our health. It is symbiotic with us, providing us with several crucial, life-sustaining benefits, including the production of vitamins, protection from infection by destructive microorganisms, refinement of the immune system’s response, and the abil-

ity of the cel s lining the GI tract to mature.11

Gut health is an important aspect of the immune system, where

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invading microorganisms (like dangerous bacteria, yeasts, fungi,

and viruses) are destroyed. If the population of microorganisms that live in your gut becomes unbalanced, or your immune response is

underactive, you will respond as though you were being poisoned,

and your health can real y suffer. That’s what a dramatic change in my intestinal flora did to me.

Disruption of the balance of intestinal flora can lead to the development of several chronic diseases, including inflammatory bowel

disease, diabetes, metabolic syndrome, obesity, autoimmune disor-

ders, arthritis, colon cancer, irritable bowel syndrome, autoimmune liver diseases, malnutrition, allergies, and autism. People with these conditions have been found to have communities of gut bacteria that are significantly different from those of healthy people.12

A healthy balance of microflora in the gut requires a greater num-

ber of health-promoting microorganisms, or probiotics, than dis-

ease-causing ones. The community of intestinal flora is affected by diet, genetic makeup, age, sex, and—what I discovered for myself a few years ago—level of stress.

As hard as it might be to believe, as part of the two-way commu-

nication system between your body and mind, your intestinal flora

affects your emotional state. Research has revealed that particular probiotic strains can reduce the level of gastrointestinal symptoms caused by stress. As a result of emerging evidence that gut flora affects how well the brain and the spinal cord function, a group of