Leaky Gut
So I have been getting so many questions about what is leaky gut? How do I know if I have it? Why doesn’t my doctor think this is a real thing? I’ve cut out gluten but I’m still not better? This blog post will hopefully answer ALL of your questions.
The gut truly is the gateway to health. It’s where nearly 80% of your immune system lives. It’s also where up to 95% of your serotonin (the primary neurotransmitter responsible for your mood) is produced. If your gut is healthy, chances are that you are in good health. You need good gut health in order to have good brain health. Leaky gut, leaky brain.
However, there’s a condition called leaky gut that can lead to a whole host of health problems and set you on the path to chronic illness. The symptoms caused by leaky gut go far beyond digestive issues. And thanks to our modern environment and genetically modified food, leaky gut is much more common than you’d think. In fact, millions of people are struggling with leaky gut without even knowing it! These people have many diseases that are mentioned below that conventional medicine just keeps giving you pills for! It never addresses the root cause of your disease.
Think of your gut as a drawbridge. Your gut is naturally semi-permeable to let teeny-tiny boats (micronutrients) pass through your intestinal wall and into your bloodstream. It’s how you absorb your food. Certain external factors, including food, infections, toxins, and stress, can break apart the tight junctions in your intestinal wall, leaving the drawbridge open. We don’t want those tight junctions open.
Once this happens, you have a leaky gut. When your gut is leaky, much larger boats that were never meant to get through (toxins, microbes, and undigested food particles) can escape into your bloodstream. Your immune system marks these “foreign invaders” as pathogens and attacks them. The immune response to these invaders can appear in the form of any of the signs that you have a leaky gut.
Signs that you have a Leaky Gut:
You have digestive issues such as gas, bloating, diarrhea, or irritable bowel syndrome (IBS)
Food allergies or food intolerances
Brain fog, difficulty concentrating, ADD, or ADHD
Mood imbalances such as depression and anxiety
Skin issues such as acne, rosacea, or eczema
Seasonal allergies or asthma
Hormonal imbalances such as irregular periods, PMS, or PCOS
Diagnosis of an autoimmune disease such as rheumatoid arthritis, Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, lupus, psoriasis, or celiac disease, type 2 diabetes, MS, parkinsons, to name a few.
Diagnosis of chronic fatigue or fibromyalgia
Scolosis- yep you read it, everyone who has scoliosis has a gut issue.
If you have taken antibiotics or have lyme, you have a gut issue
If your immune system is down all the time and constantly getting colds (more than 2 x a year) you have a gut issue.
You have joint pain and arthritis, you have a gut issue.
If you were a constant yo-yo dieter, you have a gut issue.
You can’t loose weight. Fat is protective. You will need to heal your gut first, then the weight will come off.
So what causes this Leaky Gut?
Food: Gluten, dairy, corn, soy and many other toxic inflammatory foods
Gut infections: Candida, SIBO and parasites, Epstein Barr, Babesia, Borreliosis, bartonella
Stress: chronic, emotional and physical
Toxins: Medications, mercury, pesticides, BPA and tons more
The foods we eat are among the main culprits. Gluten is the number one cause of leaky gut. Gluten causes the gut cells to release zonulin, a protein that can break apart the tight junctions in your intestinal lining. Other inflammatory foods (such as dairy) or toxic foods (such as sugar and alcohol) are causes as well.
Infections, toxins, and stress are the other three important factors. The most common infectious causes are candida, parasites, and SIBO (small intestine bacterial overgrowth). Toxins come in the form of medications including NSAIDS (Motrin and Advil), steroids, antibiotics, and acid-reducing drugs. Environmental toxins including mercury, pesticides, and BPA from plastics are also causal agents. And stress can also contribute to a leaky gut.
The Leaky Gut and Autoimmune connection
When your gut remains leaky, more and more particles are able to escape into your bloodstream. Your immune system reacts by sending out wave after wave of inflammation to attack the foreign invaders. This state of high alert causes your immune system to become overstressed and fire less accurately. This can lead to your own tissues to get caught in the crosshairs. Eventually this will turn into autoimmunity.
