Trusting Your Gut

I keep coming back to this as someone who spends her days improving the lifestyles of those struggling with chronic digestive disorders for a living. We want the lettuce, the farm, the precise details of the cause. What we miss, as a public health system and as individuals managing our own bodies, is the slower, uncounted, failing systems running underneath the headline.

Cyclospora doesn't cause illness independently. It exploits an opening: contaminated water on a field, a supply chain with minimal inspection between soil and shredder, a system built for scale and efficiency over human consideration. The outbreak is the visible and labelled event, yet the terrain is what determined how far and efficiently it spread. We keep naming the pathogen but forget to audit the terrain.

It’s a modern habit that runs deeper than iceberg lettuce.

The cyclospora parasite lodges in the small intestine, and unlike most foodborne bugs that clear in a day or two, it settles in, avoiding detection by our immune system for up to several weeks before symptoms hit: watery or explosive diarrhea, cramping, fatigue, vomiting, sometimes for a month or more if untreated. The small intestine is lined with more nerve cells than the spinal cord and produces the majority of the body's serotonin. Disrupt that lining for weeks and the disruption doesn't stay local. It travels up the vagus nerve — the longest and most complex cranial nerve in your body — and can affect mood, sleep, focus, and stress tolerance. People recovering from cyclosporiasis don't just report gut symptoms, they report feeling foggy, flat, wrung out, even long after the diarrhea resolves.

Most people don’t realize you don't need a CDC case number assigned to you to be living with a version of this. Chronic, low-grade gut disruption from years of ultra-processed food, antibiotics, and unmanaged stress hammering the same nerve pathways daily, produces a version of the same signal disruption. No outbreak map or recall notice. An overlooked long-term erosion of the same gut-brain system Cyclospora attacks all at once.

We tend to value acute events because they're loud, dated, and named. We almost never notice the slow version, because it never gets a timestamp. It just becomes a new baseline where you stop remembering what "not tired," "not foggy," "not anxious for no reason" felt like. 

Zoom back out and the same asymmetry shows up at scale. A handful of large suppliers now grow, wash, and ship produce for a huge share of this country's restaurants and grocery stores. That's not conspiracy, it's consolidation. The same logic that reshaped nearly every American supply chain. Fewer growers, longer routes, more hands between a field in central Mexico and a shredded bag on a restaurant line. It’s a system built for our modern definition of efficiency. It's also why one contaminated field can reach nine states before anyone can prevent it. 

Quality control often doesn’t scale with supply chain size. The incentive, at every level, points toward speed and cost — not the careful work of ensuring water quality or maintaining healthy soil. That work doesn't show up on a quarterly report. So it gets underfunded, until an outbreak forces it retroactively, under deadline, with a nine-state case count as the incentive.

We do the same thing with our health, for the same reason. Root-cause work, a gradual audit of what's actually going into a body, a gut, a nervous system, over years, doesn't produce a crisis either. It's easier to wait for the flare-up and go looking for the one thing that caused it. Naming a single cause feels like control. Responsibly managing a holistic system apparently doesn't, even though the system is almost always where the damage started.

None of this means Taylor Farms shouldn't have been named, or that the recall was wrong, but that's exactly the accountability that should happen faster, further upstream. But naming one culprit in one outbreak isn't the same as fixing what made the outbreak possible. A recall closes a case, not a systematic gap. Neither does a diagnosis, a prescription, or a press conference declaring things "under control."

So what do you do with this, reading from a kitchen that was never on the outbreak map? You might not be able to audit a supply chain. But you have jurisdiction over one: the one running through your own body, every day.

I’m not encouraging panic-auditing every meal but something closer to what should have been happening at that lettuce farm all along: ongoing attention to conditions, before the flare-up forced action. Chronic stress diverts blood flow and digestive resources away from the gut, the same way an underfunded inspection budget diverts attention from the parts of a supply chain that aren't currently on fire. A body in constant low-grade fight-or-flight is a body already primed for the next disruption to hit harder and last longer.

Notice what you've normalized as the baseline. Fatigue, bloating, brain fog, a stomach that's "just sensitive," these aren't identity traits or genetic flaws, but a call to action from your body. Your body speaks in a language of symptoms encouraging you to reflect on the lifestyle factors and systems that guide your body’s health. 

Reestablishing our relationship to our inner systems requires time, and these fool proof strategies help rebuild internal communication and trust:

Focus on whole, unprocessed foods, even though it may feel time consuming, learning to cook with fresh, minimally processed ingredients is easier on our wallet and easier on our stomach. Fibers repopulate the good bacteria in our gut; and avoiding additives, fillers, stabilizers and other chemicals found in ultra processed foods help restore our gut lining.

Allow yourself to rest fully. I’m talking 7-9 hours of sleep; real rest allows our body to regenerate overnight and clear out old junk from the digestive system.

Maintain awareness around your stress levels and management techniques. There’s no doubt we live in a stressful world, and learning to identify when we are in fight or flight vs. rest and digest significantly improves the function of all our organs. 

Move physically and emotionally. Physical movement and emotional movement are deeply interconnected as they encourage the release of cortisol, the stress chemical. To avoid a constant level of baseline stress, it’s imperative to express and integrate emotional moments, and to sweat, cry, and express our truth even if it’s uncomfortable. 

Embrace a holistic view of health. A healthy person is not just one with a healthy body; but someone with a supportive community, a sense of purpose, a joy for life, and an active interest in the world. We are deeply nourished by our everyday behaviors, values, and relationships. 

And when something does flare, resist the pull to treat the name as the whole story. Yes, the parasite is real. But parasites don't wreak havoc alone. They require a chain of command of accomplices — one that cut its own surveillance system, called the parasite "under control," and thus broke rank with the nation's body and soul.