The Zoo in our Colon
The occurrence of microorganisms such as bacteria in our gastrointestinal tract is sparse in our mouth and stomach, and almost non-existent in our small intestine. However bacteria is luxuriant in the lower bowel (colon) where they live in huge populations and most assist the health of the body (the gastrointestinal tract is a part of the external environment in the form of a tube coursing through our body proper).
Inside the colon live hundreds of species of commensal bacteria which create for our bodies K2 vitamin and some of the B-vitamins (biotin, vitamin B12, folic acid, and thiamine), that we cannot get from cooked foods—and indeed we cook most of our foods. These friendly bacteria also recycle essential bile chemicals that our liver produces (bilirubin, bile acids, cholesterol, estrogens, as well as liver "drugs" such as morphine) and the metabolites of vitamin-D. The bacteria also play a small role in fiber reconstitution for suitable stool formation.
Our immune system "farms" and "feeds" these bacteria according to the seasons and the type of micronutrition our body needs to stay healthy from week to week. Alongside and among these desired colon bacteria hide pathogenic microorganisms that continually test our immune system's capabilities to remove them. Bacteria such as Vibrio cholerae, E. coli, Shigella and Campylobacter, Bacteroides, Anaerobic Streptococci, Clostridia, along with Rotavirus, Calicivirus, as well some forms of protozoa and thread worms, as well as other undesirables.
Gastric acid in the stomach kills most organisms that come along with our food. People with reduced gastric acid usually have some bacterial colonisation in the small intestine and are then more susceptible to bacterial diarrhoeal disease. Liver bile has antibacterial properties and helps control unwanted bacteria in the small intestine. The good bacteria of the colon also produce their own antibacterial substances (e.g., bacteriocins and fatty acids), to stop pathogenic bacteria from dominating their community.
Delicious plants with Deadly Costs
In the early 90s I wrote a book which I named "Death begins in the Colon", because this part of the body is the first place most people experience degeneration and excessive aging. The gastrointestinal tract is our Achilles' heel, and it is the food we love to eat that leeds people to their health downfall. We are genetically programmed to be attracted to the taste, smell, crunch and texture of food, in order to differentiate safe foods from toxic foods during our hunting-gathering travels. But we are not living as hunter-gatherers any more, and population pressure, technology and commercial imperatives lead us in different culinery directions now.
Throughout life we obtain nutrition to keep our bodies alive and healthy, and we get this from the foods that pass through our gastrointestinal tract. For the unwary or unlucky, there can be a terrible cost to pay for nutrition—and this cost can be a life of chronic illness and an early death. The challenge for most of us is to obtain the required nutrition we want from various plants, but at the same time sidestep the toxic warfare chemicals that these plants use to defend themselves from being eaten by us and other animals.
Our immune system and the liver organs such as our stomach-pancreas and liver, attempt to denature these toxic chemicals, or corral them and force them out of our bodies without them doing damage. Our immune system and these organs are efficient at denaturing the toxins in leaves, stems, flowers and roots of the few hundred plant species we eat, but they always have more difficulty with the seeds of plants. The seeds are the genetic inheritance to the next generation of plants, and therefore are endowed with more cunning toxins. Some plants have evolved seed toxins that confuse our immune system and damage our organs, while at the same time using our bodies to effect their seed germination. They induce us to eat them—they are tasty.
With the reduction in available animals to eat in the Middle East between 10,000 and 14,000 years ago the people there turned to eating grass seeds (wheat and barley) just to stay alive. These seeds last for ever if kept dry and these smart people built silos to accumulate and store these grains. They surrounded the silos with towns and enhanced their culture with bakery products—bread became the "Staff of Life". But these grains contain cunning toxins which allow people to eat them and survive, but most pay the price and suffer in the years ahead.
One of the reasons a grain-free diet is healthier than a full-on grain diet, is because it allows people to avoid this group of cunning toxic and destructive lectins.
Lectins
Lectins are a very diverse class of sugar-binding protein chemicals that are found in all forms of life—animals, plants, and microorganisms, including humans. Both plants and animals evolved to use these chemicals. Plants evolved them for defense while animals evolved them for cell-to-cell communication. The concern is that animals eat plants and most plant lectins are designed to make them sick or kill them. On the other hand, plants (except for a few, such as the Venus flytrap, Monkeycaps or Sundew), don't eat animals and have no concerns about animal lectins affecting them—except when plants want their seeds germinated by the consistently moist environment in the gastrointestinal tract of animals.
