Different autoimmune conditions require different tests for a definitive diagnosis, but a good start is determining if you have leaky gut. For definitive advanced testing, here are four lab tests to consider, all of which can be done at home:
a Lactulose Breath Test (LBT), which is excellent for diagnosing small intestine bacterial overgrowth (SIBO) and leaky gut
an Organic Acids Test (OAT), which reveals vitamin and mineral deficiencies
an IgG (Immunoglobulin G) test, which checks for food allergies in the body
a stool test, which tells you the balance of good and bad microorganisms in the body
In the resource guide at the end of the book, you will find information on how you can order these tests. While you are waiting for these results, I would not waste any time—go ahead and get started on the Eat Dirt program and specific gut type protocols in part 3. Addressing the root causes of your leaky gut now could prevent you from progressing into full- blown autoimmune disease.
4
Eat Dirt
A
few years ago, my wife, Chelsea, and I were on a New York City subway on our way back to our hotel from Palma, our favorite organic Italian restaurant in Greenwich Village. We were enjoying a bit of dark chocolate when she dropped a large piece on the floor. Bummed, she bent down and picked up her piece of chocolate and put it back in the wrapper to throw away.“It’s okay. The five-second rule,” I teased.
Chelsea laughed. “No way! We’re on the subway.”
I thought of that moment when I read an incredible study in 2015, about how the microbes found in New York City public parks, the Gowanus Canal, and subway cars were harmless—and possibly even could be healthy.
A team of DNA-swabbing researchers, led by Weill Cornell Medical College geneticist Chris Mason, identified nearly six hundred different species of bacteria and microbes on New York City subways alone, from samples taken on handrails, seat backs, floors, and closing doors. Almost half of all DNA present on the subways’ surfaces matched no known organism. One subway station that was flooded during Hurricane Sandy still had the microbial profile of a marine environment.1
The researchers pointed to the sheer number of passengers—1.7 billion every year—as the source of the bacterial diversity. But rather than make us reach for the hand sanitizer, they said, these findings should encourage us to spend more time on subways, to expose ourselves to this rich microbial dirt. Mason even joked that he would advise any new parent to “roll their child on the floor of the
New York subway,” because exposure to germs and certain infections—
especially at a young age—primes the immune system to defeat germs, viruses, and bad bacteria in the future.2
While I can’t envision many new parents rushing to take his advice, I deeply appreciate the message behind his words. If we are ever going to slow the epidemic of leaky gut, reverse course on the autoimmune crisis, and address the rising tide of all chronic illness in the world, there’s one thing we need to do more than anything else: we need to eat more dirt.
For the past century, in so many facets of our lives, we’ve been trying to blast bacteria. The goal was understandable: bugs bad, clean good. But in our misguided attempt to keep ourselves and our families safe, we have exposed ourselves to a growing health crisis. We have oversanitized our daily lives, and our bodies, relying on disinfectants and sanitizers, spending most of our time indoors, and rushing to get prescriptions for antibiotics any time we (or our kids) feel sick. Now we know that living in too sterile of an environment makes our bodies more vulnerable to disease, not less. In the past, scientists called this the
“hygiene hypothesis”—the idea that limiting our exposure to bacteria, especially in childhood, makes us more likely to have a suppressed immune system. Now we know that what’s most threatening is our modern lack of “old friends,” the commensal and mutualist bacteria and other microbes in our microbiome that help fine-tune our immune responses to our environment.
By living in a squeaky-clean bubble and turning germs and dirt into villains to be destroyed or avoided at all costs, we’ve kept some of our most powerful allies for health at arm’s length—and the devastating ramifications are piling up all around us. Researchers at the California Institute of Technology have estimated the recent sevenfold to eightfold increase in rates of autoimmune disorders such as Crohn’s disease, type 1 diabetes, and multiple sclerosis is directly related to the lack of beneficial microbes in our gut.3
We’ve been waging our war in five main ways: oversanitizing our lives;
eating processed, nonorganic foods; using modern conveniences that expose us to environmental toxins; living daily with unrelenting stress; and overmedicating. In doing so, we’ve ceded the battle for our microbiome and left our gut barrier wide open—and, ironically, completely vulnerable to the strains of bacteria that we were trying so hard to avoid in the first place.
