The Autoimmune Epidemic: Bodies Gone Haywire in a World Out of Balance--and the Cutting-Edge Science that Promises Hope (No Series) (31 page)

What exactly does a special diet that can help to subdue the autoimmune response look like? As anyone who likes to browse in bookstores knows, consuming a healthy diet is a topic that fills whole bookshop aisles and magazine stands. But oddly enough—despite the fact that nearly 24 million Americans suffer from autoimmune diseases and that number is steadily on the rise—there is not yet a recognized diet focused on combating autoimmunity through nutrition.

Before discussing what an anti-autoimmune diet should consist of, it might be helpful to consider why our current diet is so harmful to our immune system in the first place.

THE RISE IN FACTORY-MADE FOODS

One of the most significant ways that foreign antigens, which may trigger the immune system to overreact, can enter the body is through what we eat. In the past hundred years we’ve completely changed what we digest as food. We’ve gone from a whole-foods diet—one in which we digested whole grains, fruits, vegetables, poultry, and livestock produced locally or on our own land—to a processed-food diet. This processed-food diet often consists of highly preserved bread products, doughnuts, prepackaged coffee cakes, and cereals laden with sugar for breakfast. (Think of it: one bowl of Cocoa Puffs has the same amount of sugar as a 50-gram bag of Hershey’s Kisses, and a bowl of Corn Pops is the sugar equivalent of eating a Kit Kat bar.) Chips, multi-dye-colored cheese Goldfish, and pretzels in foil-lined bags, along with processed meats, fill the typical lunch box. Dinner often comes from a box or prepackaged bag from the freezer, and snacks and sodas—of which there are a plethora to choose from in our snack culture—serve as pick-me-ups in between.

What fresh foods we do consume—unless organic—are sprayed liberally with pesticides and fungicides. Nonorganic poultry and meats are packed with hormones and antibiotics, not to mention often full of PCBs, mercury, and other chemicals that accumulate up the food chain in the cows, pigs, lambs, and chickens we consume. Processed meats are preserved with nitrates. Patient studies show that higher intake of nitrates and nitrites is associated with a higher risk of developing type 1 diabetes. Grocery-store chicken comes to us having been raised on feed laced not only with hormones and antibiotics but chemical dyes to give the meat a more attractive hue. Indeed, today farmers can select from fifteen different shades of yellow dyes, in a range from light yellow to bright orange, to add to chicken feed in order to make egg yolks the perfect color. Known as tartrazine, or FD&C yellow no. 5, yellow dye is present in thousands of other foods and drugs and has been linked in research studies to higher rates of asthma and allergic reactions. There is also evidence it may trigger lupus symptoms in some patients.

Today, only 10 percent of all American adults consume enough healthy foods for their diet to qualify as “good,” according to researchers at the USDA Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion. When you look at recent studies on what Americans do get in their diet, it is pretty grim: U.S. soft drink consumption has grown 135 percent since 1977; 75 percent of preschoolers in America are not getting the daily recommended amount of fiber in their diet; fewer than 11 percent of Americans consume the USDA recommended five servings of fruits and vegetables a day; junk foods such as chips, snacks, desserts, and soft drinks now constitute 30 percent of the American daily food intake. Fruits and vegetables no longer pack the nutritional wallop they once did; their nutrient value has declined as much as 38 percent since 1950. One reason is that farmers tend to select produce breeds that are faster growing, bigger, and more pest resistant—meaning crops have inadequate time to make or absorb nutrients during their shortened growing season. Likewise, the soil in which crops are grown is contaminated with far more mercury, PCBs, and other noxious industrial fallout than it was half a century ago. Acid rain has taken its toll as well: American soil has lost as much as 75 percent of its calcium during the past century, which also compromises a crop’s nutrient intake and growth.

