How to manage IBS
One of the biggest roadblocks to feeling your absolute best is restoring good digestive health. This is true for even the healthiest among us, but especially for those coping with a chronic illness like chronic Lyme disease, IBS, fibromyalgia, or chronic fatigue syndrome.
That’s because without normal digestion, the body’s ability to absorb healing nutrients and remove toxins that disrupt homeostasis suffers greatly. What’s more, this very complex system is connected to every other system in the body. When digestion suffers, nothing works well.
Slowly, awareness of the importance of digestive health is increasing, and I’m getting more and more questions about it. One I hear more now than ever: “What’s the best treatment for healing leaky gut syndrome?” What’s interesting is that leaky gut, also known as intestinal permeability, is not a new problem. It’s long been associated with gastrointestinal diseases like Crohn’s and Celiac.
But leaky gut is a growing problem, and one that extends far beyond the gut. It’s now being linked with numerous serious symptoms and health concerns including autoimmune, inflammatory, and neurodegenerative diseases, including lupus, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, and Alzheimer’s. As prevalence and concern grow, so does the number of remedies being offered by various health and wellness companies. Many people also ask me what is “inflammation?” Most people understand inflammation in regards to a wound. When a wound swells up, it turns red and it hurts. In the body, inflammation is the body’s immune system response to an irritant. That irritant can be food, medications, water, toxic fumes and chemicals among just a few things. When something damages your cells, your body releases chemicals that trigger a response from your immune system. The response includes the release of antibodies and proteins, as well as increased blood flow to the damaged area. Chronic inflammation happens when this response lingers, leaving the body in a constant state of alert. Over time, this has a negative impact on your tissues and organs. If you wake up tired in the morning, you most likely are dealing with chronic inflammation.
Treating leaky gut requires a multifaceted approach, one that restores a healthy gut, diminishes the system disruptors that damaged it in the first place, and offers much-needed symptom relief.
Leaky Gut, Explained
To understand why a gut becomes leaky, it helps to paint a quick picture of where in the body it occurs. Although some digestion begins in the stomach, most digestion and absorption of nutrients occurs in the intestines, which also work to defend against foreign invaders like pathogens and toxins.
When functioning correctly, the cells that line the intestines, called the mucosa, are linked securely together with tight junction proteins that create a barrier and regulate the substances that pass into your bloodstream. Vital nutrients are let through; foreign substances such as toxins, microbes, and certain food components are mostly kept out. Those that do slip through are swiftly tagged by the immune system with antibodies to signal white blood cells to get rid of them.
But if an irregularity occurs in the mucosal cells and the integrity of the protective barrier weakens, gaps and holes may develop, increasing intestinal permeability. Once the intestinal lining has been compromised, undigested foreign proteins, including food components not broken down by normal digestion, “leak” into the bloodstream in high concentrations. This is what’s commonly referred to as leaky gut.
These foreign substances overwhelm the immune system and create an inflammatory response that leads to problems in the digestive tract and throughout the entire body. Ultimately, a leaky gut has the potential to affect more than your bowels – it can set the stage for a long list of systemic problems.
For most people, the decline from normal digestion to digestive dysfunction and leaky gut is gradual. It starts with symptoms that are easy to ignore, such as mild indigestion and bloating, and then slowly progresses to intestinal misery. Add in chronic illness, chronic stress, and eating on the run, and the digestive situation goes from bad to worse. Here’s what to watch out for:
Symptoms of Leaky Gut
Abdominal pain
Digestive disturbances such as gas, bloating, belching, diarrhea, constipation, nausea, or indigestion
Stomach ulcers
Dietary concerns such as food allergies or sensitivities, nutritional deficiencies, or loss of appetite
Chronic fatigue
Arthritis or joint pain
Headaches
Weakened immune function
Allergies and/or asthma
Skin rashes and other skin problems such as acne, eczema, and rosacea
Depression and anxiety
Mood swings
Cognitive issues such as brain fog, memory loss, forgetfulness, confusion, or difficulty concentrating
Hormone imbalances
Weight fluctuations
You might think this list covers a pretty extensive set of symptoms — and, you’d be right. That’s how interconnected gut health is with the rest of your body. If your gut is leaky, other chemical processes, organs, and tissues in your body won’t function well either.
The 3 Modern Causes of Leaky Gut
As with most things, genetics have been shown to play a role in intestinal permeability, particularly with inflammatory bowel diseases. Certain microbes may also be a factor.
But even bigger is the role of the typical Western diet – one that’s been cultivated for convenience, but is totally unnatural to our digestive system – and the stress that comes with living in a modern fast-paced world.
Here’s an overview of what’s most to blame for compromising the gut lining and causing leaky gut:
1. An Unnatural Diet
Today’s typical American diet hardly resembles what our ancient ancestors ate. For hundreds of thousands of years, the menu was dominated by roots, tubers, leaves, mushrooms, wild fruit, berries, bark, bird and reptile eggs, and game. Grains and beans were not digestible without the processing technology that we have today.
Flash forward to modern day, and we’ve learned that processing grains and soaking and boiling beans made it so we could digest them. And thanks to industrialized farming techniques, we can produce both cheaply and en masse. Unfortunately, all the ways we’ve found to grow and manipulate food have also flooded the Western diet with three key gut-disrupting components: lectins, gluten, and excessive carbohydrates.