I’ll go over each of these five factors in detail in part 2, spelling out ways we can fight back in the five-step Eat Dirt program, as well as the five gut type protocols in part 3. But thankfully, the answer to many of our leaky gut issues is pretty simple: we just have to eat more dirt.
— Take Your Daily Dirt —
As you’ve read in the last three chapters, our bodies are paying the price for our modern lifestyle. Bacterial organisms have been around since the beginning of time—and the human gut has always been the first line of defense, the largest area of direct contact between us and the world.4 Our misguided attempts to dominate nature—rather than live within it—have left us in an extremely compromised position. Thankfully, we are coming full circle. We’re starting to recognize how important it is to embrace our elemental existence. Because we are literally made of mud.
If you were to take away the water in our bodies, you’d be left with mostly dirt, made of sixty of the most abundant elements in the Earth’s crust.5 This isn’t such a new idea, really—it’s an age-old one. The idea that humans are made from mud is foundational to many of the world’s leading religions, including Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. In Christianity and Judaism, Genesis 2:7 (NLT) says, “Then the Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground. He breathed the breath of life into the man’s nostrils, and the man became a living person.”
We are an amalgam of the Earth’s elements: oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus, with traces of potassium, sulfur, sodium, iron, and magnesium. All of these elements come together to make a living, breathing human being. And as much as we’d like to believe we’ve grown much more sophisticated since the earliest days of humans, the truth is that our genome is basically the same as it was when we first appeared on Earth—while the microbiome continues to evolve every single day.
We have to stop seeing ourselves as the masters of the universe and eat some humble mud pie. The only way for us to coexist peacefully and healthfully with the microbes around is to simply give in and eat dirt.
Now, when I say “eat dirt,” I’m not ordering you to actually scoop up a handful of soil and eat it. (Well, not exactly.) True, ensuring you get daily microexposures to soil-based organisms in dirt and other plant life is a part of the program. But I urge you to embrace the idea of “eating dirt” as a broader philosophy, an overarching principle I teach my patients when I talk to them about healing their gut health. It’s a slightly different way of looking at the world and our place in it. And I not only preach this philosophy—I live it.
Let me tell you how I like to start the day.
Every morning around seven o’clock, rain or shine, Chelsea and I take Oakley, our Cavalier King Charles spaniel, for a twenty-minute stroll along a neighborhood path in our hometown of Nashville, Tennessee. We use this quiet time to wake up our bodies and get our blood flowing before we attack our daily schedules.
Our early walk also serves as Oakley’s morning constitutional. We let him off his leash and watch him hop through mud puddles and chase after squirrels.
About a half mile down the path, Chelsea and I turn around—which prompts Oakley to scamper after us.
Back home, we enter through the garage, but before I let Oakley into the
laundry room and the rest of the house, I plunk myself down on the doorstep and gather him into my arms. Invariably, he’s covered in something, whether it’s leaves, pollen, or dirt. After fluffing his silky chestnut red-and-white coat, I grab his paws and brush off the dirt—and, with that, beneficial microbes enter the bloodstream through my skin’s absorbent epidermal layer. These beneficial microbes:
reinforce the numbers of good bacteria already in my gut
teach those the beneficial bacteria information about responding to pathogens in the surrounding area
aid my body in creating nutrients, including vitamin B12 and vitamin K2 support my digestion and absorption of minerals
reduce my inflammation
help heal (or prevent) leaky gut
I’ve had a dog since I was a kid, and I credit many of those walks, and much of that paw dirt, with giving me the cumulative microexposures that have helped my immune system avoid allergies. In fact, medical research has proven that having a cat or a dog as a kid cuts our risk of allergies in half.
I’ve become such a believer in the health benefits of getting my hands dirty that I’m constantly looking for ways to touch, feel, and yes, even eat dirt. My favorite way is through produce: when I purchase a fresh bunch of organically grown carrots at the farmer’s market, I know I’m going to be far better off simply rinsing my carrots under running water instead of scrubbing them with a brush and some kind of produce wash, because the surface area of every carrot contains beneficial microbes. When I do this, I can take in an average five hundred milligrams of old-fashioned dirt each day, the same amount the average child consumes when playing outdoors. Five hundred milligrams, essentially the size of an average supplement capsule, may not sound like much—but there are probably more beneficial microbes in that small amount of dirt than there are people living on Earth today.6