Processed foods are just as troubling. When we hear phrases such as “food manufacturing” or “food processing,” few of us have a visual picture of what that really means or how many chemicals, preservatives, and additives work their way into the foods we eat as they’re processed and packaged on manufacturing assembly lines. “Processed food” basically means any food that you can buy in a can, jar, packet, or bottle that has been produced in some kind of factory as part of a bulk manufacturing process. Most processed foods would quickly spoil if kept on a shelf for very long. In order to make sure that won’t happen, raw food ingredients are processed at very high heats. This causes grains, fruits, and vegetables to lose most of their vitamins, minerals, and fiber, as well as other nutrients. Preservatives are then added in order to prevent germs from proliferating in the food while it sits in the jar or package on the supermarket shelf. That way, your food won’t spoil or be covered with mold when you tear open the plastic packaging a week or a month or even a year down the road. Preservatives make sure that insects and germs find the food too toxic for them, so bacteria won’t grow on the marshmallows in your kids’ Lucky Charms and ants won’t find that package of chocolate cupcakes in your cupboard the least bit attractive.

Centuries ago, salt, sugar, and vinegar were among the first food preservatives. Today, industrial food manufacturers have at their disposal an endless variety of chemical ways to preserve food, including benzoates, BHA, BHT, FD&C dyes, MSG, nitrates, nitrites, parabens, and sulfites. The final step in food processing is the addition of vitamins and minerals, to make up for what was lost during the initial heat-stripping phase. In an ironic sense, food processing might be defined thus: taking a food from nature, removing everything natural from it, then adding preservatives, dyes, bleaches, flavors, emulsifiers, and stabilizers to make it taste, look, feel, and smell like what it was originally supposed to be, but no longer is. The resemblance is there, but little else remains.

Those of us who grew up in the wake of the 1950s food-processing revolution probably know exactly what a non-whole-food diet is like. My own mother, mom of four, was, like most fashionable housewives of the 1960s and 1970s swept up in the great processed-food sensation that swept the nation, offering housewives every conceivable convenience food from Tasty Baking Company’s Tastykakes to Oscar Meyer wieners. And who can forget “Cold or hot, Spam hits the spot!” It was the age of Cap’n Crunch for breakfast, bologna and Velveeta on Wonder Bread with barbecue chips and Twinkies for lunch, and Hamburger Helper for dinner. (As kids, we once found a half-eaten Twinkie under one of my brother’s beds that had been there for nearly a year, and it still looked exactly as it had the day he opened the package, with the outline of his bite mark still perfectly intact. It was so full of preservatives even the ants that feasted on nearby forgotten banana peels wouldn’t touch it.) During our childhood, if it didn’t come in a package, it wasn’t newfangled, it didn’t have that zing of being remarkably, modernly American.

Immigrants to America also fall under the spell of our processed foods. Studies show that almost 40 percent of newly arrived immigrants quickly change their diet to add in more prepackaged highly processed foods and snacks, eating fewer vegetables and fruit and less fish, rice, and beans. Not surprisingly, autoimmune inflammatory bowel diseases are more common in Western countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, and Scandinavia—where rates of Crohn’s disease have been rising—and less common in southern Europe, Asia, and Africa. But what is especially striking is that South Asian immigrants who move to Western countries soon show an increased incidence of autoimmune inflammatory bowel diseases like Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis.

Clearly, the diet most Americans favor is a far cry from the whole-foods diet that Gerry Mullin and other complementary and alternative-minded physicians believe might help to rebalance an overreactive immune system. Indeed, for individuals who are genetically susceptible to autoimmunity, eating a diet full of chemicals, dyes, pesticides, and the like may be tantamount to swallowing tiny doses of antigens that the body does not recognize as safe and may, over time, help nudge the immune system toward an autoimmune response. This shift from a whole-foods diet to a processed-food diet over the past sixty years is a critical factor in pushing autoimmune disease rates ever upward.

THE AUTOIMMUNE DIET

As more studies are published on how specific foods and supplements can modulate the autoimmune response, a comprehensive anti-autoimmune-disease diet plan is slowly emerging. Increasingly, top specialists are suggesting whole-food diet guidelines to their patients. No single recommendation fits all patients, and none of the following should be construed as medical advice. Every single dietary step should be checked with one’s personal physician, and anyone considering following a special diet and/or taking supplements should first share the plan with his or her health-care provider. Another caveat: not all supplement manufacturers are the same, and some supplements manufactured both in the United States and abroad have been found to contain traces of heavy metals and other harmful ingredients.