In addition, your immune system starts making antibodies against the substances that have escaped into your bloodstream. Many of these foreign invaders, like gluten and dairy in particular—look very similar to your own body’s cells. Under constant pressure, your immune system can get confused and accidentally attack your tissues. This process of mistaken identity is called molecular mimicry. It’s another way that leaky gut can trigger autoimmune disease.
How Do You Repair a Leaky Gut?
The very first place everyone should begin is by following the 4R approach:
Remove. Remove all inflammatory foods that can damage your gut such as gluten, dairy, corn, soy, and eggs. You’ll also need to ditch toxic foods including sugar, caffeine, and alcohol. You’ll also want to eliminate any gut infections you have.
Replace. Replace the bad with the good. Adding digestive enzymes to your regimen will help support optimal digestion and nutrient absorption, as well as assist your body’s intestinal repair and inflammation responses.
Reinoculate. Restore the beneficial bacteria in your gut with high-quality, high-potency probiotics to re-establish a healthy microbiome.
Repair. Provide your gut with the essential nutrients it needs to repair itself.
I like to use L- Glutamine and collagen as well as bone broth.
Understand that this is a general outline for how I treat Leaky Gut. Every case and person is different and healing time will depend on many factors, such as time spent in trauma or stress, infection, disease, how sick the gut is, the emotional state of a person, how motivated the person is to follow the plan. There is no one size fits all approach, but this is the outline. When the gut becomes injured, we will always be in a fight or flight mode to some degree. We don’t want to live here, it’s unhealthy to keep our nervous system in sympathetic mode. If you know me well enough, you have heard me talk about parasympathetic and sympathetic. This also has a lot to do with your gut, your digestion, and the vagus nerve. When we take away the things that your body is defending itself from, the body can use that energy to heal.
Remember this will be a multidisciplinary approach. With some people the gut may be healed, but they can still be having issues, like a person who has IBS. Many times the root cause is the emotional and energetic state of a person that needs to be addressed. Again we are looking for the root causes. The gut is only one part of the entire picture.
Inflammation is spread via the nervous system. The nervous system and the lymphatic system run together as well as the cardiovascular system. The lymphatic system also includes your immune system. If you have a gut problem, you have lymph problem and vice versa. In order to address the gut issues, you need to deal with the lymphatic and nervous system. Can’t do one without the other. Cue in breathing and lymphatic work. Learning how to breathe properly will help to 1- calm down to vagus nerve and 2- the diaphragm will help to “pump” the lymph. Learning to do your own self Lymphatic work will also help to keep it flowing and allow your organs to function properly. I offer all these treatments in my physical office and also via Zoom online sessions. If getting in to see me is a issue, then I have a online school where you can find the courses you will need to fix yourself. I have breathing, bracing and the pelvic floor, which will walk you through a self help program to fix your breathing pattern, learn how to create IAP (intra abdominal pressure) and working on your pelvic floor issues. You will also find 2 lymph courses, so you can work on and address your lymphatic system with all the same step by step directions I give my clients in the office. You will also find a course on reversing autoimmune and chronic disease, which will walk you through everything that is in this blog. All of my courses come with a power point presentation, PDF’s that you can print out, and videos walking you through the drills you need to perform. I also have a On Demand channel that you can subscribe to at a low monthly rate which holds “classes” that go over much of what is in the courses. All of this can be found on my website. I also like to supplement my treatments with clients by using ANF (amino neurofrequency) discs to aide in the healing process and fighting off infections. More on this in another blog post. You can also find out more information from my website under ANF therapy.
Many times when working with people, once you heal the gut, many of the other issues tend to go away. This is why I like to start here. If I notice that functional neurology treatments are not holding, or we are not getting the results that we should be getting, I like to discuss gut protocol with my clients. As you can see below with the picture, there are MANY reasons why a specific muscle or organ can be “off” or “inhibited”. Again, using applied kinesiology muscle testing concepts, we can search out where exactly the issue is coming from. No more guessing and randomly releasing things that shouldn’t be released.
If you have questions, would like experience a session for yourself, feel free to reach out to me! I would love to help you live a better life pain free!