TEDx Charlottesville on Gut Health
November 14th, 2014
There was a time when human health was understood to be completely dependent on our connection with Nature, a complex ecosystem that would give us the opportunity to thrive. Western medicine has forgotten about that larger Nature, and has often forgotten about that human organism itself, breaking our patients down into single organ systems, to address, to discuss, to treat. We turn our attention to a pharmaceutical industry that offers increasing complexity and cost, with the tools that we would apply to the management of those organ diseases.
In so doing, we’ve largely forgotten about the possibility of health, and in its place constructed the industrial medical complex, a three trillion dollar-a-year industry in the United States that has overseen one of the most rapid collapses of human health. The United States now ranks forty-ninth in the world for health outcomes. We rank behind Croatia, the Dominican Republic, and Chile. We spend three times as much money per-capita to achieve that ranking of forty-ninth.
This chronic disease management has been really spurred on by an increasing amount of attention, not to the human but to the diseases they manage The children we now bring into the world are facing a diabetes rate of one in three. Already, adults in the United States are facing cancer prevalence of one in two. The scientific tools that we now wield encourage us to go into ever-increasing minutiae and tiny bits of information to process, further, the science of the last ten years has revealed an interesting discussion on the undercurrent of that disease. There is one root cause of all human disease and it is inflammation.
Inflammation is common to all of us in an experience we have had. At the cell level it is the loss of communication. With the loss of communication at the cell level, things snowball and we get disease processes. We lose the capacity for order. Autism in our children, attention deficit disorder, asthma and allergy, autoimmune disease. As we progress, anxiety, depression, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer. Moving on we getting into Alzheimer’s dementia, Parkinson’s, and the continued deterioration.
All of this an increasing rate of flow of inflammation through the human body and a loss of communication, and disorder. Over the last four years, a group of doctors and scientists have jettisoned from this industrial complex and set up a shop down in tiny Scottsville, Virginia in a plumbing building, and started to drill down on the question of what is inflammation and where does it come from and what is its relationship to Nature?
The story has come down to one root injury that would lead to that inflammation. The injury is in the matrix of the carpets that make up our bodies. Separating you from the greater world around you is membrane — starts at your gut and then your liver, your blood vessels, the blood-brain barrier, the kidney, these carpets of cells that are laced together with a quilting of little proteins that are called “tight junctions.”
In these beautiful networks of quilt-like sewing, one cell to its adjacent cell to create these membranes. These barriers, these tight junction systems, are the firewall between a toxic world and your system. Without that, we lose the capacity for protection. It turns out that our story really starts with the soil, with the loss of soil in the post-WW II era we lost bacteria, we lost farming practices that had been around for thousands of years. With the loss the bacteria, we lost nutrients in the food that we ate. With the loss of the nutrients, we lost biodiversity in the bowel. As those bowels became leaky with the loss of bacteria, we developed disease.
Our group has been drilling down to the story of the bacteria and its relation to those tight junctions and those human cells and its protection. Those tight junctions are maintained by a language that we have uncovered from ancient soils in the southern United States. Those soils are containing a complex family of molecules that are the protection and repair mechanisms of our body. As we lose them we become prone to two potent toxins — weed killers and an ever-refining gluten food chain. These two toxins destroy the tight junctions further.
With the loss of those tight junctions, we manifest disease at a very early age. Our group has demonstrated in the human small bowel and colon, that if you take those control cells that protect the human body and add the herbicide, you lose eighty percent of the integrity within seconds, minutes, and hours of exposure. If you add back this language, this song of the bacteria, you get complete protection this song of the bacteria, you get complete protection With the introduction of gluten, you lose twenty to thirty percent of that barrier.
With the reintroduction of the bacterial song, you get a complete protection of that cell membrane once again. The patients that we treat and manage do something fantastic as their barriers go back up — they show that they have the intrinsic capacity to heal. That was a word I did not use in the industrial complex. We have the capacity to plug back into Nature and heal ourselves and give a different future to our children.
Thank you.
