What is Leaky Gut?
Picture a healthy intestinal lining as a cheesecloth with tiny holes that allow only fully digested food particles through, while keeping out toxins, viruses and other stressors. With leaky gut, this semi-permeable lining becomes damaged and the tight junctions break apart, allowing undigested food particles and other unwanted substances into the bloodstream. Once in the bloodstream, these substances circulate throughout the body creating widespread inflammation and destruction.
What Causes Leaky Gut?
There are many contributing factors that can damage the gut. These include a poor diet high in sugar and inflammatory oils, chemicals, antibiotics and drugs, an underactive stomach, gluten consumption, stress, imbalanced bacteria and pathogenic overload.
How Can Leaky Gut Affect My Health?
Digestive Health
Digestive problems such as constipation, diarrhea, IBS and autoimmune conditions like IBD and celiac disease, are all signs of leaky gut. A damaged gut can create serious malabsorption issues resulting in long-term deficiencies, and set the stage for chronic illness.
Immunity
Our immune system was designed to fight off invaders while allowing the “good guys” such as beneficial bacteria, to thrive. Unfortunately, as a result of the Standard American Diet, laden with pesticides and GMOs, over sanitization and over prescription of antibiotics, our immune systems have a lot more to handle these days. With 70% of our immune system residing in the gut, the impact these factors have on the state of our health cannot be overlooked.
Allergies
Furthermore, allergies develop when the immune system reacts inappropriately to otherwise harmless substances that have slipped through the intestinal barrier. This triggers a cascade of inflammatory events and can manifest as a variety of symptoms, such as pain, skin conditions, sinus issues or depression.
Anxiety, Depression and Cognition
There is a very strong connection between the brain and gut, referred to as the “Gut-Brain Axis”. In fact, the gut is actually called the second brain, with 40 known neurotransmitters and 50 million nerve cells. An imbalance in gut bacteria or dysbiosis and can cause anxiety, brain fog, poor memory and other severe cognitive issues. 95% of serotonin, our feel-good, happy hormone, is actually produced in the gut, along with 50% of dopamine. The Blood Brain Barrier (BBB) acts in a similar way to the gut barrier, allowing nutrients and other beneficial substances into the brain. When the BBB is “leaky”, toxins like heavy metals, chemicals, food additives such as MSG and other inflammatory substances can make their way into the brain affecting its function.
Pain and Joint Health
Have you ever had a headache and been constipated at the same time? It’s not just a coincidence. The nerves that run through our digestive tract are continually communicating with the brain, and pain is the body signalling to the brain that something is wrong. When toxins leech into the bloodstream through the damaged gut lining, your immune system will see these substances as foreign, mounting an immune response and creating inflammation wherever they land in the body, including the joints.
Fatigue
When the body is continually fighting an overload of pathogens, cleaning up chemicals, dealing with excess inflammation, trying to heal and using its energy and resources to digest food, there’s no question that this will inevitably result in fatigue.
Thyroid, Adrenals and Sleep
Leaky gut can lead to thyroid and adrenal dysfunction due to the high amount of stress in the body, lack of nutrition, infection and hormone dysregulation. Insomnia is also a common concern.
The state of the gut has also been connected to type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, weight gain and metabolic dysfunction.
Now, what can you do about leaky gut? I cover this in my post How Can I Heal My Gut?
Asher Kleiber,
Registered Holistic Nutritionist™
Sources:
Eat Dirt by Dr. Josh Axe