Clean Gut

The Breakthrough Plan for Eliminating the Root Cause of Disease and Revolutionizing Your Health

Alejandro Junger

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780062075895
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Diseases & Allergies

In Clean Gut, Alejandro Junger, M.D, New York Times bestselling author of Clean and creator of the world-famous Clean Program, delivers a complete toolkit for reversing disease and sustaining life-long health.

All of today's most-diagnosed ailments can be traced back to an injured and irritated gut. The gut is an intricate and powerful system, naturally designed to protect and heal the body every moment of every day And yet for far too many of us, this remarkable system is in disrepair, which leads to all kinds of health problems—from extra pounds, aches and pains, allergies, mood swings, and lack of libido, to heart disease, cancer, autoimmune disorders, insomnia, and depression.

But we no longer have to be sick to get healthy. In this groundbreaking program, Alejandro Junger, M.D. explains how instead of treating the symptoms as they arise, we can preemptively attack disease before it takes root in the gut.

No matter your current state of health, you will benefit from this program: Clean Gut will help you put an end to everyday ailments, reverse chronic disease, and achieve true, long-lasting health.

CHAPTER ONE

The Root Cause of Disease

My first lesson in good medicine came when I was a young boy growing up in Uruguay, many years before I started medical school. It arrived from the unlikeliest of people. I used to follow around a gardener named Fermin as he tended to the plants in our home. I noticed that when he saw an unhealthy tree, he spent most of his time inspecting the roots and the soil around them. He only took a quick glance at the leaves. He would then devise a plan: more water, less water, fertilizer, pest removal, or some other remedy he kept in his gardening toolbox. I always wondered why he wasted his time down there around the roots when the problem was clearly up here on the leaves. I mean, I was actually staring at the problem!

When I asked Fermin why he cared so much about the roots, he simply smiled. “Boy,” he said, “that’s the way nature designed it. Your tree’s health and disease start in its roots.” My first thought at the time, if I remember correctly, was yeah, whatever, but I couldn’t argue with Fermin’s results. Time and time again Fermin took care of most problems by changing the conditions around the roots. The leaves always returned lush and green. Fermin was a good gardener, and a wise man.

The reason I say this was my first lesson in good medicine is because after eight years of medical school, six years of training, and another fifteen years of practice, I came to the conclusion that good medicine is very much like good gardening. Imagine you have a tree you love. One day you notice its leaves have turned brown. They will, you understand, soon wither and fall off. Imagine now that you call an expert who, after close examination of the leaves, recommends that you paint them green and attach them back to their branches so the tree can at least appear to be healthy. Everyone would agree that’s crazy. If you want to get your tree truly healthy, you can’t just cover up the problem. You need to get to the root of it. And just like Fermin used to say, the problem is most likely in the roots.

While I was in medical school the trend in modern medicine was to specialize and super specialize. Doctors became experts in one organ or even one part of one organ. More advanced technology helped not only detect problem areas, but also treat them. The advances of science were mesmerizing, and people held the practice of medicine in high regard. The great irony of our success, however, was that we only got better at painting the leaves. We went way beyond gardeners who paint the brown leaves green. We cut out whole branches and replaced them with healthier ones. Or built artificial branches and leaves altogether. We got so good at attacking individual diseases and symptoms we forgot to look at their root causes.

Take the medical community’s response to inflammation, for instance. After I completed my training as a cardiologist, in 1998, scientists started to notice that all chronic diseases—regardless of how different each disease seemed or where each disease presented in the body—shared one common condition: inflammation. Identified as a precursor of disease, the medical establishment turned its attention to fighting it. Inflammation quickly became the “new disease on the block.” Hundreds of articles, studies, and books were written about it, and entire industries were born in the fight against it. While the fight against inflammation helped many people alleviate their suffering, it is really just the first symptom of disease. The fight against it is really just another example of modern medicine’s attempt to keep individual leaves vibrant and green while the plant is dying. We still need to get to the root of disease.

Clean Gut does this. Before chronic disease, there is inflammation; but before inflammation comes gut dysfunction. Anti-inflammation treatments help, but gut repair corrects the problem right at its source.

In these pages I reveal how your overall health is connected to a singular area of the body, your gut. I explain how the root of almost all chronic diseases also starts in your gut. You will discover that most of the “diseases” being diagnosed in epidemic proportions—such as heart disease, cancer, autoimmune diseases, insomnia, depression, asthma, diabetes, and arthritis—can all be traced back to your injured and irritated gut.

Even if you have not been diagnosed with a specific disease, many of the minor ailments you may be suffering from—such as tiredness, aches and pains, allergies, mood swings, lack of libido, bad breath, body odor, eczema, and constipation—may also be directly related to gut dysfunction. In addition, a damaged gut will lead to premature aging. These symptoms are often justified and attributed to the unavoidable wear and tear of your aging body, but they are ultimately directly related to the health of your gut and can be reversed by a gut repair program.

In fact, most health issues affecting the world’s populace today are the result of a disrupted, damaged gut. It is critical that we make this vitally important information and health tool available to everyone. Clean Gut is a proven path to avoiding disease and reclaiming your own power to get truly healthy.

