The Kefir Solution: Natural Healing for IBS, Depression and Anxiety

by Shann Nix Jones

Overview

Heal your gut and heal your brain with recipes that harness the probiotic properties of kefir—your secret weapon for treating IBS, depression, and anxiety, the natural way.

Irritable Bowel Syndrome is the most common gastrointestinal disorder in the world. People with IBS are prescribed more medications, miss more workdays, have lower work productivity, and higher suicide rates than people without it. Yet the causes are still unknown, and there is no cure. Or rather—there was no cure, until now. Cutting-edge scientific research has found that IBS is nearly always connected to anxiety and depression through something called the gut-brain axis. Heal the gut and you can heal the brain—and vice versa.

Enter The Kefir Solution. Developed by Shann Nix Jones, it uses kefir, a powerful natural probiotic to support your microbiome and help heal IBS without the use of chemicals. It has no nasty side effects but loads of health benefits—including alleviating the anxiety and depression that often go hand in hand with IBS. Combining common sense with uncommon science, Shann shares stories, tips and recipes to help you on your way to better gut health and a happier life. If you suffer from IBS, or know someone who does, and it’s taken hold of your life, this book could lead you back to gut health and freedom.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781788170925
Publisher:	Hay House Inc.
Publication date:	06/26/2018
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	360
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Shann Nix Jones is the author of Secrets from Chuckling Goat and The Good Skin Solution. While struggling to cure her son’s eczema and her husband’s life-threatening MRSA infection, Shann discovered powerful natural-healing remedies that solved her family’s health problems. She now dedicates her time to creating health-enhancing soaps, creams and probiotic kefir drinks. www.chucklinggoat.co.uk

Read an Excerpt

Introduction
You may be wondering if you have Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), or you may be absolutely sure that you do. But one thing is certain:
Tummy’s. Not. Happy.

Whether or not you’ve been diagnosed with IBS, if you experience stomach pain, cramping, bloating, wind, diarrhoea and/or constipation on a regular basis – perhaps accompanied by anxiety or depression – this book is for you.

You’re probably feeling pretty overwhelmed at the moment. But here’s my promise to you: by the time you reach the end of this book, you’ll understand exactly what’s going on, and why it’s happening. And most important of all: what you can do about it.

So, what is IBS?

IBS isn’t a disease; rather, it’s a wide range of symptoms that occur together. There are no tests for IBS: the history of a patient’s symptoms helps a doctor establish a diagnosis.

Until recently, IBS wasn’t fully understood, and doctors didn’t really know how best to treat it. But the latest scientific research and discoveries have shed new light on this distressing disorder, and its underlying cause is now known. After reading this book, you’ll be up-to-date with all the current knowledge in this area.

You’ll also have a practical plan that you can put into action in your everyday life: one that has relieved the discomfort experienced by thousands of people just like you.

For a long time, as well as putting up with the distress and embarrassment their symptoms caused, IBS sufferers had to deal with doctors who labelled them as hypochondriacs and told them their problems were ‘all in their head’. Nice, right?

Thankfully, these days we’re more enlightened, and since around 2010 it’s been widely accepted that IBS is a real disorder. IBS is typically diagnosed after a patient has experienced recurrent abdominal pain or discomfort for at least three days per month, in the previous three months, combined with a change in the frequency of their bowel movements or a change in the appearance of their stools.

IBS can occur at any age, but it often begins during the teens or in early adulthood. It’s twice as common in women as in men. Studies have shown that people who have a first-degree relative with IBS are at increased risk.

If you have IBS, you’re not alone. Simply put, IBS is the most common gastrointestinal disorder in the world. Researchers estimate that up to 15 to 20 per cent of people in the West suffer from it.3 IBS represents up to 10 per cent of the workload of family doctors and up to 60 per cent of that of gastroenterology practitioners.

According to studies, IBS patients make more visits to their GP, undergo more diagnostic tests, are prescribed more medication, miss more work days, have lower work productivity, are hospitalized more frequently and account for greater overall direct healthcare costs than patients without IBS.

The burden of illness for IBS is significant: research suggests that the disorder can have such a severe impact on Health-Related Quality of Life, that it’s been linked to an increase in suicidal behaviour.

