Improve your gut and brain health to reduce chronic pain

Pain and gut-brain inflammation

What is pain?

Pain is a signal from your body that something is wrong. It is linked to tissue damage (tissue is your bones, muscles, organs and blood), its purpose being to allow your body to react and prevent further damage.

This tissue damage sparks inflammation. Inflammation is where a site in your body becomes swollen, red, hot and painful. It’s a normal response to injury, illness or stress and is part of your body’s natural defence system to help you to heal.

Pain in itself is not harmful or disabling.

Chronic or long-term pain is not normal

When pain is ongoing, it can be associated with inflammation. Chronic inflammation can mean your immune system is constantly under attack and must inflame to protect itself.

This kind of inflammation and associated pain causes a constant low-grade fever, joint swelling, brain fog, depression and more. It also contributes to disease. In fact, almost every modern disease and 90% of all disease – including autoimmunity, cardiovascular, depression, anxiety, cancer, diabetes, obesity, dementia – is linked to inflammation.

Of note, inflammation is also the main contributor to obesity. Basically, being overweight or obese means the body is inflamed because excess fat is the storage of inflammatory sugar.

Neuro-inflammation and chronic pain

Neuro-inflammation, or inflammation in the brain, is what drives the transition of pain from acute (short term) to chronic (long term) through the activation of glial cells.

Glial cells form around 90% of the cells in your brain. They perform many key functions like cleaning up dead neurons (brain nerve cells), manufacturing protective myelin for neurons and providing physical and nutritional support for neurons. But when they’re inflamed, their normal function is turned off and they become inflammatory and can die, never able to be replaced by your body. These primed glial cells are a key contributor to brain fog and mental health problems.

Gut health diversity

Poor gut health is a key contributor to brain inflammation and pain activation. Poor gut health means a lack of diversity in your gut flora. The greater your gut flora diversity, the better your health because of how this positively impacts your immune system. This includes through the activation of TReg cells, which control your immune reaction and prevent autoimmunity (where your immune system attacks your own body).

Short chain fatty acids

Poor gut health also means low amounts of short chain fatty acids in your gut. Short chain fatty acids come from the fibre in your diet, where they are converted by friendly gut bacteria into the food your gut lining cells live on. Given that your gut lining is where most of your immunity lives, it follows that if its health compromised so is your gut and general immunity.

Gut permeability

A compromised gut lining also means greater gut permeability, where the once tight and healthy junctions there become damaged and loosened, allowing foreign threats into our blood stream and thus your brain. This foreign matter is inflammatory, crossing from your blood stream into your brain, causing inflammation there.

Gut permeability also allows LSP into your blood stream. LPS is a toxin that results from imbalances in your gut flora. These can also cross your blood-brain barrier and contribute to brain inflammation.

Vagus nerve

The other way that your gut and brain are connected (and why your diet matters) is through your vagus nerve, the long meandering nerve that goes from your brain stem out to your gut and organs. Its vagal neurons inform your brain about your dietary intake, nutritional status and peripheral inflammation which can, in turn, lead to glial activation as mentioned above.

What all of this means is that if you have long-term pain, you most likely have brain inflammation.

What causes inflammation and chronic pain?

The causes of inflammation and chronic pain are all around you.

From the sugar, refined carbohydrates, rancid processed vegetables oils, modern wheat and gluten, chemicals and pesticides we ingest to our lack of exercise, high stress life, hidden infections and, as already mentioned, compromised gut health.   

One of the best strategies to support your immune system, and therefore to reduce pain and inflammation, is to heal your gut while improving your lifestyle.

Heal your gut to reduce your inflammation and pain

Healing your gut is a process of

  • Removing inflammatory foods from your diet like sugars, refined carbs, processed vegetable oils, chemicals and pesticides, alcohol and too much caffeine

  • Removing foods you’ve become sensitive to, which can be any food you eat regularly

  • Eating foods high in anti-oxidants like vegetables and some fruit

  • Eating a whole food diet to crowd out bad bacteria with good bacteria and nourish your cells i.e. single ingredient foods as close to nature as possible without human interference, killing off any gut infections like HPylori, bacterial overgrowths, candida, certain parasites (some can be beneficial)

  • Eating foods that promote healthy stomach digestion like apple cider vinegar, pawpaw and pineapple, but some gut healing might be required first

  • Eating prebiotic foods to support healthy gut bacteria like onions, garlic, asparagus, artichokes, cold cooked potatoes

  • Introducing gut-healing foods like bone broth, apple sauce and probiotic fermented foods

  • Stressing less as research shows stress results in gut permeability

  • Reducing chemicals not just in your food but in self-care products and your home environment

  • Sleeping more and better

  • Moving regularly, which is what we’re made to do

For more info specific information about the state of your gut health, you can get microbiome mapping and food sensitivity testing done, and follow a protocol to eradicate infections and rebuild your gut and immune system.

Gutsy by NutritionComment