In my first book, Clean, I explained how the toxic chemicals we are exposed to, and the toxic conditions we create in our lives, are responsible for many of our health problems. Nobody escapes this reality. This is true now more than ever. There are great possible benefits for most people when they learn how to activate and support their bodies’ detoxifying organs and systems. The twenty-one-day Clean cleanse has helped thousands do just that.

In Clean Gut, I share a powerful new program, a critical tool in preemptively attacking and eliminating disease at the root. We do not have to wait until we are sick to get healthy. Let me explain. The most common toxins come in our food, and your gut bears the brunt of these toxins. Even toxins that are absorbed through your skin and lungs will eventually end up causing havoc in your gut. Take a shower with unfiltered water in any city in America and you will end up with some amount of chlorine circulating in your blood, which will reach the cells at the lining of your gut and negatively affect the gut’s good bacteria. The reality is that life these days is not gut friendly.

It is unquestionable that the state of human health is in crisis. We are sick and getting sicker. Everyone seems to be suffering from something, getting tests done, taking over-the-counter and prescription medications. Chronic diseases are on the rise. Too many people are diagnosed with a growing number of diseases. It is out of control. When I was in medical school, I saw many patients with cancer, but this was not the case in my personal life. Today, however, many of my friends have cancer and many more people I know are being diagnosed with it. Diseases that were rare in the 1980s, such as autoimmune diseases, are now global epidemics.

Not only is the state of human health in crisis, the state of our medical system is also about to collapse. Doctors have no reservations about spitting out a diagnosis, ordering sophisticated tests, and prescribing treatments, which include drastic surgeries and radical combinations of prescription drugs to silence our symptoms. These combinations of chemicals are often effective in suppressing symptoms but are frequently all too toxic. Many health issues, and in some cases death, are caused by treatments given to patients by the most competent doctors.

A pill for an ill to suppress symptoms is a lot like painting the brown leaves green for a sick tree. It is just bad gardening. And it doesn’t work. I talk to people all over the world, and there is a general frustration with the current state of medicine. People are disappointed by their doctors and upset by the lack of information and real, lasting solutions. We were taught to trust physicians and to be fascinated by and grateful to science, but this kind of blind faith in the medical profession is beginning to wane.

There are still many of us who believe we are diagnosing more diseases because we are constantly getting better at it through better science and technology. It is far too easy to accept the current state of medical care and assume that without it things would probably be much worse. We are told and expected to believe that diseases are a combination of bad luck and bad genes—mainly that diseases happen when the body is doing something wrong.

Symptoms are grouped into syndromes, which are classified by systems. A series of laboratory tests are often necessary to confirm a diagnosis. Treatment is usually a standardized plan, which mostly consists of surgeries and medications. It doesn’t matter which patient has a particular disease but what particular disease a patient has. Modern medicine offers the same treatment for the same diagnosis no matter who you are.

It doesn’t have to be this way. By focusing on gut health, you can eliminate disease at the root, and protect your health for the long term. Even if you have followed Clean or another program that focuses on detoxification and have already eliminated the majority of your exposure to toxic chemicals, your gut may still be in need of further repair. Organic, chemical-free food can also negatively affect your gut’s health if eaten in the wrong combinations, frequency, or quantity. Certain foods—such as sugar, caffeine, and dairy—that you may have not yet identified could be toxic triggers, which initiate a cascade of reactions that erode your health from the roots up.

All these negative and toxic influences disrupt the gut. Simply reverting to a “healthy” diet is not enough. Special measures must be taken and specific conditions must be met in order to aid our bodies in their attempts to repair themselves. This is what we do with other organs in our bodies when the damage is beyond “natural self-repair.”

Within the medical community, the word “gut” is a loosely defined term. It’s more often used as just another way to talk about our intestines. When I use the word gut, however, I refer to a lot more than just the body’s digestive tube. I mean the living organisms inside the gut, the intestinal flora, and the immune and nervous systems within and around the walls of the intestines. The body doesn’t make a distinction between these different parts. Nor should we. Together, these different organs and tissues make up the gut, one of the most complex and important instruments in your body. Your health and well-being depend on all these parts working in concert, at their highest levels, in more ways than you can imagine. It’s simple, really: if you learn about how your gut works and understand how to repair and keep it clean, you will achieve vibrant, long-lasting health.

The gut performs essential functions in the body. The different organs of the gut, while working interdependently, remain in constant communication with each other through nerves and hormones. How the gut functions has both a direct and indirect effect on every single cell in the human body, from the cells in your bone marrow deep inside your bones to the hair and skin on the surface. Often dysfunctions in the gut cause symptoms in the unlikeliest parts of the body. A rash on the skin, for instance. When you notice a rash, you consult a dermatologist. Because the rash is something you can see and feel, chances are the dermatologist will focus his or her attention there and prescribe a cream to eliminate the rash or the accompanying itchiness. In other words, the dermatologist is simply painting the brown leaves green. This is just one example of how a dysfunction in the gut presents itself as a different symptom somewhere—anywhere—else in the body. There are countless others. As I regularly tell patients, the gut is the body’s great trickster, hiding in plain sight. It fools almost everyone, including doctors and even gastroenterologists, into thinking that it’s perfectly fine. That the real problem is somewhere else.

