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Healing the earth by healing ourselves? Peter Cornah February ‘23
Healing ourselves through knowledge of the human body – how it is built and functions.
Part 1;
Our gut – this is truly something that is right at the fore-front of modern thought and research – and for good reason.
After conception and our bodies start to appear from their single cell origin, the gut starts to form at about 3-4 weeks. It is worth bearing in mind that the embryonic heart does not start to beat until 5 weeks!
Up to 6 weeks the gut is just a hollow tube running from one end of the body to the other. In the distant past of history, when I was at learning medicine, it used to be taught that the gut formed from 2 two types of tissue . These days a third tissue type is known to be involved and much is made of this. This third type goes on to form the enteric nervous system - our gut brain - more of this anon!
Now it turns out that, at this really early part of our journey through life, the gut is ‘remembering’ a time when during our evolutionary history the gut was just this simple tube . Earthworms have the same arrangement. and you may think that this is a bit primitive, but the simple earthworm is a critical part of the health and diversity of the soil – this is a simple parallel between our health and soil health. These are starting to appear again and again!
Anyone who has suffered a bowel colic, say when the gut is blocked for any reason, will appreciate that the bowel is a hollow muscular tube which screams in these circumstance. They will know that the agonising, relapsing - throwing you around the bed - bowel colic is felt exquisitely in the midline of your belly, a memory going back millions of years, reflecting our development as a species, but also goes back decades to our development before birth. Commonly this pain is felt in the early stages of appendicitis. (The communist type of colic is child birth! Here the hollow muscular tube, the womb is obstructed by a baby! Inflammatory pain is quite different it makes you lie as still as possible to protect the inflamed area.)
Most of us will have seen pictures I suppose of the twists and turns of the gut through the belly this is a process which starts early in our development (I seem to remember someone once said it looks like the contents of a suitcase that had been packed in a mighty big hurry). At the very earliest stages the bowel becomes attached to and irrevocably joined with certain nerves and arteries which rotate with the gut, in a sort of sacred swirl around the abdomen - the arteries are fascinating but the nerves are even more interesting!
Part 2. Swirling Arteries and Nerves; what is this all about?
In the first part it was mentioned that we had something which I called an ‘enteric nervous system’. You could think about our nervous system as in two parts, one the brain and spinal cord and secondly everything else!
It's the everything else bit that we're thinking about here, nerves in our organs and limbs that help was feel move and other things.
It's strange to me now, that 50 years ago, when I was a medical student, nothing was made of this great mass of nerves in and around the bowel, accept to say, “Oh well yes, there they are”. So extensive is this system, we are now told that it is like a brain outside the brain, with the capacity of a dog brain – the biggest collection of nerves outside our head brain! So what the heck is it doing there?
Well one answer, a realistic one is that we don't know, or perhaps we should say that we're only just getting the first glimmerings in the last couple decades. It seems that this nervous system is connecting with our brain and as the most important part of the body for our immunity is our gut!, there is highly likely a really important connection between the gut brain and our immune system.
How is our gut is communicating with our brain?…………. at first sight that seems like a crazy question. A little higher up I talked about nerves inside and outside the brain. There are 12 pairs of unique nerves and they are called cranial nerves . They're all pretty fascinating but for present purposes we need to think about just one pair. These paired nerves are traditionally given a number, a Roman numeral, so that here we're talking about X.
Now, the 10th set, cranial nerves are called the Vagus Nerves. We shouldn't think about the gambling town in the southern United States, rather we should think about……. vagrant and vague to indicate wandering and erratic. It's not very complementary is it?
Reeling back the decades to what I was taught medicine, you got the distinct impression that the vagus nerves we're really a bit of a nuisance! They start in the lower brain and exit through a hole in the base of the skull and you might think this tells you they are doing something really important….. you would be quite right! Apart from minor things like controlling the heart and lungs!… and after of course making their way down the neck (where they are also is rather important), a vagus nerve on each side of the body, left and right, enters the belly. Here, they used to be thought of as, at best, a mixed blessing. The two vagus nerves enter the belly though a sheet of muscle - the diaphragm - which divides chest from what I really should call the abdominal cavity.
We will have been calling them left and right but in their new territory they have rotated to front and back of the stomach which has now twisted round to form it’s adult shape, so they are more front and back. They send branches of nerve fibres to the stomach, and this is where they got a bad name. The vagus nerves are known to be part of the parasympathetic nervous system. This helps to slow us down make us less anxious, slows our heart and breathing and makes us mellow and contented. It is the sort of way you might feel after a sunday roast! It is rest and digest and that was sort of the problem.
In the stomach these nerves stimulate us to produce acid to digest our food. 30 or 40 years ago and more stomach and other gut ulcers (just holes in the inner lining) were thought to be present far more than they are today. The culprit for all this trouble was - you will have guessed - stomach acid and it’s prompter the vagus nerves. So frequent attempts were made to stem the source by cutting the nerves on their first appearances in the belly. I spent a good deal of my working life watching stomachs, doing the now defunct barium meals. It was quite intriguing and although we were looking for big ‘headline’ problems like ulcers and tumours mainly, nevertheless, the churning action of the stomach which often looked quite disorganised was all too evident. We now so much more of the fine detail of why this large sac-like organ is their at all. The fluid it produces is quite severely and this helps to start to break down our food, but the stomach does so much more! Not only does it produce hormones that affect our gut further downstream but can affect your brain and even influence our sleeping. Fascinatingly, it is now known that Micro Rna (this is a little like our own genetic material but much simpler), contained in our food, and from the bodies of plants, is received in the stomach. This can directly effect the way our own genes function. (It is also known that actually as we get older the stomach produces less and less acid and this in itself can be a factor in disease).
