Gut What?

Gut health is an essential—and repeatedly overlooked—starting point for achieving optimal health and preventing disease. Your gut is often referred to as “the missing link” and its health is important for everyone, not just those with digestive issues. Whether your goal is to lose weight, increase your energy, better your immune health, rid yourself of sugar cravings or resolve digestive issues, always start with the gut. It is the cornerstone for optimal health and the avenue through which nutrients are incorporated into the body.

Past dieting, antibiotic use, a stressful life and environmental toxins can all be impairing your health—even if you currently have a perfect diet. If your gut health isn’t up to par, even the most nutritious foods may not be broken down or absorbed properly. Eating healthy food is only half of the nutrition story. You need to be in the ideal state to digest food, too. So while it’s important to make the best food choices possible, it’s just as important to prepare your body to digest it.

What Makes a Gut Leaky?

A leaky gut (technically known as increased intestinal permeability) is when the lining of your intestine, which is supposed to keep the contents of our digestive system separate from the rest of the body, has become compromised…leaky. This allows large particles to slip through the gut membrane and enter into the bloodstream…not good! Your body perceives these particles as invaders, triggering an immune response which can then set the tone for a host of health issues such as food allergies, autoimmune conditions and more.

What Causes Leaky Gut to Happen?

Leaky gut is usually caused by eating foods with anti-nutrients, like grains—both refined and whole. These can basically tear holes in the intestinal lining because we can’t break the anti-nutrients down very well. This could be because of how different grains are these days than they used to be (grains have evolved into a totally different food!), or as a result from a lifetime of doing things that weaken our digestive function such as consuming refined foods, taking rounds of antibiotics, drinking alcohol, and being chronically stressed out. I’ve concluded that it is a combination of all of the above that causes leaky gut to happen.

What are the Symptoms of Leaky Gut?

Leaky gut can result in digestive symptoms like bloating, gas, burping, constipation or diarrhea, and it can also present itself in ways that we wouldn’t necessarily associate with the gut, like migraines, eczema, weight gain, blood sugar issues, food allergies, fatigue, anxiety and autoimmune conditions. A lot of these symptoms are the same symptoms you’d find with food sensitivities or chronic inflammation. Fortunately, the treatment for any of these conditions is the same, and we’ll cover that in a moment.

What Testing is Available for Leaky Gut?

If you want to differentiate and know for sure whether you are suffering from a leaky gut rather than something else, there are tests available to do just that. It’s safe to assume if you are suffering from more than a few of the symptoms we talked about that your gut isn’t in top notch health, and everyone can benefit from implementing strategies to healing a leaky gut—even if yours isn’t leaky. Like I mentioned earlier, gut health is important for everyone, so it’s beneficial to act as if you have a leaky gut and take the measures to heal it even if you don’t.

All of that said, there are some tests that can be done to verify whether or not you have a leaky gut. A leaky gut cannot be not found on the usual tests, not even with an endoscopy or colonoscopy, so these tests are quite specialized. Talk to your doctor about receiving these types of tests to check for leaky gut:

1. Urine test – specifically the Lactose/Mannitol test

2. Parasite test

3. Bacterial dysbiosis test

4. Comprehensive Stool and Digestive Analysis test

5. Blood test checking for IgG and IgA antibodies

6. Food allergy tests (but often food allergy tests can miss a sensitivity or indicate an allergy to a food you don’t actually react negatively to)

How Do I Heal my Leaky Gut?

Just like leaky gut can develop slowly over years or even decades, the healing process will also take time. With our clients, we see it taking anywhere from three to six months, and sometimes upwards to a year. It’s important to be diligent and consistent about the following tips in order for your gut to heal from the inside out.

Here are the five steps we walk our clients through to heal a leaky gut:

1. Stop eating foods that damage the lining of your gut.

2. Start eating foods that reduce and heal inflammation and restore the healthy gut bacteria.

3. Get stress and sleep under control.

4. Take gut healing supplements & minerals.

4. Start moving and get your blood pumping.