The Link to Immunity and Whole Body Health

Previous Lesson Review:
You learned the importance of incorporating alkalizing foods—and activities—into your life. You also learned what foods and activities will help you achieve a balanced, alkaline body.

Congratulations on your continued journey to whole-body health! Last lesson you learned what you can do to create an alkaline body that resists diseases like cancer and osteoporosis. This lesson you’ll learn how your digestive health is linked to immunity and overall wellness.

Digestive Health

Everything in your body is connected—it shouldn’t be a surprise that a healthy digestive system will greatly enhance your immune system while improving the absorption of nutrients and energy from the foods you eat. In our second lesson together, you learned that your body can experience stress from spending most of its energy on digestion. In this session you’ll discover ways to improve your digestive health and get helpful tips on what foods promote digestive efficiency.

Improving your digestive system helps your body assimilate nutrients more efficiently so you can use your energy for other activities. When you’re eating foods that are processed or acidic, your body has to work harder to digest and assimilate the nutrients it needs—having a healthy digestive system ensures that your body is efficient and effective at absorbing the nutritive value in the food you eat.

Welcome Unlikely Friends: Bacteria

Probiotics are the friendly, “good” bacteria that inhabit your body—especially your intestinal tract. These beneficial bacteria are the supportive intestinal flora that help your body digest, process and utilize complex carbohydrates and protein.

The regular consumption of probiotics increases the bioavailability of minerals (especially calcium), so your body gets more value out of what you feed it. But more than just helping your body get the most out of the food you eat, probiotics keep your whole digestive system balanced. Whether keeping your body’s other natural flora in check (yeast/candida, for example) or helping you get back in stride after antibiotic use, “traveler’s tummy” or other infections, you’ll be glad to have these microscopic friends aboard!

Primary probiotic strains include B.bifidum and L.acidopholous, though there are plenty of others. While usually cultured from dairy sources, you can find vegan-friendly, dairy-free probiotic blends in supplement form. A vegan-friendly whole food source of probiotics is brown rice miso paste.

Your team of friendly bacteria work for your digestive health by clearing out the indigestible remnants of food from your system. This clearing out activity has a two-fold benefit for you:
1) it eliminates residue that can cause gas, bloating and other discomfort, and 2) when a healthy population of friendly bacteria feeds off this residue and clears it out, it leaves a less-hospitable environment for the unfriendly bacteria that cause illness and infection, supporting your immune system by giving it fewer problems to fight off.

Prebiotics

The non-digestible components in food that support the growth of probiotics in your digestive track and essentially act as fuel for your team of friendly bacteria are referred to as prebiotics. If your objective is to encourage a healthy population of friendly bacteria to help with digestion, you’ll want to feed your friendly bacteria by adding food choices that deliver prebiotic elements, especially fiber and inulin. Prebiotic foods include:

• Soluble Fiber
• Chicory root (an excellent source of inulin which is a great prebiotic)
• Jerusalem artichoke
• Jicama
• Green tea (which studies suggest has polyphenols that help kill pathogenic, “bad” bacteria, while letting the good varieties thrive)

Energetic Enzymes

Want to get the maximum energy return from the foods you eat? Enzymes play a huge part in unlocking all the potential food brings to your body. Put simply: enzymes are the catalysts necessary for almost all biological processes to occur effectively—without the key action of enzymes, digestion fails, depriving your body of the nourishment and fuel contained within the food you eat.

Whole foods are naturally enzyme-rich—they come complete with the keys your body needs to unlock their nourishment. But when foods are cooked and processed, many of the important enzymes they offer are destroyed. Destroying these natural enzymes through processing means that before your body can make use of the food, it must first produce the missing enzymes which assist in absorption and assimilation of nutrients.

Producing enzymes that would otherwise be found in food creates additional work, and thus more uncomplementary stress for your body. Forcing your body to compensate for the processed food’s shortcomings in order for it to be digested is an inefficiency that can even result in lack of nutrient absorption altogether!

In fact, there is evidence to suggest many years of forcing your body to compensate for the enzymes lost in processing may actually exhaust the body’s enzyme-producing glands, resulting in poor digestion and assimilation of food later in life. Poor nutrition triggers symptoms associated with aging: wrinkles, fatigue, weight gain—all the things you’re not looking forward to!

I’ve said you can grow a younger body several times in our lessons and it’s true—if you actively seek out nutrient-dense, enzyme-rich foods that support your body instead of taxing it, your body will feel and appear younger.

Sprouts—An Enzyme-rich Fountain of Youth?

Obviously, you want a younger, more vibrant body—we all do! And getting the enzymes that will help you nourish that younger body is easier than you think. An unsung superfood awaits you in the produce section: sprouts.

Enzymatically-alive and nutrient-packed, sprouts are one of the most complete and nutritional foods you can find—and you can even grow them yourself in your own kitchen! Practically any edible seed can be sprouted: from radishes to flax, buckwheat to almonds, beans to classic alfalfa.

