🤲🏽The impact of what we put into our bodies has an enormous impact on our health and the planet. The epic benefits of bacteria, the art of fermentation, and how our gut relates to the systems and cycles of all life play an intricate part. Stay tuned for my simple Beet Kava recipe and find out how delicious eating to heal our guts can delight your taste buds and regenerate the planet.

Adding enzymatic rich fermented food to your daily diet will make the food you ingest more bioavailable, enabling you to absorb maximum nutrients. Think of your gut as the composting system for your body; breaking down raw material into an enriching soil amendment. It makes sense how studies have proven that healthy living soil equates to more healthy, nutrient-dense food.

👍 Dr. Miller, the author of Farmacology, reminds us, “Thinking of a healthy body as an extension of a healthy farm, and vice versa, is a paradigm shift for many of us. But when we consider that all of our cells get their building blocks from plants and soil then, suddenly, it all makes sense. In fact, it is not too much of a stretch to say: We are soil.” What she’s saying is that your health starts in the gut like the health of the planet start with the soil. What we put in we get out.

👏The major killers and disrupters of healthy bacteria include processed foods, refined sugar, too much alcohol, chlorine in the water, and the indiscriminate use of antibiotics. If you pollute your body with too many bad bacteria-generating substances, you make yourself sick. But for some reason, this obvious connection between food and our bodies has been lost. The same goes for if we contaminate the soil, we contaminate ourselves. To get to the root cause of this deception, we must ask ourselves why and take matters into our own hands. Literally, where we put in our hands and what we put into our mouths can change the world.

When your gut bacteria are in balance, your immune system is also in balance. This miraculous and complex living system can aggressively protect your body from outside offenders. Unhealthy bacteria rob your life force. This same principle goes for the balance of the soil, which is like the immune system of the planet.

Symptoms warning that your immune system is out of balance are food and seasonal allergies, chronic inflammation, chronic sinusitis, and colds and flu that linger for weeks.

🤟So what is our Soil/Gut relationship?

There is a very tight relationship between the gut flora (the microbiome) and the health of the soil. Just like your gut, the soil requires healthy bacteria and organisms to function properly. According to Kathy Merrifield, Nematologist at Oregon State University, a teaspoon of fermented foods is like a single teaspoon (1 gram) of rich garden compost and can hold up to one billion bacteria, several yards of fungal filaments, several thousand protozoa, and scores of nematodes.

Think of your body as an ecosystem. Like everything in Nature, it depends on healthy ecosystems for its health. All thirteen of its systems must function properly for optimum health. Your body is negatively affected when just one of those systems is out of whack. When you eat crappy food it contaminates all the priceless systems in your body, making you sick. It’s exactly what happens in nature when we contaminate one ecosystem and it spreads too many.

🧑Example: If chemicals are dumped into the ecosystem of a river, the chemicals are eventually carried to wherever the river flows, either into the ocean or a lake, depositing those toxins. The bank of the toxic river is then contaminated, affecting that ecosystem and all the plants and animals eating from the toxic river, the riverbank, the ocean, or the lake. Do you get the picture? And eventually, humans get contaminated when eating the contaminated plants and animals. The origin of chemical pollution has far-reaching effects.

Let’s cover the basics: What is the gut?

The collective bacteria that live along the GI (gastric-intestinal) tract is referred to as your gut microbiome. The stomach is part of the gut, which is also referred to as your abdomen or belly, the internal organ in which the major part of the digestion of food occurs. The organ is a pear-shaped enlargement of the alimentary canal linking the esophagus to the small intestine. The health of your gut bacteria and the health of your immune system are paramount and vitally interconnected to the health of your body. How come? This is where digestion takes place and 80% of your immune system lives. This essential system provides the nutrients to all of your internal systems, which depend on what you choose to put in your body.

The process of breaking down food actually starts in your mouth with the bacteria in your saliva, continues through the esophagus, then the stomach and its digestive bacteria, onto the intestines, and gut flora, and finally to the toilet bowl. The “Gut Flora,” also referred to as “Intestinal Flora,” is the symbiotic bacteria and microorganisms occurring naturally in the intestine.

Hard to believe, but you are composed of 90% bacteria, trillions of them, with most of them living inside your GI system. That’s approximately three pounds lining your intestinal tract alone! Only 1 in 10 of those cells is actually a cell from our body. The rest are bacteria, viruses, and other microorganisms coming from the earth. So when I say we are Nature, I mean it literally!

Composted human waste makes a great soil amendment if the diet is healthy and a proper composting system is used. Many places in the world use properly decomposed human waste as fertilizer. In China, it’s called “nightsoil.” Remember, your gut is your personal composting system.

Your gut flora reacts to the nutrients you put in your body just as the soil reacts to what we put into it. Conventional agriculture that uses processed chemical fertilizers depletes the soil of good bacteria and all the well-intended organisms. This type of farming negatively affects the immune system of the soil, just like when you dump chemical processed foods into your body.

🙏🏼 In Summary:

You can heal and stay healthy.

If this is not enough to encourage you to eat and drink for your health, Science America notes ‌it has technically known the gut as the enteric nervous system, or the second brain, and deserves our utmost attention. Let’s listen and respect what our gut is telling us.

A healthy and resilient gut microbiome is essential for immune function and overall health. I highly recommend you check out “The Gaps Diet,” created by Dr. Campbell-McBride. GAPS stands for Gut & Psychology Syndrome. Dr. Campbell-McBride holds a degree in Medicine and Postgraduate degrees in both Neurology and Human Nutrition. The GAPS diet is designed to reduce inflammation, support the gut lining, and restore microbial diversity through dietary intervention and detoxification.

Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride holds a degree in Medicine and Postgraduate degrees in both Neurology and Human Nutrition. In her clinic in Cambridge, she specialized in nutrition for children and adults with behavioral and learning disabilities, and adults with digestive and immune system disorders. She states. “Clinical research continues to reveal how significant the health and function of the gut flora are to every physiological action in the body, including metabolism, digestion, nutrient production and absorption, neurotransmitter production, as well as transport, inflammation, detoxification, etc. Through dietary intervention, targeted supplementation, detoxification, and lifestyle changes, the nutritional protocol is designed to restore digestive function, brain function, and overall health.”

To learn more about the GAPS Diet, read Dr. Campbell-McBride’s book Gut and Psychology Syndrome available here.

I am honored that Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride will be my special guest on this week's A Dose of Positivity. We discuss how to get our guts and Mother Earth back into balance!