(These are perhaps new ideas to some and you may like to read more. Dietary microRNA—a novel functional component of food by Zhang L. et al. This is a good introduction and there are plenty of further references to read further.)
The following scenario would have seemed highly fanciful a few years ago, but now is the sort of thing that is being debated. Mico Rna from ‘stressed’ plant food, grown with chemical and mechanical intensity could be causing disease in many systems of the body, whereas traditionally grown foods without the stress of monoculture, plowing of the soil and chemicals may be ‘tipping’ bodily metabolism back toward health. These are exciting concepts and it looks like the stomach is the place where the message of our food is being ‘heard’. So it turns out that the stomach structure with it’s luxuriant folds and huge surface area, plus its eccentric actions is all, it seems, geared towards the stomach getting ‘the full story’ about our food, before it moves on.
As far as I recall, little thought was given to what the vagus nerves were doing after they left their intimate friend the stomach and furthered their wanderings in the rest of the abdomen. Perhaps even less thought was given to why millions of years of evolution, the vagi making intimate contact with the gut and other organs in the belly, had gone into perfecting which we were now effectively ignoring.
Since those days, a tidal wave of new innovate science has started to shed ever more light on these matters (how our foods, guts, immunity and brains are connected) and it is more startling than anyone could have imagined; we simply cannot afford to ignore it any more. So this will be the subject of the next sections, but for the moment we follow the progress of 2 nerves with a big job to do in the tummy! If you are really keen to hear about the arteries that stick so closely to the nerves they will come up later.
Part 3; The Small Bowel. Now things are starting to get really interesting and if you have always thought that this was a matter you could safely ignore, - prepare to change you mind……I am going to try.
I said above that the stomach lining had a big surface area, but this is dwarfed by the small bowel! This is key to the wonders that are being revealed about the rôle of this part of the bowel in our lives. I said above that the stomach has folds, but these are big, obvious - have a look at tripe on a butcher’s slab to see the cow version! The small bowel as well as having major folds also has microscopic folds which make it’s surface area huge - if you were to spread the lining of all the small bowel loops out flat it would be far more than the area of a tennis court! This is a massive reception area for your food which establishes intimate contact with the nervous and immune body systems. It also turns out that the barrier between the food and these vital body functions is so slender and delicate it is hard for us to imagine - far less than the thickness of a human hair. Here is scope for astonishment, potential big trouble but also great hope for our health. This set up means that the food and microscopic life and the products of the metabolism of that life are all in intimate contact with the small bowel lining and nerve ends and cells that are the workers of our immune system……………So maybe now it is time to take some time to consider some of the things that can go right or wrong with our bowel. This is massive subject and expanding faster than the universe expanded after ‘The Big Bang’! so it will be a short explanation with some references for anyone who would like to read more.
To come……………… What can go wrong with the complex interplay in our small bowel between complex arrays of microbes, the bowel lining and immune systems.
What in practice is actually going wrong,
In truth a many things can and do! Perhaps we can start with a throughly modern problem, or perhaps its origins are not so modern. The narrative here is from Zac Bush and other sources and my own observations. The compound Glyphosate (you may know it as Round-up a broad spectrum herbiced) was first developed in Japan in the 1950s as an antibiotic. Its developers realised they could not possibly use it because as the antibiotic name implies (against life), it was highly toxic and worse still water-soluble. As water is everywhere to be found including in ourselves this is highly worrying. There are many reasons why glyphosate is toxic to animals and plants but here are a few…………. it kills a range of micro-organisms that live within plants and animals and form vital symbiotic partnerships with them. In particular it is toxic to mitochondria - the energy liberating micro-organisms that live in all animal cells in vast numbers. It blocks the production of essential fatty acids (the clue is in the name, these are vital compounds which we need to function.) It locks up or chelates metallic minerals which also are vital to a full metabolic life.
This was only part of a wider picture. In the early years of this century a tiny trickle of scientific papers started to appear on the subject of something called “leaky gut”. I did not know anything about this at the time. I had always taken a special interest in the diseases of the gut and belly in general, though from the stand-point of x-ray and scan tests. The doctors who were looking after patients - they call themselves gastroenterologists - were not talking about this and I wonder how much it crops up day to day today.
What is this all about and why is it so important - no hyperbole to call it vitally important.
Well on two levels I would say that one importance is that leaky gut is s present danger to our health with huge ramifications.
It is possible to argue that there is a much wider context which goes to the heart of what we are as human beings in this extraordinary world.
Let’s take the first first!
Chronic inflammation,
Extraordinary new insights into the colon, the last part of our bowel.
The remarkably position and role of the liver.
Our first appearance was as a microscopic single cell. In a mysterious and miraculous process, we developed into a fully formed highly complex being with organs that migrate and differentiate. No drug no operation no intervention was needed. So why don’t we believe that these remarkable bodies are the critical factor for robust health and repair of disease.