How Toxins, Food, and Fat Ruin Your Microbiome

Written by Amy Denney on May 24, 2023. Posted in Current News

In this series, we’ll share how the latest developments on this medical frontier are transforming our approaches to illness and offering new strategies to heal and prevent disease

Risk factors for disease aren’t always accompanied by obvious symptoms. For instance, you can have high blood pressure or high cholesterol without obvious signs of heart disease.

The gut microbiome operates similarly. You can have massive problems among that community of organisms living in a symbiotic relationship within you and not have any obvious signs of disease.

And yet, problems in the gut microbiome should serve as an alarm for autoimmune diseases, which affect 1 in every 5 Americans. Some physicians use stool tests that measure different gut flora as biomarkers for disease.

However, just like certain lifestyle choices cause high blood pressure and contribute to heart disease, there are three major areas of your life that have an enormous influence on the community of microbes in your gut.

Toxic ingredients in your food, body fat, and poor sleep each have a profound effect on gut microbes. Accumulating evidence shows the American lifestyle creates poor health and that an unhealthy balance of gut bacteria, otherwise known as dysbiosis, can exist long before symptoms manifest.

“We are seeing that our modern diet, lifestyle, and stress are causing an imbalance [of gut bacteria] that is central to most diseases,” integrative physician Dr. Akil Palanisamy told The Epoch Times. Author of The T.I.G.E.R. Protocol: An Integrative 5-Step Program to Treat and Heal Your Autoimmunity, Palanisamy describes the diversity of the gut microbiome as a key metric of health.

A stool test can reveal if we have too many problematic microbes and not enough beneficial ones, although even functional doctors may skip this test when patients are obese, overloading their gut with toxins, or sleeping poorly. In these cases, dysbiosis is all but guaranteed—and sooner or later, so are problematic, and sometimes life altering, symptoms.

Toxic Foods

If you are reading this, chances are, you’re at some risk of dysbiosis. Bacterial gut imbalances are a product of the modern world. Our unnatural foods, sedentary lifestyles, stress, obesity, and lack of restorative sleep destroy the ecosystem inside us.

Palanisamy highlights the risk posed by toxins that accumulate in fat deposits, or are slow or difficult to clear from the body. Our world is brimming with them, in our water, food, hygiene products, and air (especially indoors).

Packaged food contains countless toxins—many that haven’t even been studied because of the government’s “generally regarded as safe” policy that allows many food additives to bypass close inspection.

Chemical ingredients do more than extend the shelf life of these foods; they are also added to create more appealing textures, colors, and flavors. Many of these are presumed safe only because they’re a small percentage of the total makeup of a food product.

Switching to a diet of real foods from a processed food diet can make a huge difference in gut health.

Dr. Ari Grinspan, associate professor of medicine and director of the fecal microbiota transplant program at Mount Sinai Hospital, told The Epoch Times about one type of food additive—emulsifiers.

Emulsifiers, which can be made from natural plant-based or synthetic ingredients, help prevent the separation of ingredients, such as oil and water, in processed foods. Emulsifiers extend the shelf life of packaged foods.

A 2021 study in Microbiome found several emulsifiers can change the makeup of the microbiome and increase gut inflammation.

We can also ingest toxic ingredients in pharmaceutical products, supplements, beverages, and unfiltered tap water. The lack of regulation and confusing studies that are often funded by biased sources means that reducing your toxin exposure is a personal responsibility.

In many instances, marketing messages have a powerful influence on what we eat and drink, as Dr. Scott Doughty, integrative family practitioner with U.P. Holistic Medicine, told The Epoch Times. He’s no longer surprised when patients believe diet sodas are healthy or think nothing about the amount of alcohol they drink.

Both products can throw off balance in the microbiome and damage health. Doughty’s approach is to educate and empower patients to make better choices, rather than handing out restrictive prescription diets his patients would never choose.

His starting point is asking, “What do you think is the most impactful change you can make in your lifestyle?”

It’s a simple but powerful assessment tool.

Another straightforward strategy to detoxify is eliminating, reducing, or rethinking sweets. Excess processed sugar is toxic to the human body.

“It also really disrupts the microbiome. It feeds the bad bacteria and contributes to dysbiosis,” Palanisamy said. “Avoid artificial sweeteners because they also disrupt the microbiome.”

He suggested reducing servings of sugar—and its artificial knockoffs—or replacing sugar with the natural substitutes xylitol, monk fruit, or stevia.

Belly Fat

Sugar isn’t only toxic, but it also can lead to another gut microbiome risk factor: obesity.  

And when you combine obesity with a diet high in saturated fat and sugar, you’re more likely to suffer nonalcoholic fatty liver disease because of shifts these factors can trigger in the microbiome.

