OTHER HEALTH PROBLEMS CAUSED BY POOR DIGESTION

By this time, you are probably a little queasy at the idea of having food rot in your gut rather than be properly digested. And you should be. Intuitively, you should realize that such a process is very toxic. As bacteria, especially anaerobic bacteria, multiply out of con­trol in the gut, their metabolic products multiply as well. In people who have had digestive tracts out of whack for most of their lives, the toxicity of this process can be a primary reason for their poor general health.

Partially digested food on its way to becoming feces can become trapped in intestinal pockets. Such pockets can sometimes have lit­tle or no access to any oxygen. When these bacteria-filled pockets lose oxygen exposure, very toxic bacterial products can be pro­duced. Furthermore, these pockets can become chronic and self-sustaining even after dietary and nutritional habits have been changed. Anecdotal evidence in individuals who have had chroni­cally poor nutritional habits indicates that foods can sometimes be trapped in such pockets for years! Any disease process, left alone and neglected long enough, can persist even when the initial causative factors have been removed. Sometimes further measures

36 Optimal Nutrition for Optimal Health

beyond the mere removal of the initial causative factors must be un­dertaken. If you have made every change imaginable in your eating habits (including the removal of dental toxins) and you are still pro­cessing food poorly you should consider undergoing a series of colonic therapies. However, a less invasive and possibly superior way to clean your intestinal tract and keep it clean is with large amounts of vitamin С orally (see chapter 8).

There is still another potentially severe consequence to rotting food and the leaky gut syndrome. The bacteria themselves, not just their toxic by-products, can also gain access to the body's blood and lymphatics. In addition to being an enormous ongoing challenge to the immune system, susceptible sites throughout the body can be­come seeded with these bacteria, which can then magnify their toxic abilities as they multiply inappropriately in these sites. Once this seeding takes place, the already compromised immune system often cannot clean up these sites. If the bacterial challenge is over­whelming enough to allow seeding to occur in the face of whatever immune resistance is present, a substantially stronger immune sys­tem will be required to do a proper cleanup. And this strengthen­ing will never occur in the face of continued bacterial toxicity from incompletely digested food, or in the face of unaddressed dental toxins.