The latest statistics show one out of every ten people is dealing with an autoimmune disease. There are more than 100 diseases that are classified as autoimmune, and more than 250 thousand new diagnoses per year in the United States alone! The good news is that the ongoing studies around autoimmunity are finally proving what we already know in functional medicine — all autoimmune diseases are tied to gut health, and toxic exposures often play a big role in the development of autoimmune disease.
We see clients every day in our practice who have received one or more autoimmune disease diagnoses, and who want to uncover WHY they have these conditions in the first place. Many of these clients have been given multiple prescription medications to help mask their symptoms, and most have been told there is nothing they can do to change their situation.
This is simply not true.
At Modern Holistic Health, we have worked with thousands of clients over the years. No matter what diagnosis the client received before they came to work with our team — our approach is always to find the underlying root causes of the person’s symptoms, condition, or disease — and that’s no different with autoimmune disease. So let’s look at some of the most common root causes of autoimmune disease that we see with our clients.
Toxic Chemicals
Latest studies show that babies born in the United States have an average of 186 toxic chemicals in their bodies at birth. We are bombarded with toxins on a regular basis — in our drinking water, our food, body care products, household cleaners, and even in the air we breathe. If you’re not detoxing your body on a regular basis (or maybe you’ve never done a detox), then toxins are building up in your body. The higher your toxin levels get, the more symptoms you are likely to experience, and the more damage is done to your gut microbiome, or the balance of good and bad bacteria in your digestive tract. Eventually, your toxin load, and this imbalance in your gut bacteria, starts to affect the way your immune system functions, which makes toxins a major trigger for autoimmune disease.