This metabolic process is seen in older patients and those with Type 2 diabetes, high cholesterol, and metabolic syndrome. It affects nearly 25 percent of adults. Fat often accumulates around the midsection in metabolic diseases, making obesity in the form of belly fat a key contributor to problems in the microbiome.

Fat that accumulates around the stomach is called visceral fat. It surrounds internal organs in the abdomen and produces hormones and other signaling molecules that can trigger inflammation linked to diseases that range from cancer to Type 2 diabetes.

That may explain why studies show those who are obese have different types and ratios of bacteria in their microbiomes. This difference seems to trigger the activation of inflammatory pathways that lead to the progression of disease, according to a 2019 article in the Journal of Clinical and Translational Hepatology.

Belly fat isn’t too complicated to reverse, especially in its early stages, Dr. Doni Wilson, a naturopathic doctor and certified nutrition specialist, told The Epoch Times. It’s often a matter of reducing or eliminating refined carbohydrates, sugar, and processed foods.

Author of “Master Your Stress Reset Your Health,” Wilson said oversized portions of food also can lead to an imbalance of microbes. Too much of any food also burdens the liver, and excess glucose—fuel for cellular energy—can end up stored as fat.

“It’s all this big, interrelated vicious cycle,” Wilson said.

She said gaining weight can also lead to sleep issues.

Poor Sleep

Circadian rhythm is “the most robust biomarker of health,” according to Satchindananda Panda, a researcher and professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and graduate of the Scripps Research Institute in LaJolla, California. He studies the genes, molecules, and cells that keep the whole body on the same circadian clock. He presented findings at the recent Digestive Disease Week in Chicago.

The most at risk of circadian dysfunction, he said, are shift workers, families of shift workers, the jet-lagged, and those who travel frequently.

“Disease risk goes up in response to circadian rhythm,” Panda said. “It’s a modulator of cellular functions.”

Unfortunately, sleep problems aren’t limited to shift workers and frequent travelers.

Obstructive sleep apnea—disrupted airflow during sleep that causes the upper airway to collapse—has a profound effect on the body. It ruins sleep, leaving the body in a declining state due to sleep fragmentation, intermittent hypoxia, and excess carbon dioxide in the blood, known as hypercapnia.

A 2021 article in the journal Sleep found that sleep fragmentation, intermittent hypoxia, and intermittent hypercapnia can all alter microbiome composition. Hypoxia is low levels of oxygen that can cause rapid heart rate, difficulty breathing, restlessness, and confusion. Hypercapnia comes with neurological symptoms such as confusion, as well as headaches and shortness of breath.

The prevalence of obstructive sleep apnea and its bidirectional relationship with the microbiome affects a large number of people—older adults especially—who are at risk of disease. As much as 38 percent of the population suffers obstructive sleep apnea, but in the elderly, the figure is 90 percent for men and 78 percent for women.

The microbiome may also play diverse roles in the quality of our sleep.

A 2019 PLos One study identified three phylum—Bacteroidetes, Firmicutes, and Actinobacteria—associated with sleep fragmentation in various ways. Bacteroidetes and Firmicutes are related to sleep quality, with growing evidence they may also modulate circadian rhythm and food intake, both of which impact sleep quality. Increased richness within the Actinobacteria phylum contributes to sleep quality.

Our microbes aren’t just good and bad. In the same way that a mixture of plants makes for a healthy ecosystem, a mixture of microbes makes for a healthy microbiome. And just as the dominance of one plant can destroy an ecosystem, the dominance of one microbe can ruin a microbiome.

Sometimes, a microbe’s role in the body depends on its numbers or location.

Bacteroides is the main member of the most common category of gut bacteria called Bacteroidetes, which make up 10 percent to 25 percent of the microbiome. It’s considered a pathobiont because it generally isn’t harmful but can become problematic, particularly if it escapes from the gut.

For the most part, Bacteroides is a good bug—aiding in immune system development, breaking down undigested food into compounds that support the growth of beneficial bacteria, and providing protection against infectious invaders. But when levels become too high, it’s associated with reduced diversity and insulin resistance.

Because Bacteroides is responsible for producing beta-glucuronidase, an enzyme that plays a huge role in clearing toxins from the body, high levels will create excessive enzymes that wreak havoc on the body and impair detoxification. Bacteroides-related dysbiosis is associated with Type 1 diabetes, breast cancer, and colon cancer.

Keeping an optimal pH in the colon by limiting the intake of animal fats and dairy and increasing certain prebiotics and polyphenols can help reduce the overgrowth of Bacteroides, Palanisamy says.

(Information adapted from The T.I.G.E.R. Protocol by Akil Palanisamy, MD. Copyright 2023 by Akil Palanisamy, MD. With permission from Balance, an imprint of Grand Central Publishing. All rights reserved.)

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