Why Does Your Body Attack You? Autoimmune Diseases

Do you or your family have any autoimmune disease?

You’ve probably thought that once you develop one, it will stay with you for the rest of your life and that you’ll just have to learn to live with the symptoms. But did you know that none of this has to be definitive?

Autoimmune diseases or disorders are conditions in which your immune system loses the ability to distinguish what’s foreign from what’s your own and begins attacking your own tissues. For this to happen, you must have a genetic predisposition—yes—but other factors also play a role: hormones (it’s more common in women), environment, infections, diet, and emotions.

All of these are burdens that you need to remove.

Imagine for a moment that you’re a little donkey carrying a load. But instead of just carrying food, clothes, or tools, you’re also carrying:

• Psychological stress and worries: and yours are probably much more complex than those of that little donkey.
• Environmental toxins: and you surely have more pollution and chemicals around you than that donkey does.
• Infections: and you’re just as exposed to microbes as that donkey, and when your body has to deal with an invading microorganism, your immune system goes on alert. It can become overactivated and end up confusing what’s yours with what’s foreign—especially if your “doorway” (the gut lining) is open or if you’re consuming “enemy” foods that you’re sensitive to or that feed those microbes.

Yes, you read that right—your diet can also be the cause of your inflammation!

When your diet is rich in “enemy foods,” even those you may think are “healthy,” “low-fat,” or “light,” it can actually be overloading you.

And if you consider that you’re consuming more and more inflammatory and unnatural foods—much worse! Imagine again that little donkey eating not his usual fresh green grass, but a longer, dry, nutrient-poor grass. That’s essentially what we’ve done to our food compared to what our grandmothers ate.

And this last factor is the one that you, unlike the donkey, can control—you can choose which friendly, nutrient-rich foods to feed your gut. Because it turns out that 70% of your immune system is located in your gut, which is also your body’s largest surface in contact with the outside world.

You become inflamed when you eat foods your digestive enzymes cannot break down into single “letters”—the basic units your body recognizes as nutrients.

[Related: Chronic inflammation: Symptoms, causes, and how to fight it]

How does that work?

Imagine that food is like a library filled with books, sentences, and words—all made up of the same alphabet, or basic units: letters, which in your body are nutrients.

These letters (nutrients) are what should enter your system and, using that same alphabet, build another library—you. Your thoughts, emotions, bones, pancreas, hormones, enzymes—everything you are.

But this only happens if you eat “friendly foods,” which your body can break down into those basic units—letters: nutrients.

When you eat “enemy foods,” your body cannot break them down completely, leaving bigger blocks—syllables: anti-nutrients.

Anti-nutrients are also made up of nutrients, but since they remain in larger pieces, your body can’t use them. And because of their size, your immune system recognizes them as invaders. The immune system then tries to neutralize, burn, or remove them by creating a “bonfire”—inflammation.

If that bonfire keeps burning and you keep adding more wood, it can turn into a wildfire with serious consequences: Leaky Gut.

Leaky Gut allows these anti-nutrients, toxins, and infectious agents to pass into your system.

Once inside, your immune system may become overactivated and begin attacking not only the “masked thief” (the enemy food) but also the “Venetian gondolier”—your thyroid or pancreas.

This phenomenon is called molecular mimicry: when your immune system attacks both foreign and self-tissues, leading to an autoimmune disorder—conditioned by your genetics. This happens, for example, with gluten and casein; when you react to one, you might react to the other. Your body can confuse either of these “thieves” with your pancreas or thyroid, depending on your genetic predisposition, and autoimmune diseases can appear.

That’s why we say that Leaky Gut is the gateway to all diseases, symptoms, and infections.

But do you know how to prevent it?

Through your personalized 3R Protocol!

• Remove the foods that are hard for your gut to digest, that inflame and make it “leaky,” preventing nutrient absorption.
• Replace them with friendly foods for you and your gut, from which you can obtain real nutrients.
• Recover your health through the 3R approach.

Do you already know which foods turn into letters or syllables for you?

This doesn’t end here—you can prevent, treat, and recover with your personalized 3R Protocol. We invite you to tailor it in an online consultation with our team of NutriWhite Ambassadors.