Junger - Clean gut : [the breakthrough plan for eliminating the root cause of disease and revolutionizing your health]

I dedicate this book to Carla, my wife, my soulmate. Cuka, my heart is in your hands.

It could not be in better hands I love you.

Contents

M y first lesson in good medicine came when I was a young boy growing up in Uruguay, many years before I started medical school. It arrived from the unlikeliest of people. I used to follow around a gardener named Fermin as he tended to the plants in our home. I noticed that when he saw an unhealthy tree, he spent most of his time inspecting the roots and the soil around them. He only took a quick glance at the leaves. He would then devise a plan: more water, less water, fertilizer, pest removal, or some other remedy he kept in his gardening toolbox. I always wondered why he wasted his time down there around the roots when the problem was clearly up here on the leaves. I mean, I was actually staring at the problem!

When I asked Fermin why he cared so much about the roots, he simply smiled. Boy, he said, thats the way nature designed it. Your trees health and disease start in its roots. My first thought at the time, if I remember correctly, was yeah, whatever, but I couldnt argue with Fermins results. Time and time again Fermin took care of most problems by changing the conditions around the roots. The leaves always returned lush and green. Fermin was a good gardener, and a wise man.

The reason I say this was my first lesson in good medicine is because after eight years of medical school, six years of training, and another fifteen years of practice, I came to the conclusion that good medicine is very much like good gardening. Imagine you have a tree you love. One day you notice its leaves have turned brown. They will, you understand, soon wither and fall off. Imagine now that you call an expert who, after close examination of the leaves, recommends that you paint them green and attach them back to their branches so the tree can at least appear to be healthy. Everyone would agree thats crazy. If you want to get your tree truly healthy, you cant just cover up the problem. You need to get to the root of it. And just like Fermin used to say, the problem is most likely in the roots.

While I was in medical school the trend in modern medicine was to specialize and super specialize. Doctors became experts in one organ or even one part of one organ. More advanced technology helped not only detect problem areas, but also treat them. The advances of science were mesmerizing, and people held the practice of medicine in high regard. The great irony of our success, however, was that we only got better at painting the leaves. We went way beyond gardeners who paint the brown leaves green. We cut out whole branches and replaced them with healthier ones. Or built artificial branches and leaves altogether. We got so good at attacking individual diseases and symptoms we forgot to look at their root causes.

Take the medical communitys response to inflammation, for instance. After I completed my training as a cardiologist, in 1998, scientists started to notice that all chronic diseasesregardless of how different each disease seemed or where each disease presented in the bodyshared one common condition: inflammation. Identified as a precursor of disease, the medical establishment turned its attention to fighting it. Inflammation quickly became the new disease on the block. Hundreds of articles, studies, and books were written about it, and entire industries were born in the fight against it. While the fight against inflammation helped many people alleviate their suffering, it is really just the first symptom of disease. The fight against it is really just another example of modern medicines attempt to keep individual leaves vibrant and green while the plant is dying. We still need to get to the root of disease.

Clean Gut does this. Before chronic disease, there is inflammation; but before inflammation comes gut dysfunction. Anti-inflammation treatments help, but gut repair corrects the problem right at its source.

In these pages I reveal how your overall health is connected to a singular area of the body, your gut. I explain how the root of almost all chronic diseases also starts in your gut. You will discover that most of the diseases being diagnosed in epidemic proportionssuch as heart disease, cancer, autoimmune diseases, insomnia, depression, asthma, diabetes, and arthritiscan all be traced back to your injured and irritated gut.

Even if you have not been diagnosed with a specific disease, many of the minor ailments you may be suffering fromsuch as tiredness, aches and pains, allergies, mood swings, lack of libido, bad breath, body odor, eczema, and constipationmay also be directly related to gut dysfunction. In addition, a damaged gut will lead to premature aging. These symptoms are often justified and attributed to the unavoidable wear and tear of your aging body, but they are ultimately directly related to the health of your gut and can be reversed by a gut repair program.

In fact, most health issues affecting the worlds populace today are the result of a disrupted, damaged gut. It is critical that we make this vitally important information and health tool available to everyone. Clean Gut is a proven path to avoiding disease and reclaiming your own power to get truly healthy.

In my first book, Clean, I explained how the toxic chemicals we are exposed to, and the toxic conditions we create in our lives, are responsible for many of our health problems. Nobody escapes this reality. This is true now more than ever. There are great possible benefits for most people when they learn how to activate and support their bodies detoxifying organs and systems. The twenty-one-day Clean cleanse has helped thousands do just that.

In Clean Gut, I share a powerful new program, a critical tool in preemptively attacking and eliminating disease at the root. We do not have to wait until we are sick to get healthy. Let me explain. The most common toxins come in our food, and your gut bears the brunt of these toxins. Even toxins that are absorbed through your skin and lungs will eventually end up causing havoc in your gut. Take a shower with unfiltered water in any city in America and you will end up with some amount of chlorine circulating in your blood, which will reach the cells at the lining of your gut and negatively affect the guts good bacteria. The reality is that life these days is not gut friendly .

It is unquestionable that the state of human health is in crisis. We are sick and getting sicker. Everyone seems to be suffering from something, getting tests done, taking over-the-counter and prescription medications. Chronic diseases are on the rise. Too many people are diagnosed with a growing number of diseases. It is out of control. When I was in medical school, I saw many patients with cancer, but this was not the case in my personal life. Today, however, many of my friends have cancer and many more people I know are being diagnosed with it. Diseases that were rare in the 1980s, such as autoimmune diseases, are now global epidemics.

Not only is the state of human health in crisis, the state of our medical system is also about to collapse. Doctors have no reservations about spitting out a diagnosis, ordering sophisticated tests, and prescribing treatments, which include drastic surgeries and radical combinations of prescription drugs to silence our symptoms. These combinations of chemicals are often effective in suppressing symptoms but are frequently all too toxic. Many health issues, and in some cases death, are caused by treatments given to patients by the most competent doctors.

A pill for an ill to suppress symptoms is a lot like painting the brown leaves green for a sick tree. It is just bad gardening. And it doesnt work. I talk to people all over the world, and there is a general frustration with the current state of medicine. People are disappointed by their doctors and upset by the lack of information and real, lasting solutions. We were taught to trust physicians and to be fascinated by and grateful to science, but this kind of blind faith in the medical profession is beginning to wane.