Lectins
Grains and beans – along with other common dietary staples like legumes, tree nuts, nightshade vegetables (such as tomatoes, potatoes, and eggplant), and meat and dairy raised on corn and soybeans – are loaded with lectins, plant proteins that bind to molecules in cell membranes of the intestinal tract, irritate tissues, and cause tight junction proteins to malfunction. While our mucosal lining is designed to protect us from a certain level of lectins, excess lectins erode and compromise that barrier.
Once lectins start to flood the bloodstream, they can send the immune system into overdrive. This stimulates antibody production, activates cytokine cascades (chemical messengers of the immune system), and initiates a histamine response that can cause inflammation and the slew of symptoms associated with leaky gut.
Gluten
In addition to lectins are other, storage proteins in plants that have a similar effect, the worst offender being gluten (in wheat and related grains like rye and barley). Storage proteins are found in the inner parts of the seeds of grains (called the endosperm), and they’re designed to provide amino acids to the plant seed to help it grow.
But storage proteins are also resistant to digestion and can be very irritating to the gut. And like lectins, they can create gaps between cells in the gut lining, flood the bloodstream, overwhelm the immune system, and trigger symptoms.
Excessive carbohydrates
One final, significant problem with the standard American diet is the sheer volume of processed food products we consume, most of which are loaded with carbohydrates in the form of starch and sugar — much more than the human body can use or absorb. This is great news for bacteria and yeast, as their favorite food is undigested carbs.
So while our highest concentration of bacteria is normally in the colon, excess sugar and starches allow bacteria and yeast to flourish in the small bowel (called small intestine bowel overgrowth, or SIBO). The resulting damage to the intestinal lining intensifies leaky gut symptoms and immune dysfunction.
2. Non-Stop Stress
Some stress can be okay,occasional stress in the face of a serious threat slows the movement of food materials through the gut so the body can put its energy and resources elsewhere. It’s the old fight-or-flight response(symphathetic) — a biological throwback to when we had to evade the occasional tiger in the wild.
But chronic stress — a pervasive problem in a world ruled by global commerce and a 24/7 workday mentality — basically signals to the body that you’ve got a tiger hot on your heels all day long. No surprise, this compounds the problems associated with leaky gut.
Chronic stress decreases the production of serotonin, a feel-good chemical that’s also important for peristalsis (the movement of food materials through the intestinal tract). As a result, food materials are left to sit in the stomach and intestinal tract to ferment, creating more opportunity for lectins, gluten, and carbs to wreak more havoc.
3. Gut-Disrupting Toxins
Toxins can enter the body via three routes. There are those we ingest, including artificial pesticides and herbicides and mycotoxins from mold spores that grow on food. And there are those that make their way into our system through the air we breathe or through our skin, namely petroleum residues that come from driving cars, creating plastics, mining, and chemical plants.
All of these unnatural toxic substances disrupt cell membranes, plus they act like free radicals and cause serious inflammation. This in turn compromises your immune system, disrupts homeostasis, and allows bad bacteria to flourish and upset the balance of your microbiome.
Then there are certain pharmaceutical drugs. Antibiotics are a key one: They disrupt our microflora and the biofilms (mucus layers filled with beneficial microbes) that protect the lower intestine and large colon. Other drugs that play a similar role in leaky gut include nonsteroidal anti-inflammatories like ibuprofen (Advil, Motrin) and naproxen (Aleve).
How to Restore a Healthy Gut, Naturally
Likely the best way to heal a leaky gut is to go back to eating and living the way our ancient ancestors did, and spend your days foraging for food in the form of roots, leaves, berries, bark and the occasional egg or wild animal you manage to take down. This is what our digestive systems were designed to thrive on, and they haven’t changed much (if at all) in the last few hundred thousand years.
But let’s be honest: None of us want to live that way, nor is it even realistically possible. Perhaps best of all, it’s not necessary.
Instead, you can overcome leaky gut by making some calculated changes to your day-to-day diet and lifestyle to minimize the worst of the risk factors that accompany modern life. Some of the key steps are easy, such as taking supportive herbal remedies; others, like nixing added sugars and being truly dedicated to reducing stressors in your life, are admittedly harder.
While you can’t eradicate all threats to your digestive function, you can minimize system disruptors enough to restore a healthy gut lining. And that allows your immune system function to normalize so it can resume dealing with any threats that do slip through the cracks.
How long you have to stick with the program really depends on the degree of your dysfunction. If you have a chronic illness, gut restoration will likely be a major part of your overall recovery process. No matter where you are, the necessary steps are doable – and the results are well worth the effort.
IBS may be a slightly different beast to tame. Many times the standard elimination diet doesn’t work completely and these folks may need to be on the low FODMAP diet, along with food sensitivity testing to eliminate most of the symptoms. However, folks with fibromyalgia and IBS typically have further work to delve into as there are many roots in the emotional and trauma realm that keeps them ill. Finding someone good who can help find and eliminate these triggers will help massively in the end. Remember it is trifold process in finding remission. Working with the structural, physiological and limbic (emotional) aspect of one’s health is the perfect trifecta.
As always, I am here to support and help you all! If you have questions, let me know! On the fence about jumping in to take charge of your health? Scheudule a consultation! I have so many options for everyone, from a 30 day anti inflammatory challenge, to functional nutrition appointments in office and ZOOM, to the online school which houses the course “reversing autoimmune and chronic disease” to wellness programs.
