WHAT IS LEAKY GUT

The healthy intestine has the important role of acting as both a barrier and a filter through selectively closing and opening intestinal tight junctions, depending on the need.

The healthy intestine allows for nutrients to be absorbed, and blocks the absorption of toxins and pathogens.

Think of the lining of your digestive tract as a net with extremely small holes in it that only allow specific substances to pass through. Your gut lining works as a barrier keeping out bigger particles that can damage your system.

When someone has leaky gut (often referred to as increased intestinal permeability), the ‘net’ ( aka tight junction) in your digestive tract gets damaged, which causes even bigger holes to develop in your net. Now things that normally could not pass through are able to make their way through.

Some of the things that can now pass through include proteins like gluten, bad bacteria and undigested food particles.

When these food particles and other proteins enter the bloodstream through a leaky gut instead of being properly broken down and absorbed, they are now ‘foreign invaders’ and must be destroyed.

It’s like opening the front door of the house and allowing burglars to enter. The body’s defence system fights back (just like it does when you catch a virus) and it’s during this fight that uncomfortable symptoms are experienced.

This causes a vicious cycle, creating inflammation in the body, which creates more damage to the gut lining.

A lot of the symptoms of leaky gut are caused by the multiple food sensitivities that develop as a result, and the inflammation this causes in the body.

This means that the best course of action to start feeling dramatically better is to identify and remove all source of trigger foods and chemicals from your diet, which will not only eliminate symptoms, but also allow the gut to finally heal.

It's important to know that the reaction to each specific foods is not like a typical food allergy, and the symptoms can take up to 72 hours to show up — it’s called a delayed immune response, and is mediated by IgG (rather than IgE, which is responsible for a ‘true’ allergic reaction, which causes very quick and severe reaction to foods like peanuts).

By far the best way to identify your triggers is by doing an elimination diet… which we will do as part of the 'Finding Your Ideal Diet' section of this program.

We are big proponent of bio-individuality and the fact that no one-diet-fits-all, and leaky gut is the best example of this. The healthiest super food on the planet can be your worst triggers if you've developed a sensitivity to them.

So never assume that because something is ‘healthy’ it's good for you.

One of the most important thing we want to teach you as part of this program is to learn to listen to your own body!

COMMON SIGNS & SYMPTOMS

• Digestive symptoms (diarrhea, constipation, reflux, etc)
• Multiple food sensitivities
• Nutritional deficiencies (iron, zinc and B12)
• Fatigue
• Headaches
• Frequent cold & flu
• Nasal/sinus congestion
• Joint pain
• Skin issues (rashes, acne, hives)
• Anxiety and depression
• Brain fog
• Auto-immune diseases (like Hashimoto’s)

CAUSES OF LEAKY GUT

The cause of Leaky Gut is widely debated in the medical community. However, there is some level of consensus that the following are the basic contributors:

Diet: Consuming high amounts of refined sugars, processed foods, preservatives, refined flours and flavoring introduces massive amounts of chemicals into the body that are seen as toxic. If your body has a hard time keeping up, the toxins start to build up and cause inflammation.

Chronic Stress / Trauma: We’ve seen a stressful event as the trigger in many of our clients.

Brain Injury (TBI): Research shows that a severe brain injury / TBI causes leaky gut to happen almost instantly.

SIBO (Small Intestinal Bacterial Overgrowth): About 50% of people with SIBO also have leaky gut. We'll cover SIBO in more details in Phase 2 ' The Big Clean Up'.

Inflammation: Any type of inflammation in the gut can lead to Leaky Gut. Unfortunately, this means that the food sensitivities and resulting inflammation can create a vicious cycle. People with coeliac disease often have a leaky gut as a result, which can explain why gluten removal might not be enough for complete resolution of symptoms. Environmental toxins (like heavy metals and pesticides), are another common cause of constant inflammation leading to leaky gut.

