Our body is a wonderful system , each part has its own purpose and gut health in particular plays a role fundamental in the prevention of certain diseases .
As you know, my aim is to make the path of change practical .
In a world full of conflicting theories and opinions, many people find themselves disoriented and cannot find clear and unambiguous answers to their problems.
Keep in mind that we should all know the importance that the intestine has for our health and what to do to make it as functional as possible.
A weak intestine can contribute to many problems and some common autoimmune diseases such as arthritis, psoriasis and thyroiditis.
To avoid these diseases and improve your health there is the 4R protocol and below I’ll explain what it consists of.
This article will give you a clear insight into why and how to treat your gut – it could make a big difference to your overall health now and in the future.
That health starts from the gut is one of the things I learned when I started studying anti-aging medicine, functional medicine, in the United States. (continue reading)
This is a concept that was not transmitted to me so strongly by the typical studies of the Faculty of Medicine in Italy.
The first thing to keep in mind is that the intestine , which we automatically see in a somewhat simplistic way as a tube, is actually not a tube but is a filter .
It is a filter through which something like 30-40 tons of food pass on average over a lifetime and which, precisely because of this enormous mass of food that it must somehow “manage”, becomes a filter that can pass some substances into the circulation, then get them to our organs, but it must also keep many others out.
In a nutshell, the intestine is a selective filter that becomes a fundamental regulator of molecular traffic .
Whenever we eat we certainly get energy and nutrients, but within the food we eat all of these substances are digested and must be absorbed. At the same time, however, there are many substances that we do not want to enter the body and these substances in some cases manage to pass instead.
For example, a diet that has an inflammatory connotation, the use of drugs, alcohol abuse, stress are conditions that lead to the intestine becoming porous.
We speak in English of leaky gut which translated literally could become a sieve intestine, that is this filter that has very precise holes and that do not allow the passage of certain substances become looser, the holes widen and many more molecules pass through the intestine than we actually want.
What happens when this phenomenon sets in?
The immune system is activated, because clearly we are not made to receive all this quantity of substances.
The immune system destabilizes and produces antibodies which, instead of acting against the substances that we have to keep away from our body, end up (precisely because they are unregulated and fail to recognize the target against which they must act) with also acting on our organs, leading to many of the autoimmune diseases we know, for example arthritis, psoriasis, autoimmune thyroiditis and many others.
This is an interesting theory that has found confirmation in some studies and that could just explain how some of the autoimmune pathologies, which are undoubtedly not pathologies of the organ that then gives us the problem but pathologies of the immune system, could originate from this situation in the intestine.
So what should we do?
We need to repair the intestine, we need to make this filter work again.
There is a very interesting protocol that we use in functional medicine and anti-aging medicine called 4R protocol :
- Remove
- Replace
- Re-inoculate
- Repair
1. Remove
Remove means remove all sources that can potentially cause damage.
So reconsider the quality of nutrition and remove those foods that can represent a real damage to the intestinal barrier (first of all, for example, excess alcohol, but also remove stress, which is one of the most important factors in the genesis or at least he is a co-author of many pathologies that affect us today even in very distant organ districts).
2. Replace
Very often we replace digestive enzymes; maybe the gastrointestinal tract and the organs of reference are struggling to produce the quantity of enzymes necessary to digest food in the correct way and this can lead to an overload at the level of the intestinal wall.
3. Re-inoculate
The third R means re-inoculate. Giving back probiotics, a very important issue, and reinserting good bacteria in the intestine . We now know that in the intestine there is this very massive microfilm of bacteria that interact with the intestinal wall and truly form a functional system. In reality, the immune protection that part of the intestine is given by a game of balances between the intestinal wall and the good bacteria that must be present.
When these good bacteria disappear and instead pathogenic bacteria prevail, this system no longer works well and the intestinal wall can be attacked by agents that alter its functionality.
4. Repair
The last R is to repair, which is to restore adequate levels of certain nutrients that the cells of the intestine use to repair themselves. An example of this is glutamine , a very important amino acid that acts on the immune system by enhancing its effects but which is also the preferred metabolite by enterocolitis, i.e. the cells of the gastrointestinal tract that use the glutamine just to strengthen.
This is a specific therapy protocol that must be managed by a physician who knows these terms but it is also important for you, and for the patient in general, to make the connection and understand that perhaps some diseases that are defined as immune diseases may instead have a gastrointestinal genesis and in this case hygiene of the gastrointestinal tract and the health of the gastrointestinal tract can be an additional way to improve the conditions, the quality of life and the evolution of this type of pathology.