If you’ve been suffering from IBS for a while, you’ve probably visited your GP and maybe even been referred to a consultant at the hospital. If you were really unlucky, these medical professionals may have suggested you were imagining your symptoms.

If you were ‘lucky’ and they believed you, you may have been prescribed antibiotics, antispasmodics, laxatives or antidepressants. These medications may have caused troubling side-effects, including nausea, insomnia, palpitations and decreased appetite. And they haven’t really worked, have they?

So, you may have turned to dear old Auntie Google, and done your own research. Maybe you’ve cut things from your diet – such as gluten or dairy – in an attempt to cope. Perhaps this helped a little – but it’s left you with such a restricted diet that eating isn’t much fun anymore. And you’re still in pain, still feeling down and are possibly even afraid to leave the house.

But now, finally, there is something that can help. We call it the Kefir Solution. It’s all natural, involves no nasty chemicals and its only side-effects are pleasant ones! You may find that while following this natural health programme, you feel calmer, less anxious, less depressed and more energetic.

You may even lose weight, and keep it off. If you have eczema, acne, psoriasis or rosacea, you’ll most likely find that it clears up too. Such skin conditions are a common side-effect of tummy problems, and I’ll explain why shortly.

In this book, I’m going to share with you some common sense, and some uncommon science, about what’s causing your IBS, anxiety and depression – and explain what you can do to feel better. The Kefir Solution has worked for thousands of our Chuckling Goat clients, and it can work for you too!

How I discovered the Kefir Solution

But first, let me tell you my story. I’m not a doctor or a scientist: I’m a farmer’s wife and a mother who, when doctors couldn’t help us, was forced to search for natural healing solutions for my family. Because of my experiences – none of which I would have chosen! – I know all about feeling frightened, overwhelmed and isolated. And what it’s like to struggle with a medical problem for which conventional medicine offers no answers.

I started my adult life in San Francisco as a city girl – a journalist and radio talk-show host – who couldn’t boil an egg. I then relocated to Wales, that mythic land of castles, mist and magic. At the age of 41, I fell in love with a Welsh farmer named Rich. We got married and I brought my two children to live with him and his two daughters, on his beautiful farm by the sea.

I was on a steep learning curve as I struggled to adapt to traditional Welsh culture, and started to make my own soap, jam, beer, bread and cheese. In 2010, Rich and I bought our first goat, in order to help my son Benji’s bronchial infections (my husband knew of the reputation of goat’s milk for easing allergies, asthma and chest infections).

We became enchanted by the goats, and one goat soon became seven. As the herd of goats grew, we needed to use up our surplus milk, so we learned to make a powerful probiotic drink called kefir.

Because we’d met late in life and felt we’d wasted enough time apart, Rich and I started a little business on our farmhouse kitchen table called Chuckling Goat. You can read more about my early adventures on the farm in my book Secrets from Chuckling Goat: How a Herd of Goats Saved My Family and Created a Business that Became a Natural Health Phenomenon.

Disaster strikes

When I first met Rich, he’d had ulcerative colitis (a condition that causes inflammation of the large intestine, or colon) for seven years. He was taking some heavy-duty drugs to keep it under control: infliximab and other medications that arrived at our door in a special van, and with their own injector pen.

After a while, these drugs stopped working. During a particularly bad colitis flare-up, Rich checked into hospital and the doctor told him that his large intestine might perforate. He needed emergency surgery.

If I’d known then what I do today about gastrointestinal diseases, I might have had the courage to face down the surgeons and insist that we take a different path to heal Rich’s gut. But at that time, I didn’t have the knowledge or the confidence to fight that battle. So we began a cycle of surgeries that lasted for four years.

Rich returned home from the second operation without his large intestine, but with an antibiotic-resistant superbug MRSA infection along the 25cm/10 in surgical incision in his abdomen. It was eating little red holes in the wound that were getting deeper every day – and there was nothing the doctors could do.

I’ll never forget the day the doctor came to our farm to examine Rich’s MRSA infection. The doctor pulled back the long bandage, and the blood drained out of his face. After replacing the bandage, he turned to me and said brusquely: ‘I’ve no experience of dealing with something of this magnitude. I suggest you contact the surgeon who performed the operation.’