Mould: Toxic Mould Illness or Chronic Inflammatory Response Syndrome (CIRS), also known as bio-toxin illness can widen the gap junctions in the gut.

Imbalance in gut bacteria (Dysbiosis) /gut infection: Yeast overgrowth (Candida), parasites and not enough good bacteria can all lead to leaky gut. We will cover this in more details in Phase 2 'The Big Clean Up'.

Medications: Antibiotics, NSAID, opioids, proton pump inhibitors (nexium, losec), to name a few.

Zinc Deficiency: Zinc is a critical player in maintaining a strong intestinal lining. A deficiency of the mineral can lead to the mucosal lining losing strength and becoming more permeable. There are studies that show that supplementing with zinc when it is deficient can dramatically improve intestinal lining integrity.

Zinc deficiency is rampant in our society. Vegetarian and vegan are especially at risk (the best source of zinc is meat).

A leaky gut (and other digestive issues) can lead to zinc deficiency, creating a vicious cycle.

MOST COMMON TRIGGER FOODS

It’s important to understand that everybody will have different food triggers, and different symptoms associated with it. The relation between ingesting the trigger food and the symptoms may not be obvious, as it can take up to 72 hours for symptoms to develop.

It's also common for your main trigger food to be your favourite food. This is especially true for dairy (hello cheese lovers!).

Although you can react to practically anything you eat, it’s useful to know what the most common triggers are.

*Note that gluten and dairy are by far the most common.

• Gluten (anything containing gluten... it's important to read labels)
• Dairy (note that it's the protein called casein that's the issue here, not the lactose.)
• Soy products (including tofu, soy sauce, etc)
• Eggs
• Nuts and seeds
• Corn
• Nightshades (bell pepper/capsicum, chilli, paprika, cayenne, tomato, eggplant, white potato, goji berries, ashwagandha (a popular adaptogen)

HOW DO YOU HEAL A LEAKY GUT

The steps recommended in this program will take you through everything you need to do to heal a leaky gut.

Here's an overview of the important steps:

Remove Triggers

The first step is to stop eating the foods that you're sensitive to so that you stop the inflammation response in your body.

We will eliminate the most common trigger foods as part of the Reset, Supersafe and Safe diet, and then test your tolerance as part of the Adventurous diet.

It’s very important to completely eliminate those foods at first – if you have developed sensitivity to those foods, even a very small amount can trigger a reaction in your body (creating lots of bothersome symptoms and overall inflammation). The good news is that if you eliminate the foods you are sensitive to for long enough (usually 3 to 6 months) and heal your gut lining, you will be able to eat most of those foods again!

In the Adventurous diet, we will slowly re-introduce the trigger foods again to test your tolerance. You'll need to pay attention to your body when re-introducing these foods so you can figure out your own sensitivities. Reactions can be anything from digestive upsets to headaches, joint pains, anxiety, cravings for sugar and junk food, difficulty sleeping and fatigue. If you do experience relief when taking a food off your diet, and symptoms come back when re-introduced, it's a strong indication that you're sensitive to that food.

Clean Up the Gut

Addressing any imbalances in the gut, such as SIBO, parasites and dysbiosis is very important, as these can prevent you from healing a leaky gut. We will address this in Phase 2 of the program 'The Big Clean Up'.

Detoxify

As toxins can cause leaky gut, it makes sense that removing toxins, and reducing your exposure to toxins, are important steps. We'll start addressing this in Phase 1 by first Reducing Your Toxic Exposure. In Phase 3, we will go deeper and actively work on detoxifying the body of accumulated toxins.

Supplements

We believe that the steps outlined above are more important than supplements to heal leaky gut. However, here are a few that are commonly used for leaky gut:

L-Glutamine: For full benefit, take up to 20 grams per day in divided dose.

Slippery elm and Marshmallow root: Those can be great for some people. However, if you have SIBO, we recommend avoiding them as they can feed the gut bacteria and cause unpleasant gut symptoms.