What Is Leaky Gut?

I am excited to tell you about leaky gut. You’ve probably heard this term before. Maybe you are wondering if you have it because you’re feeling fatigued. Sometimes you eat something and it comes right through you. You don’t have any allergy. You have trouble sleeping and you just – your gut is just a wreck, right?

So what is leaky gut? Leaky gut, it’s – actually the scientific name, it’s called intestinal permeability. So what does that mean? Let me explain a little bit about your gut so that this makes sense to you and so that you understand the treatment, which we do here at the clinic.

So your gut, you can imagine as the roots of a plant and you are the plant, right? So if you are a banana plant, right? Probably you know that the roots of that banana plant have a lot to do with the health of the banana plant, right?

So pretty much the roots are your intestines and think about this. If you have roots of a plant that don’t get the right soil and water and the right mineral composition and are taken off, what kind of banana plant do you think it’s going to be? Probably a languishy one.

So when it comes to your gut, your roots are that intestinal barrier where food is absorbed, nutrients need to be very, very, very small so that your intestinal wall, right, your barrier from your actual physical intestines into the bloodstream needs to be intact. So pretty much what happens with leaky gut is that this becomes permeable.

You can think about this as a colander, you know, that people use to rinse their pasta. So let’s say you have pasta that you want to rinse after it’s cooked. So the colander usually just holds in the noodles, right? And then you just go on and do the pasta however if you want.

With leaky gut, you can think about the colander, the holes of the colander getting bigger and bigger and bigger so the spaghetti or the pasta just goes through it, right?

So with leaky gut, this intestinal permeability just gets bigger and bigger and bigger and this happens because the gut wall gets pretty much attacked by different things, gets irritated, gets inflamed, right? So this happens due to different reasons. A lot of people, it’s stress, stress. I don’t know if you ever had a time in your life when you’ve been stressed or sometimes you just feel it in your gut.

So a lot of people don’t know this and that’s – at the clinic here, we do different treatments and we identify what is the root cause of this leaky gut.

So also alcohol. Alcohol is something that it’s a lot of people’s life, part of their lives and unfortunately, it’s very proinflammatory to the gut and it invites the unhealthy species that can actually break down the lining of the gut.

Then there’s also toxins and believe it or not, we do live in a world that when you think about cavemen, right, and how cavemen were living on earth, a caveman had really the basic foods for him to digest. But unfortunately, in the world that we live now, we have access to foods that are very not compatible with our digestive tract.

So what happens is that when we eat something, right, that has been processed and manmade and really didn’t use to exist in nature, when we were made us humans, then the digestive tract and the gut at the bottom has a very hard time opening up the molecules of this food.

So it breaks down the wall of your intestines and that is what causes leaky gut. So again we’re talking about toxins. We’re talking about foods.

So it’s really all connected.

So to heal leaky gut, it’s important to have a very good functioning gastrointestinal tract so that actually the food can be absorbed through the gut wall the way it should be instead of it just acting like sandpaper and making it a permeable leaky gut because when things leak into the bloodstream without being absorbed the way they should, they go into circulation and they can actually cross a lot of other organs where food and toxins can create a lot of imbalances, one of them being the liver, one of them being the brain, one of them just being your overall system. You can be very achy and also brain fog and that has to do because of toxins that shouldn’t be going through are actually going through.

We also may use other therapeutic agents to help you actually digest and break down the food the way you need to, so that you can be absorbing the nutrients instead of these nutrients going right through you.

So a lot of people come see us because they’re like, “Oh, I eat super clean. I eat organic and I work out. But I just don’t feel well. I don’t have any energy. I have all this pain and aches and bloating and I don’t know what’s going on.”

So that is how a lot of autoimmunity develops through an intestinal permeability issue, which can be leaky gut. So if you want to get better, have energy and feel good and happy and healthy, you have come to the right place and I will be here to help you.