HOW CAN AN INFLAMMATORY RESPONSE TO COMMON FOODS CAUSE IBS SYMPTOMS?

White Blood Cells React Too Much and Release Excessive Amounts of Inflammatory Chemicals.

First, here is what our own laboratory discovered when we looked at the levels of inflammation-causing chemicals in the blood of IBS patients compared to normal blood. We really don’t have to get into the complex technical explanations of what all these chemicals (mediators released by our white blood cells) do to make you sick. Simply stated, unless you have an infection the levels of these chemicals in your blood should be very low. When there are high levels in your blood, as in the case of infection-causing bacteria or viruses getting into the body, you will begin to feel ill in various ways. That includes pain and diarrhea, the most rudimentary way of flushing out the bowel if there are dangerous bacteria or parasites “sensed” by the immune system.

Foods or chemicals in food are normally largely ignored as they are basically harmless except for a few types of toxins or toxic foods. These are managed by detoxifying systems the body has developed. So the normal person has no IBS symptoms as the body has learned to tolerate these things and process them without fanfare. The foods we eat are identified as “safe” by several processes. Some work very fast inside the gut beginning with the ingestion of food. Others work more slowly after both small (digested) and big (not fully digested) particles of everything we eat are taken up (sampled) from the gut. These samples and “looked at” by specialized cells circulating in and out of the intestines. That is necessary because many bacteria or viruses can get past the guts defenses and into the body (or through the respiratory tract, for example), so the body has to examine small digested elements as well as large particles, contrary to classic beliefs about digestion and immune function. While this process occurs, the first step is automatic for safety purposes. The immune system defaults to “inflammation” in response to everything. This is smart in case something bad is detected which would require the immune system to mount a major defense. This can take a lot of time in some cases.

Normally, when safe foods” are detected only a very small amount of mediators are released before the inflammatory response is turned down or “blunted”. However if the process is allowed to continue much larger amounts of the various inflammatory mediators will be released as the immune system over-reacts. These are the chemicals whose levels should go up if your body is readying to fight an infection but they should be stopped if all you have done is eat something. They are toxic to our bodies as well as to invaders. This is one reason we feel the symptoms we feel when we are getting sick. It’ s also why our IBS symptoms can often mimic the symptoms of being sick with something “infectious”. They can cause all kinds of unwanted non-intestinal symptoms. You know, the symptoms that others say “that’s not IBS” when we talk about them. It’s all part of the same process, which is simply a natural response not working properly, so an over-response has occurred.

In light of the research which proved that inflammatory cells are being triggered by something but they could not see what, we set out to show what it is that provokes this mediator release and to quantify the problem. Our laboratories measured the levels of (17) different cytokines (inflammation provoking chemicals) in the IBS-patients plasma compared to the Normal Non IBS plasma. You can see the differences just by looking at some simple bar graphs.

The top graphs shows the mean blood levels of various mediators (cytokines) in the normal people and the bottom was the mean blood levels of the same inflammation-causing chemicals from IBS patients. It’s obvious that the general trend is a lot of them are much higher than normal among the IBS patients. It is easy when knowing which ones are elevated to go to any standard immunology book and read about the effects of each chemical on the body. They match up to the symptoms we experience. When the levels of certain cytokines are too high you get certain symptoms. When they return to normal, the symptoms go away.