The medical establishment continues to minimize or entirely overlook gut health in the way I talk about it here. The state of the art of prevention in gastroenterology is a colonoscopy for early polyp detection and excision. Doctors are constantly searching for a link between specific organs and certain types of illness, disease, and germs without thinking how the gut factors in. Or they focus on the organs that seem to have more of an immediate impact on our immediate survival, such as the heart, which has to continue beating, the kidneys, which have to filter the blood, or the brain, which has to fire neurons. Modern medicine continues as “a pill for an ill” industry largely because very few doctors pay close attention to the gut. Just as the secret to a lush garden starts in the plants’ roots, the body’s health begins in the gut, its own internal roots. The gut is the center of health, illness, and dysfunction. If you want to figure out why your leaves are turning brown, so to speak, look at your gut.

Clean Gut will help your body repair your gut. No matter your current state of health, you will benefit from this program. Based on the four Rs of functional medicine—Remove, Replace, Reinoculate, and Repair—the Clean Gut program is divided into two distinct phases. The first phase is a twenty-one-day diet, which focuses on eating easily digestible and low-sugar foods while removing the kinds of food that lead to gut dysfunction. It also includes necessary supplements that will address the different aspects of gut repair that your body needs outside help with. The second—and crucial—phase is a seven-day reintroduction process, the purpose of which is to identify the foods that do you the most harm. These toxic triggers, as I call them, must be identified to fully restore and maintain gut health. Combined, this is a comprehensive program that can be easily integrated into your daily life and has the potential to heal and restore the area in your body that is most taxed by your everyday life: your gut.

We are all walking around with damaged guts and, to different degrees, suffering the consequences in our day-to-day and long-term health. Without an optimally functioning gut, we simply don’t have a chance of achieving true long-lasting health. When we repair the gut and eliminate the root of disease, however, major and minor symptoms disappear, and we discover what it means to be truly healthy.

For some, it may be a very subtle improvement, but subtle improvement can be phenomenal. A good friend of mine lives a really healthy life. Jimmy eats well and exercises regularly. He says he always feels great. But, as my friend, he’s had to listen to me describe what I observe in so many people. Eventually, he got curious and decided to try the Clean Gut program. After the program, he described that he was breathing more deeply and slowly, and the air in his lungs felt fresh and new, unlike anything he had ever experienced before. He described being more alert and aware and feeling that breathing gave him more satisfaction and pleasure. The result was a better and clearer experience of every minute of the day.

For others, the results will be more far-reaching, such as it was for Magdalena. She had always felt tired and had many debilitating symptoms: dry mouth, dry eyes, joint pain, multiple infections lasting weeks, and many others. She visited many doctors until one finally diagnosed Behçet’s syndrome, an autoimmune disease. She was told that the treatment for the severity of her disease was methotrexate, a chemotherapy agent also used for many types of cancer. What frightened Magdalena the most was that this treatment greatly reduced her chances of getting pregnant. She contacted me from Uruguay shortly thereafter. I put her on the Clean Gut program as a trial before she started her methotrexate treatment. After twenty-one days, the majority of Magdalena’s symptoms had completely disappeared or were significantly reduced. Magdalena reported that she had never felt so strong, so good, or so healthy in her life. She decided against the treatment and is instead focusing on getting pregnant.

Whether we are just repairing inevitable minor damage or eliminating diseases at their root, improving gut health has rewarded my patients with a new level of health and vibrancy they never imagined. This approach to gut repair is the most powerful healing tool in my medical toolbox, and it has helped many of my patients all over the world. Now you can do it by following the Clean Gut program as outlined in chapter 6. Restore your gut’s health and stop disease from the get-go—or, more accurately, from the gut-go!

Just as Clean was not a product of multimillion-dollar clinical trials or a pharmaceutical company sponsorship, Clean Gut is also the result of my personal, spiritual, and professional journey, a journey that led me around the world, all the way back to my first lesson with Fermin.

CHAPTER TWO

The Patient, the Teacher, and the Doctor

I didn’t just wake up one day and decide to reinvent myself as a doctor. I was desperately looking for solutions for my own health problems.

After an intense residency at Beekman, New York University’s Downtown Hospital, and a grueling cardiology fellowship at Lenox Hill Hospital, where I ran the cardiac intensive care unit during my nights on call, my health was in ruins. Six straight years of endless workdays, sleepless nights, and a steady diet of microwavable dinners and fast food had done a number on my system. I was exhausted and overweight. ...

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Contents
• Chapter One - The Root Cause of Disease
• Chapter Two - The Patient, the Teacher, and the Doctor
• Chapter Three - The Gut: Your Second Brain
• Chapter Four - How We Get Sick: Gut Dysfunction
• Chapter Five - Survival Disguised as Disease
• Chapter Six - The Clean Gut Program
• Chapter Seven - Guiding Principles for Living Clean for Life
• Clean Gut Recipes
• Resources
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• About the Author
• Books by Alejandro Junger
• Back Ad
• Credits
• Copyright
• About the Publisher