Leaky Gut

Many years ago Hippocrates said that all disease begins in the gut.  Recent research is validating that statement.  You may have heard the term "leaky gut" and wondered about it.  The official name is intestinal permeability and it has been linked to many chronic diseases, especially autoimmune diseases.  Think of your digestive system as a very long tube and in the intestines you have one cell thickness between the inside of the tube and your blood vessels.  This makes it easy for nutrients to be absorbed but if the junctions holding these cells together is loosened, larger things can pass thru and cause inflammation and  an immune response.  This is leaky gut.  So what causes this?  There are a lot of things that can trigger it and one of the problems today is that we have multiple exposures that join together to cause a problem.  Some of the common triggers include stress, toxins, gluten, medications, pesticides associated with GMOs or possibly the GMOs themselves.  Often people with leaky gut will have a number of seemingly unrelated symptoms that their doctors cannot explain like brain fog, fatigue, irritable bowel syndrome and skin breakouts. 

So what can we do about this?  I'll discuss that next time.