Recently, I posted an article pointing out the connection between your gut and your brain. It’s really fascinating stuff, with implications for mental health and psychiatry and just living a happy, fulfilled life. I then turned it into one of my radio shows. If you get a chance, go to our askdrernst.com/radio and have a listen.

I this post, I want to talk about the connection between your gut and your immune system, which, combined with your knowledge of the gut’s connection to your brain and mental health, should only serve to highlight how integral the gut is to your body’s systemic integrity as a whole.

It’s a bit of a vague thing to say, but it’s common to hear in my profession that 70-80% of your immune system is in your gut.

The GI tract-immunity connection

One of the ways in which the gut is so important to immunity because, along with your skin and respiratory system, it is the primary contact point your body has with the outside world. It has a large say in what goes into your system and what stays out. Your entire digestive tract, from your esophagus to your stomach to your small intestine to your large intestine is coated in mucous membranes designed to kill and expel bad things and digest and absorb good things. While your skin and respiratory system deal mostly with what is in the air, your gut has to deal more with dangerous pathogens found in animal proteins and plants introduced directly into the body. When you hear that the gut is 70% of the immune system, this means in terms of surface area. (Just think of the surface area in your intestines. They say if you stretch out the average small intestine, it is 23 feet long!) The mucous membranes that coat your digestive tract are embedded with lymph tissue, where immune cells are produced.

The microbiome-immunity connection

But what about the microbiome and immunity? This refers to the ecosystem of bacteria that lives in your gut. In case you didn’t know, there are trillions of bacteria living inside of your right now. And if things are going well, they don’t make you sick. They actually help prevent you from getting sick. When it comes to immunity, these bacteria play several roles:

• These bacteria have worked out how to signal to your body to do certain things. When it comes to immunity, they signal epithelial cells in the lining of your gut to secrete immunity cells, like white blood cells and antigens.
• The bacteria in your gut also affect the pH in your digestive system, making it more acidic, which is a hostile environment for invading pathogens.
• They crowd pathogens out. Because your gut bacteria are essentially the same creatures as the bad bacteria, they eat the same things and take up the same available resources. Considering that there are trillions of good bacteria in your gut, when even just a billion or so bad bacteria show up, they often can’t compete for food and just end up dying off.
• They also create compounds that fight off competing bacteria. For example, one of the more common good gut bacteria produces a compound that fights off the family of bad bacteria that is responsible for E. Coli and Salmonella.

It’s the communication factor between the microbiome and the body’s immune system that plays the most crucial role. They call it “crosstalk.” The bacteria communicate to the immune cells in the gut about the environment and the immune system responds—with inflammation or by producing and releasing response cells like antibodies and T cells. When the microbiome is damaged, or the cell receptors in your gut are damaged, the communication doesn’t happen.

How your microbiome becomes damaged

The main culprit is antibiotics, particularly wide-spectrum antibiotics designed to kill bacteria regardless of its purpose or if it is a threat to you. For listeners over 25 or so, you will likely remember antibiotics as a completely normal and ever-present part of your childhood. Got a bad cold? Antibiotics. Got the chicken pox? Antibiotics. Scraped knee? Antibiotics. I might be exaggerating, but doctors have been very loose with their prescriptions of antibiotics in the past.

Luckily, that’s changing as we become more and more fearful of the “superbug.” But we are still exposed to high doses of antibiotics from factory-farm proteins. The beef, poultry and fish we eat are, unless organic and grass-fed, free-range or wild-caught, are loaded with antibiotics. Antibiotics actually make these animals gain weight, which makes them more profitable for farmers. They are also a necessity for the cramped and dirty conditions in which most of these animals are raised. When we eat the meat, we get a dose of antibiotics. Our microbiome takes a hit and communications between it and our epithelial cells becomes less efficient or even non-existent.

Another way we mess with our microbiome is by eating things that cause it to signal inflammation in the intestines. When our microbiome perceives a threat, it sends a message to the gut lining immune cells, and one of the things it does is become inflamed. This is fine in the short-term, but over time, inflammation leads to a wide range of diseases. Gluten is one of those things. It causes an inflammation signal in your gut, every time. Some people are more sensitive than others and we call them “gluten sensitive” or they have a “gluten allergy.” But the truth is, we all have the same—but milder—response to gluten.

It’s possible to have a bad balance of types of bacteria in your gut as well. There are millions of different strains of necessary bacteria in your gut. Let’s say you destroy your microbiome with antibiotics. Your doctor or mother or friend rightly tells you you’ve got to rebuild your gut bacteria, so take a probiotic or eat some yogurt. It definitely helps, but at most, you’re only getting a dozen strains of the bacteria you need.

You can have an overgrowth of good bacteria. One is Candida, which causes yeast infections when it gets out of control. But it’s common with people who have had surgery in their gastrointestinal tract to get too many bacteria in their gut, which is also disruptive to the immune system, among other things.

Of course, if your microbiome is fine, but your cells’ receptors aren’t picking up the message, that needs to be fixed, and that’s the purpose of my cellular healing diet that I’ve talked about in previous posts or at my events. I can tell you step one: no sugar.

Healing and maintaining your microbiome

Let’s say your microbiome is out of balance, or even if it’s fine and you just want to be proactive, what can you do to strengthen your microbiome and consequently your immune system?

• Reduce or eliminate gluten from your life.
• Reduce or eliminate sugar from your life.
  • Both of these compounds directly cause inflammation and a disruption of your microbiome.
• Reduce antibiotic use to a minimum and only in absolutely necessary cases. This includes eating only animal proteins that are organic, wild-caught, grass-fed and free-range. And it includes the overuse of antibacterial soaps, mouthwash, disinfectant cleaning products, etc. Let’s stop being so afraid of bacteria. The vast majority of bacteria in the world are harmless to humans.

If you want to maintain it, strengthen it or rebuild your microbiome, you need to get probiotics in your life. This can include supplements, but you can’t rely on them because, as I stated above, you can only get about a dozen strains of the millions necessary from a probiotic. You’ve got eat fermented foods. They are much more popular in Asian cuisine, but some famous Western fermented foods are sauerkraut, Greek yogurt and pickles. The Asian variety includes Korean kimchi, Japanese Miso soup or Natto and the Indians have a lot of them: Kefir, Kombucha, lasi. These give you a much larger diversity of healthy bacteria.

Lastly, we’re finding that stress is a major contributor to the health of your microbiome. Basically, if your gut health isn’t good and you encounter stress, you will not handle it as well, either psychologically or physically. Conversely, if you are always under a lot of stress, your microbiome responds poorly, affecting all of the other functions it serves. So, it is important that you manage stress. This includes:

• Getting enough sleep
• Taking time for activities you enjoy
• Getting quiet time: take a bath, meditate, pray
• Getting exercise daily
• Going outdoors

If you want to learn more about your microbiome and how to maintain or heal it, join me on Saturday, November 12 at 11am at the Holiday Inn Express & Suites in North Charlotte. Simply CLICK HERE to get your tickets. You promo code “AskDrErnst” for FREE tickets.

Dr. Aaron Ernst, D.C. is host of News Talk 1110 WBT’s “AskDrErnst” show and clinic director of Maximized Living Charlotte.

He specializes in providing customized nutritional and detoxification total body healing programs, utilizing the 5 Essentials of Maximized Living.