Then he packed up his bag, got into his car, slammed the door and locked it, and sped off up our farm track, never to be seen again. I remember grabbing hold of the corner of the table, so my knees wouldn’t give out from under me, as I watched him leave.

What were my options now? To whom could I turn? They wouldn’t let Rich back into the hospital, because patients were screened for MRSA infection before admission. Anyway, how could the surgeon help us? He’d already cut everything out of Rich that could be cut out – there was nothing left. How can you remove an antibiotic-resistant infection that’s spreading inside someone’s vital organs?

So, was Rich going to be left to die in agony, right there on our sofa, as the infection ate its way into his insides? Well, that was just not happening, I determined. Not on my watch. I hadn’t travelled halfway across the world, survived so many disasters, kissed so many frogs, fought so hard and finally found the man of my dreams, only to have him die on me three years later. That was not the way my happy ending ended.

Bringing it all into balance

So I marched over to my desk, fired up my computer and began to do some research on treatment for MRSA. After a few days, I’d managed to come up with a combination of essential oils that I thought might knock back the superbug a bit.

But it wasn’t enough. Because while I was researching, I learned that the MRSA infection wasn’t just in Rich’s wound, and it couldn’t simply be killed. The MRSA had spread all over Rich’s body, replacing every normal skin cell with a copy of itself.

How could I fight all those infecting micro-bugs that were hiding everywhere on Rich – in his eyebrows, behind his ears, under his fingernails? Even if I were to dip his entire body in bleach, I could never get them all: some of those bugs would survive to breed and fight another day.
How could I ever kill them all? Answer: I couldn’t. The bad bugs would win, and Rich would die. Well, I didn’t like that answer. So I decided to ask a different question.

I’d established that killing all the bugs was a non-starter. In fact, the indiscriminate killing of bacteria was how this whole antibiotic-resistance mess had started in the first place. Medical science had actually created these resistant bugs.

If I couldn’t kill all the infecting bugs, then, how could I bring them all into balance? For that, I needed something completely different. I needed allies on the microbiotic level that would round up those bad bugs for me. I needed harmony, not death. I needed good bugs to fight the bad bugs and put them back into their box. So where could I find some good bugs?

The answer to that question was sitting right outside: in the stone barn where we made our probiotic goat’s milk kefir drink. I knew that the kefir was chock-full of good bugs, and that once they were inside the gut, those good bugs worked to bring the bad bugs back under control. Could it possibly work the same way on the skin, I wondered? Was it even safe to try?

There was no available research to tell me, either way: as far as I could see, no one had ever used kefir on the skin. But with nothing to lose and everything to fight for, I figured I might as well try. By this time Rich was confined to bed, fading in and out of consciousness. The red holes of the MRSA were getting deeper every day, edging closer and closer to his vital organs. So I took a deep breath and set to work.

Back from the brink

Every day for the next fortnight, I washed Rich down with the blend of essential oils I’d created – which I later dubbed CG Oil – alternating with a rinse of the kefir. What I was doing – what I prayed I was doing, anyhow! – was pushing back the bad bugs with the CG Oil, to create a foothold, and then introducing good bugs into the skin biome with the kefir. I was hoping that the good bugs would take over, and wrestle the remaining bad bugs back into balance.

It was crazy. It was stupid. It was preposterous. But it worked!

At the end of the two weeks, Rich swabbed completely clear of MRSA. He got up out of bed, went outside and started up his tractor – and he’s been happy and healthy ever since. Today, he runs the farm and physical systems of Chuckling Goat: he designs buildings, manages our herd of goats, keeps me on an even keel, is a wonderful father… and keeps everything else going as well. Thank heavens! My own private miracle.

And I learned something important from this experience:
It’s not just about killing the bad bugs that cause disease. It’s about adding in good bugs, in order to bring the whole system back into balance.

This is what a probiotic like kefir accomplishes, and it’s something that antibiotics can never do. You can’t just wipe out bad bugs and leave an empty space, because the bad bugs will creep back in and take it over again. Good health is a space grab. You have to make a preemptive strike with the good bugs – so they take over from the bad bugs. It’s all about repopulation.

Once the dust had settled, I sent the CG Oil off to a laboratory, to see if it really had worked, and I wasn’t just imagining it. The reports came back, and indeed, the CG Oil was effective against MRSA. It also worked against campylobacter, E. coli and salmonella. Eureka!

