Your Gut and Autoimmune Disease - Dr. Terry Whal's Newsletter
Thursday, May 31, 2012 at 5:02PM 
"Did you know that having the wrong the bacteria in your bowels will increase your risk of autoimmune disease?
The mix of bacteria, yeasts, and parasites that we have depends directly upon the foods we eat. For thousands of generations, we ate leaves, roots, fish, and meat. It was only at the dawn of agriculture, a mere 10,000 years ago, that we began eating so much starch. It was only 300 years ago that we began eating sugar and only 75 years ago that we began eating high fructose corn syrup. Each change shifted the mix of the critters that live in and on us.
Scientists are finding out that those critters have a major impact on our health. It turns out that if you have a starch- and sugar -loving mix of critters, you are more likely to have an autoimmune problem and a host of other health problems.
Some people turned to probiotics, a mix of healthy bacteria, to promote health, but most capsules have 1 to 15 billion bacteria in them;, which won’t have much of a chance against the 100 trillion bacteria, yeasts, and parasites that live in your gut. For a healthier mix of critters in your bowels, starve the harmful ones and do a better job of feeding the health-promoting ones. This means cutting out white flour, sugar, and high fructose corn syrup and eating more vegetables and berries. Another way to promote bacterial health is by eating food that has been lacto-fermented, such as lacto-fermented cabbage. Notably, fermented cabbage was used by the navies in the 1800s to prevent vitamin C deficiency and scurvy."