What makes sprouts such a superfood? When a seed sprouts, it’s literally digesting itself, using the protein and starch of the seed to feed the plant it will become—and creating amino acids in the process. This sprouting process gives your body a perfect, pre-digested food that yields high net-gain nutrition for the lowest energy cost possible. Sprouts are the most digestible protein source you’ll find—and they’re rich in the vitamins, minerals, phytonutrients and enzymes you need to help you achieve the younger body you seek!

Fabulous Fiber

It’s pretty hard to under-sell the benefits of fiber; consume a fiber-rich diet and you will:

• Stabilize blood-sugar levels and decrease insulin levels
• Reduce LDL and total serum cholesterol
• Detoxify and eliminate waste by cleansing your digestive system
• Boost energy
• Regulate or lose weight

In addition to these general health benefits, studies show a fiber-rich diet helps manage type-2 diabetes and serious digestive disorders such as colitis and irritable bowel syndrome, as well as reducing the risk of heart disease through lowered cholesterol.

Contributing to the health of your digestive system, getting enough fiber in your diet helps your body eliminate waste and detoxify—and it promotes an alkaline body. Dietary fiber has two forms—soluble and insoluble—which travel together in the best sources (like flaxseed). Soluble fiber slows the release of carbohydrates into your bloodstream—it’s the fiber that controls insulin levels and prolongs energy. Insoluble fiber’s main job is to create a sense of fullness that signals your body’s hunger mechanism to shut off; it’s also responsible for cleansing and detoxifying.

While both soluble and insoluble fiber play their own roles in helping your body reap all these possible benefits, what’s most important is simply to ensure you’re getting more fiber, period.

How much fiber do you really need? Most clinical studies that illustrate the benefits of a fiber-rich diet call for about 50 grams of dietary fiber per day—all from food sources (not from supplements!) If that sounds like a lot, you’re probably wondering: how can you possibly incorporate that much fiber into your diet? After sharing five lessons together, I think you already know the answer: the same whole, plant-based foods that are alkaline-forming and nutrient dense are also full of fiber!

These delicious, fiber-rich foods include:

• Leafy greens
• Vegetables
• Fruit
• Nuts and seeds
• Legumes
• Sprouted grains and pseudograins

Since you know plenty of other reasons to enjoy including these whole, plant-based foods in your diet, the fact that they’re also full of fiber is an added bonus!

Detox

After incorporating more whole, plant-based, healthy foods into your diet—and removing some of the less-beneficial, processed foods—you may begin feeling a little drained. Everyone is different, but some people experience what are known as detox symptoms when they begin eating a cleaner diet. You may experience symptoms including dizziness, fatigue, headaches, lack of focus and sometimes nausea. Don’t panic! These symptoms typically don’t last longer than a couple of days and are actually a sign that your body is cleansing.

Usually, the more shocking the dietary change is to your body, the worse the detox symptoms you’ll experience will be. So if eating clean is a fairly new concept for you, I would recommend easing into eating a healthier diet of whole, plant-based foods.

I can’t stress this suggestion enough: focus on adding rather than removing foods from your diet—change is a long-term strategy and you’ll succeed far more by approaching it at a pace you can commit to, rather than trying to take it all on at once, then risk getting discouraged and giving up.

Take Action:

• Take inventory of the food you eat and assess how well what you eat is supporting your good digestive health. This week, feed your friendly bacteria by adding prebiotic foods to your menu in two ways:

1. Try at least one new food from the prebiotic foods list this week
2. Make sure to include some of the fiber-rich food choices from this lesson, every day

• Include a source of probiotic bacteria in your routine by doing one of the following:

1. Take a vegan-friendly probiotic supplement a few times a week (you don’t need to take it every day)
2. Make a dish this week using brown rice miso paste (a whole food source of probiotics) as a condiment
3. Try Vega One All-In-One Nutritional Shake in your daily smoothie—I developed the blend to include all the non-dairy L. acidophilus and B. bifidum you’d need in a day, along with prebiotic support from chicory root

• Eat your sprouts! Start including sprouts in your big daily salad to ensure you’re getting active enzymes to assist with digestion while you get quality protein, too! Here are some sprout-related suggestions:

1. A huge variety of sprouts are available in most produce sections—don’t just stick with bean sprouts or alfalfa sprouts! Instead, try radish, sunflower, broccoli, garlic or onion sprouts or a sprout “deli-mix” to keep flavors and textures interesting
2. Sprouting in your own kitchen is criminally easy! All you need are seeds of your choice, a glass jar, a rubber band, some cheesecloth and 24 to 72 hours. Try it yourself! (Google: “How to sprout” for simple instructions)

• Listen to your body and remember not to panic if you start feeling symptoms of your body detoxifying. Instead, celebrate the fact that you’re working towards looking great, feeling great and having the energy you need to take on your dreams.

Next Lesson Preview:
You’ll learn which superfoods to choose as fuel for your life and how you can use them to heal and achieve optimum health.

Keep at it!

Brendan