The Link Between Neolithic Foods and Leaky Gut
Now that we know what leaky gut is, let’s
find out why your gut is leaking. There’s good news and bad news about this one. The good news is, the causes of leaky gut are well documented. Bad news is, they’re pretty extensive. Chances are you’re going to have to give up some things you take for granted or really enjoy. Trust me when I tell you it will be worth it in the long run.
Quite a lot of research links Neolithic foods with autoimmunity.12 These are foods that recently entered the human diet. And by “recent,” I don’t mean March of last year. I mean some ten thousand years ago, when foods like grains, legumes, and dairy were introduced into our diets on a grand scale. Even nightshade vegetables like potatoes, tomatoes, eggplant, and peppers, all products of the New World, were not widely available, if at all.
Our genetic make-up has been shaped by millions of years of evolution. This make-up determines our nutritional and activity needs. Although human genes have remained pretty much unchanged since the agricultural revolution ten thousand years ago, our diet and lifestyle have not. The huge changes our diet and lifestyle have undergone since the Neolithic era, and even more so during the Industrial Revolution, have messed us up big time.
In modern Western cultures at least 70 percent of our calories come from foods that were rarely or never consumed by Paleolithic hunter-gatherers.
Doctors James O’Keefe and Loren Cordain state that the mismatch between our modern diet and lifestyle and our Paleolithic genome plays a substantial role in the ongoing epidemics of obesity and disease,13 and that returning to a Paleolithic-type diet may reduce the risk of many diseases, including cardiovascular disease, metabolic syndrome, diabetes, cancer, acne, and autoimmune conditions.14
Now, as for the ole “Grains have been found at Paleolithic sites!” and “There’s no way Grok would have passed up milk! ” arguments, think about this:
any exposure we had to these foods would have been seasonal and short before the advent of agriculture. If you were susceptible to the proteins in those foods and you started to get sick, chances are you would have run out of the supply of that particular food before you started to develop obesity, autoimmune issues, or cancer. Frankly, autoimmune diseases take time to develop, but given that we have access to Neolithic foods 365 days a year, we have set the stage for them to flourish.
Now let’s take a closer look at these everyday modern foods that cause us so much gut ache and grief.
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CASEIN (DAIRY)
According to Sarah Ballantyne, the medical biophysicist behind the blog PaleoMom.com, dairy is designed to create a leaky gut:
In newborn infants, a leaky gut is essential so that some components of mother’s milk can get into the bloodstream, like hormones and all the antibodies that a mother makes that helps boost her child’s immune system. While this is essential for optimal health in babies, it becomes a problem in the adult digestive tract where there are more things present that we don’t want to leak into the bloodstream. Drinking milk from a different species seems to make matters worse since the foreign proteins can cause a larger immune response.41
Human milk is made for humans. It’s designed to signal our hormones that we’re ready to grow. It also contains certain antimicrobial compounds that are designed to help establish healthy gut flora in infants. These protective factors are missing in the milk of dairy animals,42 although scientists are working on developing genetically engineered goats to see if the GMO goat milk will have similar benefits to human milk. Thanks but no thanks.
Dairy contains a hormone called betacellulin, which has the ability to pass through the gut wall, taking fragments of the milk protein casein along with it, and whatever else you’ve eaten with your meal.43 That’s bad news. Casein, the main protein in milk, also has immune- compromising properties.44
Dairy has also proved to be insulinemic, meaning that a lot of insulin gets released when you consume it. Lots of insulin means more insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1). IGF-1 regulates cell growth and development and has insulin-like effects in the human body. Cow milk actually contains large amounts of bioidentical IGF-1, so it’s a double whammy. (Cow IGF-1 is identical to human IGF-1, so when we consume it, it acts like our own hormones.) That ends up being especially bad for HS, since elevated insulin levels result in increased growth of the skin around the hair follicles. We’ll discuss why this is such a problem for us in chapter five, The Hormone Connection.
For susceptible people, dairy causes acne, allergy symptoms, and asthma and has been directly linked to cancer and autoimmune conditions such as arthritis and multiple sclerosis. Insulin, IGF-1, and the elevated levels of estrogen in milk from pregnant cows (the very milk you pur-chase at the supermarket) has been
directly linked to prostrate cancer in men.45 If that isn’t enough, consumption of milk (but not cheese and yogurt) has been shown to
bring on early menstruation in girls.46
Paleo experts such as Sarah Ballantyne, Loren Cordain, Robb Wolf, and Chris Kresser all suggest the removal of dairy for optimal gut health. I suggest removing it not only for gut health, but also for hormonal stability.
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How will you get your calcium, you ask? It’s interesting to note that in order for your body to absorb the calcium in “healthy” lowfat dairy products, it requires fat and magnesium to go along with it. Get your calcium from green leafy vegetables cooked in bacon fat; your bones and teeth will thank you.
Watch Out For: Nonfat or lowfat milk; flavored milk products; pasteur-ized and homogenized dairy prod¬ucts; cheese, especially processed; frozen yogurt, sweetened yogurt, yogurt in a tube; anything containing “sodium caseinate,” “calcium caseinate”
