Most people know that bread will rise if we mix sugar with yeast. However, most people, IBS ones in particular, do not know that the same chemical process happens in our intestines. What does that mean? It means the way we bloat is, actually, the same process. It means that there is a specific type of yeasts living in our guts. Its presence may be why bloating happens to us. Its presence can also be the reason why probiotics do not work. (And more importantly, its presence causes our guts to be leaky.)
However, it’s not your fault.
Why? We are trapped by and addicted to sugar. In the face of the powerful, overwhelming, and tricky marketing strategies of food giants, we are weak, powerless, and vulnerable.
What makes probiotics not work
The bread-and-bloating analogy (by a UK nutritionist name Glickman, 2017) seems to solve the following questions that kept lingering in my mind as some of my IBS friends have had zero improvements after taking probiotics:
- Why do probiotics work for only some IBS people but not all?
- Is there something in the gut blocking them from working?
- If yes, what is it?
After reading the book by Glickman, another analogy came to my mind: buying concert tickets. You can buy a concert ticket online by a few simple clicks. However, there are chances that you still can’t buy the ticket you want. And here is a simple reason why:
The seats are occupied.
Well, can the same happens to our guts? If there is something occupying the space in my friends’ guts, or in yours, then probiotics have no chance of squeezing into the intestines.
No more seats for the concert
Let me explain the no-more-seats-for-concert analogy clearer. Imagine your intestine is a concert venue and if most of the seats are being taken by something, probiotics can only take up a small portion of them. As a result, picture this: a large amount of “something” versus a small number of probiotics. Even if you keep taking a variety of probiotics to your intestine, they cannot do anything at all to improve your health.
Regarding that something, there could be quite a lot of possibilities. However, the most common one is a kind of yeasts, of which some of you may have heard: candida.
Be be fair, candida (in a small amount) is a perfectly alright situation for our bodies. It, however, become a problem to us when we have too many of them in our intestines (doctors call it candida overgrowth or candidiasis). In this situation, candida becomes something bad, so bad that it transforms (from a yeast to a fungus). And that transformation, according to Glickman, causes our stomach to blow up like a balloon (bloating).
However, bloating is not the biggest problem. Bloating could be a sign of something much more negative, much more harmful to our bodies: leaky gut.
What (on earth) is leaky gut?
Simply put, leaky gut is a (common) situation many IBS people suffer from. It is, indeed, a situation in which holes, which are tiny, in your small intestine become too large. Too large? Yes, the lining of your small intestine act as a barrier that only allows good things (e.g. nutrients) to get into your bloodstream. Under normal circumstances our lining acts as a doorman ensuring only good guys come into your bloodstream. However, under ‘unhealthy’ circumstances, your doorman allows bad guys to get in too.
Who are those bad guys? According to a post on Harvard Health Blog, they are food partially digested, toxins, and harmful microorganisms. So picture this (though it is a horrible picture): lots of bad guys running into your bloodstream, which means
lots of gangsters have a ‘party’ all over your body and your bloodstream may take them anywhere.
What causes leaky gut: sugar & food giants
Though many IBS people know that leaky gut is caused by a variety of reasons (e.g. stress and antibiotics), the most common cause in the society we live today is: sugar. Why? It is because we now live in a place where ‘sweetness’ is everywhere, and in a city where some giant cooperations lure us to take sugar as much as possible.
You do not believe it?
Honestly, you do not have to listen to, not to mention, believe in me. However, the idea that we are trapped by too much sugar offered by cooperation echoes the claims by two giants, one from the medical field, a paediatric endocrinologist at University of California (Robert Lustig), and the other being the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting in 2010 (Michael Moss).
Nowadays most people are addicted to sugar, and worst of all, trapped in a constant loop of eating more and more sugar (Lustig, 2017). Wait a moment. Addicted? Is that word a bit exaggerating? No, hundred-percent not. It is a fact in our modern society. How does this ‘exaggeration’ come about? When we take sugar, it triggers a surge of dopamine, a thing that give us immediate pleasure. But when we get used to a certain amount of sugar, we will want more. Think about it: The more we want it, the more we take it. And the more we take it, the more we want it. Is there a term more fitting than ‘addicted’ to describe this cycle?
A luring marketing strategy
Moreover, corporations, from the processed food industry, know about this cycle of addiction well, so well that they make use of it as part of their marketing strategies (Moss, 2012). What have they done to lure and trap us? Actually quite a lot and one of them has to do with healthy diets. Riding on the tide of healthy diets, they fill supermarkets and convenience stores with junk diets but using “all-natural” or “made with whole grains” to describe ‘foods’ that are still high in sugar (and calories).
Put simply, people, including ones with IBS like you and me, have leaky gut because we are trapped to the addiction of sugar, an addiction that is hard to combat due to the marketing strategies that are smart but harmful to us.
Reference
Robert Lustig
Michael Moss
