Originally published April 14 2012
Why maintaining a healthy gut is crucial to preventing cancer
by Ethan A. Huff, staff writer
(NaturalNews) It is said that roughly 80 percent of human health and immunity originates in the gut, which includes, of course, the body's ability to ward off cancer. And a new study published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation has found that poor gut health is directly responsible for causing cancers, that would otherwise be blocked intestinally, to enter the body and proliferate.
Dr. Scott Waldman, M.D., Ph.D., chair of the Department of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics at Thomas Jefferson University, and his colleagues discovered that guanylyl cyclase C (GC-C), an intestinal hormone receptor, plays a key role in suppressing tumor growth. This enzyme helps maintain a healthy intestinal wall, which effectively keeps cancer cells at bay by blocking them from entering the body.
But when GC-C is at suboptimal levels in the gut, the intestinal walls become more prone to protrusion, which causes inflammation of the intestinal lining and the eventual leakage of cancer cells and other harmful materials directly into the body. If left unchecked, this enzymatic abnormality ends up resulting in damaged DNA and the development of tumors in various places in the body, including in the liver, lungs, and lymph nodes.
"If the intestinal barrier breaks down, it becomes a portal for stuff in the outside world to leak into the inside world," said Dr. Waldman. "When these worlds collide, it can cause many diseases, like inflammation and cancer."
The entire intestinal environment, in other words, has been specifically designed to protect the body from foreign invaders, whether it be toxins, harmful organisms, or malignant cell growths. But when this system is disrupted by a lack of proper nutrients, for instance, or from damage caused by antibiotics and genetically-modified organisms (GMOs), the intestinal lining gradually loses its ability to protect the body against harm.
Irritable bowel syndrome, Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis, inflammatory bowel disease -- these and many other intestinal problems are the direct result of a gut that has been compromised by things like bad diet, vaccines, GMOs, antibiotics, and a lack of probiotic foods. But they are also conditions that can be effectively mitigated and even reversed through improved diet and supplementation with probiotic foods and nutrients.
Numerous studies have already found that probiotics are effective at preventing cancer. And perhaps their ability to not only maintain but also improve the integrity of the intestinal lining is one specific way in which they effectively accomplish this task.
Sources for this article include:
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-02/tju-si021712.php
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17922945
http://www.naturalnews.com/probiotics.html
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