In plants, the main function of lectins is to protect the plant cells against invading fungi, virus and bacteria (microorganisms). Although not studied extensively, it appears that microorganisms also use their own types of lectins to allow them to bind to animal, insect and plant cells in preparation for invasion into the cells. For example, the influenza virus gets into cells by using a lectin called hemagglutinin to bind to the sugar-proteins on the surface of body cells in the throat and gut. Another example is the gut bacteria, Escherichia coli, which is able to adhere to the surface of epithelial cells of the human gastrointestinal tract using their types of lectins.
Plants can also use their types of lectins to stop microorganisms from binding to the surface of the plant cells, and effectively stopping them from infecting the cells.
Plants also use lectins to protect themselves against the insects and animals that attempt to eat them. They do this by disrupting the "cell-to-molecule" and "cell-to-cell" communication within the organisms, which then leads to organ and immune system dysfunction, and can result in illness or death. Plant lectins cause animal cells such as red-blood cells to clump together. They can disrupt immune T-cell function to cause illness and inflammation. Animals and insects need to be careful which plants they eat when they are not feeling healthy.
In animals, the main function of their types of lectins is to allow "cell-to-molecule" and "cell-to-cell" communication, which is somewhat like the action of Velcro, where each binding process promotes very high communication efficiency, but also allows the binding to be undone quite easily to allow for new communication. This type of communication allows the groups of organ and immune cells to maintain high levels of body homoeostasis and high effectiveness at protecting the body against infection and chemical toxicity.
Humans can only eat a few hundred species of plants out of the hundreds of thousands of species living on the planet. Most plants are just too toxic to eat because each plant species uses a great variety of defense chemicals, and among them are the toxic lectin groups.
Humans suffer poor health when they eat plants with lectins that disrupt the "cell-to-molecule" and "cell-to-cell" communication. Plant lectins are anti-nutrients because block nutrient absorption.
Of the plant foods we eat, most of them have to be cooked, baked or boiled. Their temperature has to be raised to a sufficient level to break down the chemical structure of defense toxins and this includes lectins. The plant lectins that cause us illness are the ones that are stable even after normal cooking or baking, because they are still biologically active when we eat them. The toxic lectins in the foods humans eat are called prolamins. Prolamins are plant storage and defense proteins that also assist with seed germination. Gliadin is the best-known and most thoroughly studied example of a toxic lectin—it is a prolamin.
In the cereal grass seeds (grains) such as wheat, barley and rye, the protein component is gluten. This is a complex molecule that consists of gliadin and glutenins. There are at least 50 toxic molecules in gluten that researchers know are targeted byour immune system using antibodies, B-cells, and T-cells. Gluten disrupts immune and cell-to cell-communication—it is cytotoxic. Examples of non-gluten prolamins in the other grains are: hordein in barley, secalin in rye, zein in corn, kafirin in sorghum, orzenin in rice, and avenin in oats.
Humans can eat certain plants with particular prolamine lectins and not suffer any ill effects—only if they can biologically deactivate them by breaking down their structure into their subunits (peptides and amino acids). We can do this either by cooking or through the action of our stomach's digestive enzymes. However, the prolamin lectins in the grain seeds have a chemical structure that is not broken down by normal temperature cooking nor baking, and they are still biologically active when processed into bakery products and eaten as foods. People with coeliac disease know that even if they char a piece of toast until it is black, they will still experience an immune reaction to the still-chemically-intact gluten.
Grain seeds will germinate if they can remain in a high-moisture and constantly warm, but not hot environment for around 24 hours—this is the gastrointestinal tract of animals. When a herbivore (e.g. a goat) eats the stem, leaves and seeds of grain plants they can obtain carbohydrate nutrition from the cellulose. However when a herbivore eats the hard-shelled seeds of grain plants, they pass through the gastrointestinal tract intact. While in the moist environment the seeds germinate and after they are excreted, they sprout in the stool left by the animal. If the environmental conditions are not right for germination of a cereal plant's seeds, they can also use animals to germinate their seeds. In so doing, they have evolved effective defense lectins to protect the seeds against the immune system in the gastrointestinal tract of animals. Lectins such as gluten assist the plant seed by disrupting the host's immune defense efficiency in this process.
The only animals that can naturally utilise the nutrition of hard-shelled grass seeds (grains) are birds with crops that can grind the seeds into flour (all birds have a crop or gizzard, but those species that eat easily digested foods such as soft-bodied insects, soft fruits, or nectar have very small crops that cannot grind down hard-shelled grass seeds). Note: there are some insects with mandibles that can also grind these seeds into flours and get nutrition from them.
In the last 13,800 years, humans have used tools (mortice and pestle) to grind down the hard seed shells of grains into flours. However the temperature of baking cereal flours into breads and biscuits does not denature the naturally toxic lectins. Every person who eats grains experiences low to high grade immune system inflammation and disruption to the function of gut cells. Those who are unfortunate to create an autoimmune disease related to toxic lectins can experience debilitating symptoms and even death.