An essential first step for anyone suffering from autoimmune disease is to ensure that his or her gastrointestinal tract is thriving. Although the disease one might be suffering from might affect a completely different system of the body—and it might seem absurd to consider worrying about what’s going into one’s stomach when one can’t walk without a cane due to multiple sclerosis—the health of the GI tract is inextricably linked to what’s transpiring elsewhere in the body.

A healthy intestine allows only digested nutrients to pass into the bloodstream. In patients with immune and inflammatory-based illnesses, the body’s intestinal lining often becomes impaired, thus permitting larger molecules, such as bacteria and undigested foods, to slip through. In the bloodstream, these foreign items can trigger an immune reaction, making the body think that it’s under attack and prompting the body’s immune system to lash out to battle those foreign pathogens.

Even for people who are not ill, eating a Western diet high in carbohydrates, fats, and sugary foods causes the balance of microflora in the gut to change dramatically, creating an overgrowth of bad bacteria and yeast, says Mullin. This directly damages the intestinal wall. To understand how this happens, consider the carefully interconnected parts of the intestine. The human bowel is lined with millions of projections called villi that facilitate the efficient absorption of nutrients. These villi are covered in cells that are constantly being shed and renewed—around a thousand billion cells are shed from them every day. Our intestines also have tiny gaps in the lining. In healthy individuals, as the villi are renewed, the body secretes a substance to plug the gaps, thus sealing the gut and preventing antigens from leaking into the bloodstream. These sealed gaps serve the critical purpose of keeping foreign antigens from being able to escape. But when the intestinal flora lacks sufficient good bacteria from a healthy whole-foods diet, or when we consume foods that can produce an allergic sensitivity in some people—as do many chemicals, artificial preservatives, and dyes—inflammation develops in the lining of the intestine. That inflammation breaks these seals, the gaps widen, and, in what is referred to as “leaky gut syndrome,” antigens leak out. Those antigens can rev up the immune system. Believing itself to be under attack, the immune system releases cytokines, which rally the production of antibodies that go after those added antigens circulating through the body. If food components or bacteria that escape through that intestinal barrier share a similar protein sequence to a virus or other pathogenic microorganism that the immune system deems as unsafe, it can generate an immune response, leading to an autoimmune reaction.

“Untreated leaky gut syndrome can perpetuate the autoimmune reaction,” says Mullin. “One of the most important things that autoimmune patients can do is to cleanse the GI tract through diet to make sure that they’re not letting antigens into their body through the gut and worsening their immune-driven disease.” The first step is to work with your physician to test for pathogens in the gut—bacteria, yeast, and parasites—all of which can be tested for through high-quality stool tests, coupled with a lactulose breath test for bacterial overgrowth. (One word here on parasites: Although some recent studies show that having a certain type of parasite may actually keep the immune system busy and help to keep people from getting sick with autoimmune disease, this is only true in the case of certain harmless parasites, such as pig whipworms, which do not harm people. Most common parasitic infections found in Americans such as giardia and
Entamoeba histolytica
and
Blastocystis hominis
infection can and do cause severe health problems.) Interestingly, laboratory studies show that when rats with a predisposition to Crohn’s disease have their GI tracts sterilized, so that they have no leaky gut syndrome and no bad bacteria or parasites, they are no longer susceptible to Crohn’s and they do not develop the disease.

The second step is to make sure that you are not consuming any potential allergens or foods to which you may be sensitive. For those who are facing severe autoimmune disease, this is best done by going on a complete elimination diet, with the help of your physician. Mullin recommends beginning such an elimination diet by consuming only hypoallergenic protein powders such as whey protein or rice protein—which will give you all of the essential nutrients—for a period of three days and then slowly adding in limited foods such as rice, chicken, turkey, and vegetables (see below) for a period of up to eight weeks. Patients keep a journal and take note of any type of reaction (bloating, abdominal discomfort, rashes, headaches, and any worsening of their autoimmune-disease symptoms). Gradually, with continued careful monitoring, a wider variety of foods can be added to the diet as well.