Kick Sugar to Heal Your Gut in Midlife

From the video captions, as spoken.

So, let's talk about inflammation because inflammation is the thread that kind of ties so much of this together. And there's a chain here and it starts way sooner than in the gut. Sugar, processed food, and chronic stress all push the body towards insulin resistance. Now, I want to talk about sugar really honestly because sugar I would consider the single largest addiction in our culture and almost nobody names it as one. Really think about it.

Of all of the addictions we bring attention to, sugar is the one that's often left out because we're so used to turning to sugar to change the way we feel. It is a huge emotional coping strategy. It is. And sugar and a lot of our processed foods and sugars are literally engineered to keep us reaching for more. And it is in nearly everything.

It's in your breads. It's in your sauces. It's in yogurt. It's in your coffee drinks. It's in granola marked healthy on the front of the box.

And it hides, you know, the American Heart Association caps added sugar for Women at 25 grams a day. That's 6 teaspoons. Now, 1 cup of orange juice has 21 grams. Now, it's not technically added sugar, but the bloodstream doesn't know the difference. All right.

Now, I'm not talking about nutritional value, but your 6-ounce glass of orange juice and a wedge of chocolate cake. The sugar is sugar. It's not about which is more nutritious, right? Obviously, the orange juice is more nutritious than the chocolate cake, but if they each had 23 grams of sugar in them, that's equal to your body, to the glucose in your body.

Your bloodstream doesn't gauge was it orange juice or was it chocolate cake. So stripped of its fiber, that healthy glass hits you with close to a full day's worth of sugar. And this is before breakfast. So here's what sugar does in our bodies. Every time your blood sugar spikes, your body pumps out insulin to clear it.

So spike after spike, day after day, our cells stop responding properly. So the body pumps out more and more insulin to compensate. The excess insulin in itself is inflammatory. So a body running on sugar keeps a low fire burning all day long. Now on top of that many of us are not eating whole foods primarily anymore.

Our diet is riddled with processed and packaged foods. You know, the kind that comes with a barcode and a shelf life instead of a peel or a stem or a bone. Okay. Those foods carry the sugars, the industrial oils, and the additives that also feed the very same fire. Now, many people are living sedentary lives, sitting for a lot of the day, which leaves blood sugar sitting high and sluggish in the bloodstream instead of getting burned for fuel.

So, 1 of the simplest, most honest things that I can say to you today is if you want to heal your gut, you have to kick your sugar habit. Okay? I'm not saying it's easy, but it is simple. It is that simple. You have to get your blood sugar steady, and you can't get it steady on packaged processed foods.

You just can't. Steady blood sugar, mostly whole foods, and a body that moves. This is the ground that your gut heals on. Now, here's where sex hormones also enter in. And I'll keep this brief, okay?

As estrogen drops in Midlife, 1 of the brakes on inflammation also now comes off. So the very season that Autoimmune tends to surface is also the season that your natural anti-inflammatory protection is starting to thin out. So this is part of a perfect storm. Okay? And sustained inflammation is incredibly hard on that 1-cell-thick gut lining.

So as I said, when the gut lining gets damaged, little gaps open up. Undigested particles, bacteria, and toxins begin to leak through. Now the immune system, which does a large portion of its work in the gut, on the order of about 70%, mounts an attack and researchers describe this as the pathway into Autoimmunity. Now, inflammation. Initially, you may think of inflammation as something red, hot or swollen, like a banged up knee. Okay?

But inflammation is so much bigger than this. Inflammation can be the cold that lingers for weeks. Okay? Or you get sick and then it goes away and then it comes back. The sinus headaches, the migraines, constipation, bloating, hair loss, brain fog, joint pain, fatigue, allergies that come out of nowhere.

And just those aches that you just maybe have started calling getting older. So, a lot of Women hear the word inflammation, and they don't relate or self-identify as somebody living with inflammation. And this is exactly how inflammation hides in plain sight, right? A lot of people don't think of the joint pain and the fatigue and the brain fog as inflammation.

But inflammation starts in the gut long before you feel it anywhere else.