Even cancer has been linked to eating cereal grains: Dr. Stanislas Tanchou, a physician, and one of Napoleon’s surgeons, gave a lecture to the Paris Medical Society in 1842 at the time when France was a world leader of science and medicine. This was an era of scientific focus to support the political intention for Europeans to conquer and civilize the world to make it safer for Christianity. Against this political culture, Tanchou in his lecture claimed he could predict the exact incidence of cancer in all the major European cities over the next fifty years, and it was mostly dependent on the percentage of grain-derived foods in an individual’s diet.
Tanchou’s recorded predictions proved true—a certain percentage of people in Berlin fell to cancer, a different percentage for Munich, and so on. This set off a major outrage across the civilised world, since the great mission of this European age had been to civilise every inch of the globe, and here was somebody in the centre of civilisation who declared that uncivilised people following a more indigenous hunter-gatherer diet free of grains were free of the scourge of cancer. Cancer is sometimes called a "Disease of Civilisation".
The Gastrointestinal Tract
The gastrointestinal barrier wall is approximately 400 m2 in surface area. It is a highly selective semi-permeable barrier between the inside of your body and the tube of the gut connected to the outside world. The purpose of this gut wall is to filter nutrients through the wall while keeping everything else out. This selective barrier is composed of epithelial cells and is always covered with a mucous defense layer through immune servailence. About 85% of the epithelial cells regulate nutrient absorption and are called enterocytes. The other 15% are sampling "microfold" cells (antigen presenting cells, endothelial cells, neurons, inflammatory cells, mast cells, smooth muscle cells and fibroblasts) that are involved with immune surveillance and defence.
The sides and bottoms of the enterocyte cells are smooth, while the tops facing into the gut are shaped into thousands of fingerlike projections (called microvili) which increase their surface area to improve uptake and transport of nutrition (Figure 1.). The main method by which nutrients are selectively absorbed into the body is to pass through these epithelial cells. The enterocyte cells bond to their neighbours by adhesive-protein-chemicals. These cells also have the ability to increase nutrient absorption when necessary in a less selective capacity by opening and closing the areas between the neighbouring cells which takes about 20 minutes in healthy people. These areas can act as non-selective gateways and are called "gap junctions" or "tight junctions".
If a tight junction becomes damaged, or an enterocyte cell’s ability to control the gateway is reduced, then the gap-junctions become "leaky" and this means that unwanted chemicals and microorganisms can cross the gut barrier into the body proper without immune control. When they get inside the body the immune system responds. A sign of this is lymphodema swelling of the abdominal region—the "beer gut" syndrome.
Continuous Intestinal Permeability or Leaky Gut
Nutrient uptake through the enterocyte cells, along with that through the gap junctions is regulated by chemicals called proteases. More than 20 proteases are known to affect permeability for nutrition uptake. Proteases can be secreted by the body cells (e.g., pancreatic proteases) to assist greater volumes of nutrition to pass into the body by stimulating the enterocyte cells to "open" the gap-junctions after eating meals. Protease release by enterocyte cells can also be triggered by invading gut bacteria such as E. coli and Salmonella typhi, as well as toxic food lectins passing through the gut. This can cause gut diseases by damaging the mucous protective layer and also altering the efficient functioning of the gap-junctions.
Zonulin is one of the proteases that open gap-junctions. It does this by unraveling the adhesive proteins joining the enterocyte cells. Limited amounts of zonulin are normally excreated by enterocyte cells to temporarily increase intestinal permeability at specific gut locations for quicker uptake of any available nutrition. For example, as sugars pass through the gut they can be more quickly absorbed for energy bursts, by temporarily opening the gap junctions to boost through-the-cell absorption.
While zonulin production is normally a regulated occurrence, if it is be continuously stimulated by bacteria or food lectins, then gap-junctions across a region of the gut will become permanently "leaky". This will allow unwanted pathogens and chemicals to enter the body proper. However, invading gut bacteria have to reach a certain population size to stimulate enough zonulin production to effectively open-up reasonable areas of the gut barrier to effectively invade the body. A competent immune system normally prevents this.
If the immune system is competent and is effectively monitoring gut bacterial populations and food lectin activity in the gut, it is able to act precisely when these actually attempt to enter through the gap-junctions. A competent immune system will mount a quick attack—not too strong to damage the enterocyte cells, and not too weak to allow infection or poisoning to occur within the body proper. If it is competent it will use the right amount of water pressure through the lymph system to back-flush the bacteria and the food lectins out into the gastrointestinal tract through the gap-junctions, instead of resorting to inflammatory cytokines. This adequate response would only produce slightly loose stools on occasion with no pain nor abdominal swelling.
