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Dear Readers,
This week I had a question I get every so often about childhood asthma. This particular case is in a child of eight. She has suffered for years, although it’s managed by medications and periodic hospitalizations.
Her parents want to know what I can offer her. The bad news is the current medical paradigm doesn’t address the roots of the problem, although it can decrease the symptoms. Sometimes kids seem to grow out of asthma, but more often they stop having asthma attacks and start to instead develop other conditions.
In holistic care we believe suppressing the symptoms via pharmaceutical therapies drives the symptoms somewhere else in the body. Then we see them pop up on the skin or in the digestive system or in the organs or on the mental sphere. So it’s always best to treat the root cause(s) of the condition if you can.
The good news is asthma is very responsive to holistic therapies. The most essential of these is dietary changes and targeted therapies to rebalance the gut biome. I will explain below.
Asthma has become increasingly common today, compared to when I was a child. It’s theorized that this increase is due to several factors:
- Increased exposure to toxic chemicals in our environment
- Increased intake of hyper processed, nutrient deficient, inflammatory foods
- Reduced exposure to germs and soil based organisms for immunity
- Reduced exposure to vitamin D, which plays a role in immunity and inflammation
- Increased antibiotic use early in life
We’ll explore each one in turn.
Increased exposure to toxic chemicals:
There is no doubt we are exposed to ever more chemicals. Cleaning chemicals, pesticides, herbicides, fungicides on food, colours and chemicals in food products, chemicals in air fresheners, hygiene products, and detergents, and chemicals from industrial manufacturing processes are just some of the chemicals we are routinely exposed to now.
“Women’s breast milk in many countries now contains chemicals belonging to a class of compounds known as PFAS at levels well above the safety thresholds set by governments, says a report from international environmental group IPEN.” (full 2004 CDC profile here) These chemicals are unfortunately used in products that are not required to note their presence on the label. Public health protection around these common chemicals has yet to take place.
Toxic chemicals are known to inhibit the development of the gut biome, not only by mechanism of toxicity, but by decreasing natural environmental bacteria that help develop a robust immune system. The abstracts below explain this idea a bit further.
Increased intake of processed foods:
There is also no question our children are now consuming more processed foods. Even when their diets contain abundant whole foods, those whole foods are only as healthy as the farming methods and soil that created them.
When big agriculture uses chemical fertilizers and pesticides and techniques like mono-cropping rather than traditional and more holistic methods of farming, such as crop rotation, soil resting, and natural soil amendments - the soil produces nutritionally substandard crops. A crop cannot contain more nutrients than the soil it is grown in.
Similarly, an animal that is sickly does not produce optimally healthy dairy or meat for human consumption. And commercially raised animals are not in any way healthy or happy animals.
The only way they are not rampant with disease in many instances is the continual use of antibiotics in their feed. Feed is often low quality, cheap, biologically unfit food like corn. Cattle are not meant to feed on corn. It changes the immunity of the cow, the gasses of the cow (methane), and the fat content of cow - in both density and composition.
This doesn’t even get into the stress hormones in the meat of commercially raised animals. Commercial feed even contains plastic, as bags of unused baked goods are shredded and made into feed without removing the bag. Healthy meat must come from healthy, well cared for animals. Anything less certainly reduces the nutritive quality of the product.
Fruit are often artificially ripened to be firmer to transport for sale. They look ripe, but in fact are green and do not contain all the nutrients naturally ripened food does.
Overall what this means is that even when our diets are ‘all natural’ we are not getting the nutrients we would have gotten 50-100 years ago when family gardens and small scale, more holistic farming were the norm. Modern commercially produced foods are just not as nourishing.
Additionally, modern processed foods are far more damaging. The number of chemicals in our food supply today is astronomical. If you think everything on the shelf at the grocer’s is healthy to eat, stop and remember trans fats.
These were pushed on us as healthier alternatives to natural saturated fats for decades and could be found abundantly in processed foods! Now we have come to discover that they are highly carcinogenic. Ditto BPA in much of our food product packaging. The same is true of sugar and many food preservatives. We need to be mindful of this when we reach to consume processed foods for our families. What may be approved today may not be considered safe tomorrow.
Natural, whole foods, produced as holistically as possible, are always best. And certainly, exposure to these chemicals and substandard foods impacts the health of growing bodies.
Foods that are substandard cause deficiency states in the body that impair the body’s ability to detoxify itself when it comes into contact with toxins. They also impede the body’s ability to down-regulate inflammation responses. And they damage good gut bacteria and feed pathological gut bacteria. All this to say food has a tremendous impact on asthma and many childhood diseases.
Reduced exposure to germs:
Contrary to common belief, germs are good for us. Exposure to them teaches our immune systems and the fetish with putting things in the mouth in infants may well be nature’s way to train the immune system as quickly and thoroughly as possible.
