We all know food at McDonald’s is virtually unfit for human consumption, but disturbing new lab results have reportedly demonstrated the true extent of the damage you are doing to your body when you eat fast food. Specifically, we’re talking about the ‘devastation’ of your gut health — the attack on the most important part of your biological immune response.

In a report that really brings into focus just what’s going on when we throw a bunch of chemical additives together with some ‘meat-like substances,’ a professor of genetic epidemiology at King’s College London used one unlucky college student (who also happened to be his son) to see what truly goes on in our stomachs when we chow down on some quarter pounders.

It goes way beyond just super sizing your pant size and clogging up your arteries.

According to professor Tim Spector, whose research on the effects of McDonald’s food on the gut are published in his book The Diet Myth, something really unexpected happened. Speaking on what happened to his test subject, his college student son:

“His gut bacteria were “devastated.”

In just 10 days of consuming Big Macs, chicken nuggets, fries, and Coca-Cola, Spector’s son was found by laboratory fecal testing to lose over 1,4000 types of bacteria species from his gut. What’s worse, is that these did not return after he switched back to a normal diet.

This is really concerning news. It’s the kind of news that helps bring the full picture into view when it comes to the average American diet. As you probably know, I’ve been passionate about the secret to gut health — probiotics and the balance of bacteria — for quite some time.

It was back in 2011 when I told you about the ‘new’ research that revealed the way in which antibiotics were actually leading to mentally illness. This is something that’s now being covered by the mainstream press years later.

But let’s go back to these findings. The discovery is extremely important not just because it shows how damaging fast food can be to the body’s main defense systems, but because it shows how lasting the damage can be. If we don’t take the proper steps to recover our ‘good’ probiotic bacteria, we can suffer for potentially a very long time.

Without leaving you before we hit on at least a few solutions you can do right now, here are my tips to get that ‘good’ bacteria back and regain some balance:

• Take a high quality probiotic with at least 1 billion CFU (colony forming units)

• Eat fermented foods like kefir on a routine basis

• Drink fermented teas like kombucha on a regular basis

And, even if you’re starving on an island following a shipwreck, think twice about eating McDonald’s again.

Additional Sources:

Image cropped and sourced from: monicamuller/Flickr

This post originally appeared at Natural Society

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