If the immune system is incompetent, has communication scarring, or cannot "read" the bacterial/lectin threat, it will mount a late-stage defence and overreact by resorting to the use of inflammatory cytokines through T-cells (which record inappropriate memories to the events). T-cell aggression will always produce collateral damage to the local epithelial cells and create large holes in the gastrointestinal barrier that may take days to heal (but only if the T-cells stop their reaction).
Depending on the individual person's immune system coding of these T-cells, the T-cells can remain within the gastrointestinal tract having their "memory" triggered again and again by plant lectins to cause more destruction of the gut wall as an autoimmune response. Or they can migrate to different organs to cause other types of cell destruction as a different autoimmune disease.
An incompetient immune system will also overreact in its use of water pressure to attempt to back-flush the bacteria and chemicals through the gap-junctions or holes, into the gastrointestinal tract. This will cause chronic watery stools, abdominal bloating (the "beer-gut") and intense abdominal pain, with loss of weight.
"Wasting Disease" is a name that was used for centuries in Europe before the term coeliac disease was coined. An "old wives' tail" suggested that bread was behind "Wasting Disease". Science eventualluy confirmed this, in research conducted in Holland after the second world war by the Dutch pediatrician, Willem K. Dicke.
If the enterocyte cells are exposed to ongoing bacterial attacks, or the person continually consumes the particular plant food with the zonulin-stimulating lectins, a vicious cycle of chronic "full-on" gut leakage with ongoing collateral cell damage can occur. This is the most common cause of gut autoimmune diseases such as ulcerative colitis, coeliac disease or Crohn's disease, which eventually leads to the various colon cancers.
All plant foods have lectins that have the potential to stimulate zonulin production. The lectins are different for the different plants. Plants with lectins that can be denatured by normal cooking are safe to eat. Plants with lectins that are broken down by digestive enzymes are safe to eat. However lectins that are not denatured by these processes, and are biologically intact when they move into the small and large intestines, have the potential to contribute to leaky gut disease.
The most studied of the lectin-containing foods that cause leaky gut disease across the human population, are the gluten-containing grains such as wheat, barley and rye—they contain gluten. When gluten comes into contact with human enterocyte cells, it stimulates ongoing zonulin release for quite a long period (days to weeks).
Everyone eventually suffers degrees of this disease. Some die from it and some just experience low grade symptoms. Gluten predominantly, as well as other plant lectins, in combination with inappropriate bacteria living in the gastrointestinal tract, cause leaky gut disease and are the triggers for the various gastrointestinal tract autoimmune diseases.
Grain-Free Bakery Products
Eating bakery products is a part of our cultural heritage. When we consume normal grain-based bakery products and are not completely healthy, then lectins such as gluten, zein, orzenin and other prolamins, can stimulate the release of zonulin and can affect the function of protective gut proteases that are involved in gap-junction permeability (such as Serine proteases, metalloproteases, luminal proteases). This happens in everyone, however people with coeliac disease, atypical coeliac disease, silent coeliac disease, pseudo coeliac disease, gluten intolerance syndrome, and non-coeliac gluten sensitivity, have greater and longer lasting zonulin responses to gluten consumption, and experience more intense bouts of Irritable Bowel Syndrome, than do other people.
Increased zonulin secretion is being linked to more and more to plant-stimulated diseases, including: Type-1 diabetes; Multiple sclerosis; Obesity; Insulin resistance; Polycystic ovary syndrome; Coronary artery disease; Necrotizing Enterocolitis; Iron-deficiency anemia, Crohn's disease, Ulcerative colitis and many others.
Eating bakery products that are not made from grains improves gastrointestinal health and unloads the immune system from inappropriatly expending resources (Note up to 80% of all immune resources can be diverted to the gastrointestinal tract when needed).
Deeks makes bakery products from Quinoa seeds, tapioca root, potato, amaranth seeds.
These plant products are safer than glutin-containing bakery flours. Their lectins denature at normal baking temperatures, and do not possess quantifiable amounts of celiac-toxic prolamin epitopes: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24445568
Deeks also use soy flour from soy beans in some of its products. Soy lectins, although not denatured by heat or human stomach enzymes have not been shown to trigger leaky gut in humans.
While there have been no comprehensive studies evaluating the detrimental health effects of all the different types of grain prolamins, there is much similarity in structure and function between the different prolamins of the different grains, including rice, oats and corn.
All of these cereal seeds can be a potential threat to people with a combination of weakened immune systems and inappropriate gut bacteria populations. Changing to grain-free bakery products is a wise and healthy choice for taking care of your gut microbiomes. A grain-free diet has the potential to extend your lifespan and lower your risk of chronic diseases.