Scientists studying the human microbiome found that “more than 10,000 microbial species occupy the human body.” It’s believed from the studies that our microbiome contains more genes responsible for our survival than the human genome does. The microbiome refers to all the microbes, bacteria, fungi, protozoa and viruses that live in and on us at any time.
In this amazing little TEDxCaltech Talk Elaine Hsiao shares why it is important for our health to be exposed to germs.
Reduced exposure to Vitamin D:
Vitamin D is important in regulating both the innate and adaptive immune system. Here you can find a great downloadable pdf article on this subject by Dr. Adrian F. Gombard, Ph.D. of the Linus Pauling Institute. It’s called Why a Healthy Immune System Needs vitamin D. In it you will see that vitamin D has been found to:
- Reduce risk of autoimmune diseases
- Reduce risk of cytokine storm during acute respiratory distress syndrome
- Have anti-inflammatory properties
- Reduce risk from infectious diseases
Increased antibiotic exposure:
But the greatest factor in lung health in youth may be the microbiome. Studies are now discovering the link between asthma and allergies and the health of the microbiome. Clinically asthma and allergies (as well as food intolerances) go hand in hand. As such, we will not separate them herein. Consider these studies on Pubmed:
The human microbiome, asthma, and allergy (Dec. 2015):
“In contrast to the extensive knowledge of the gut microbiome, information on the lung microbiome is limited. However evidence suggests a distinct microbiome of the lungs of healthy subjects and a difference between the microbiomes of healthy people and those with obstructive lung diseases such as asthma …
The findings of studies...indicate that humans are exposed to fewer microorganisms because of changes in factors such as the use of antibiotics and diet, which are accompanied by increasing susceptibility to asthma and allergies. Moreover, these studies illuminate the differences in the microbiomes of healthy people and those with asthma and allergies...
Increasing evidence suggests that the compositions of the lung and gut microbiomes determine the risk of asthma and allergies.”
Influence and Effect of the Human Microbiome in Allergy and Asthma (July 2015)
Microbiota in Allergy and Asthma and the Emerging Relationship With the Gut
Microbiome (May 2015)
Increasing Allergy: Are Antibiotics the Elephant in the Room? (May 2020)
The Microbiome in Asthma (Dec. 2016)
The Role of the Microbiome in Asthma: The Gut⁻Lung Axis (Dec. 2018):
“Several studies have confirmed the role of microbiota in the regulation of immune function and the development of atopy and asthma. These clinical conditions have apparent roots in an insufficiency of early life exposure to the diverse environmental microbiota necessary to ensure colonization of the gastrointestinal and/or respiratory tracts. Commensal microbes are necessary for the induction of a balanced, tolerogenic immune system. The identification of commensal bacteria in both the gastroenteric and respiratory tracts could be an innovative and important issue. In conclusion, the function of microbiota in healthy immune response is generally acknowledged, and gut dysbacteriosis might result in chronic inflammatory respiratory disorders, particularly asthma.”
In summary, what this means is that the health of the intestinal microbiome is related to the health of lung tissues and where there is chronic lung disease there is frequently a gut biome imbalance. The authors all suggest this needs further study. Clinically, many holistic physicians have undertaken to do this, with very good results. For a book on just this, you can read a book
Healing the New Childhood Epidemics: Autism, ADHD, Asthma, and Allergies: The Groundbreaking Program for the 4-A Disorders by Kenneth Bock M.D. Dr. Bock is an integrative physician out of New York, whom I had the pleasure of learning from a few years back. His book and advice have been instrumental in my work with parents addressing asthma in children.
Some considerations to check for:
- Food intolerances
- Gut dysbiosis
- Household and personal care chemicals
- Cookware chemicals
- Possible infections
- Deficiencies and imbalances in nutrients, including metals
- Toxicity and an impaired ability to detoxify the body
- Side effects of drug use to manage symptoms
- Emotional drivers of anxiety/ stress and support for those
- Any other inflammation in the body
As you can see, there is a lot that can be done holistically to help a child who suffers from asthma. Parents can undertake this without professional guidance, from reading books (as above) but I don’t advise it.
First of all, no one book captures the interventions required for every child. A good practitioner understands when each therapy and modality is most indicated.
Secondly, parents frequently burn out trying to learn about the therapies rather than focusing on parenting. I have fallen into this trap myself, and it was exhausting. The dietary changes alone are enough to manage, even when you have good guidance.
As such, I encourage parents to invest in experienced professionals to help them use holistic therapies integratively with the medical therapies they find of benefit. In this way the outcomes are much improved with fewer lasting side effects of drug therapies. I encourage parents to reach out if they need help. The best time to address such issues is as early as possible.
As always, if readers have their own health questions, I welcome them. Just send me an email. And if you’re looking for more specific health information check out my website and sign up for my free newsletter here.
Namaste!
Nonie Nutritionista