Table of Contents

Author's Note xiii

Introduction xv

So, what is IBS? xv

How I discovered the Kefir Solution xviii

Chuckling Goat takes off xxiii

When you're at the end of your rope xxvi

Meeting the challenge xxviii

Part 1 Uncovering the Cause of IBS

Chapter 1 Meet Your Microbiome 3

Your gut is a natural ecosystem 3

When your microbiome gets out of balance 6

The four horsemen of the gut apocalypse 8

Chapter 2 The Connection Between Anxiety, Depression and IBS 11

Science confirms the role of our gut bacteria 12

IBS and the gut-brain axis 13

A new therapy for LBS, anxiety and depression 18

Chapter 3 What's the Big Deal about Serotonin? 23

Serotonin's role in the body 23

Your internal communication system 27

What's the right amount of serotonin? 28

How kefir can help 31

What's tryptophan, and why should you care? 32

Chapter 4 Psychobiotics - is That Really a Thing? 35

How do psychobiotics work? 36

Psychobiotics and IBS 37

A brief history of psychobiotics 39

Part 2 The Kefir Solution: A Five-Step Healing Programme

Chapter 5 Introducing the Kefir Solution 47

How to follow the programme 47

The Kefir Solution FAQs 48

Chapter 6 The Kefir Solution Step #1: Drink Kefir 53

Putting kefir to the test 54

Is all kefir created equal? 55

Guidelines for making your own kefir 60

How to take your kefir 61

Chapter 7 The Kefir Solution Step #2: Take Ashwagandha 65

Anxiety, depression and cortisol levels 66

How ashwagandha can help 67

How to take your ashwagandha 72

Chapter 8 The Kefir Solution Step #3: Lean in to Your Feelings 75

Introducing emotion recognition 76

Introducing emotion in action 78

Emotion recognition in business 81

Crying is good for you! 84

Pleasure versus happiness: making choices 85

Four ways to make yourself happy 89

Love your tummy 90

Show gratitude towards your tummy 92

Give yourself an abdominal massage 92

Chapter 9 The Kefir Solution Step #4: Alter Your Eating Habits 95

Does what we eat affect the gut-brain axis? 95

A new way to think about food 98

Why your food choices matter 100

Chapter 10 The Kefir Solution Eating Principles 105

Feed your good bugs 105

Starve your bad bugs 119

Don't irritate your gut 130

A guide to sprouting 140

Chapter 11 The Kefir Solution Eating Plan 145

Breakfast 146

Snacks 150

Lunch 154

Supper 170

Treats 184

Chapter 12 The Kefir Solution Step #5: Make Lifestyle Shifts 189

Drink medical herbal tea 189

Take collagen 193

Take vitamin D and omega-3 fatty acids 196

Avoid antacids and PPIs 199

Move your body 204

Yoga and deep breathing 205

Get outside and get dirty 206

Other therapies that can help 208

Conclusion 213

You are the expert of your own wellness 214

The Kefir Solution is not complicated 215

References 217

Further reading and resources 235

Acknowledgements 237

Index 239

About the author 251

Editorial Reviews

‘Finally, a holistic approach to health and vitality! Here is a no-nonsense view of the source of illness and dis-ease from the inside out, rather than the outside in. Shann Jones has given us a practical handbook for healthy living based on ancient wisdom and cutting-edge science. I only wish I read this book 20 years ago.’
- Peter Meyers, CEO stand & deliver group, global leadership communication

‘I warmly recommend The Kefir Solution! Shann Jones has written a motivating and enjoyable book full of useful advice for people with digestive problems and other illnesses. And kefir is magical! I think everybody should introduce it into their lives.’
- Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride, MD

‘This book provides a comprehensive, easy-to-read overview of the importance of the microbiome and the role it plays in your health. As a reader you’ll gain a clear understanding of how your gut goes beyond just digestive issues and can influence your brain, contributing to anxiety and depression. If you’ve ever wondered how powerful food can be in healing, look no further than the kefir solution – with one drink you’ll change the trajectory of your health!’
- Dr. Will Cole, leading functional medicine practitioner and author of Ketotarian: the (Mostly) Plant-Based dietto Burn Fat, Boost your energy, Crush your Cravings, and Calm inflammation

From the Publisher