HH379: Leaky Gut-What It Is and Why It Matters

Welcome back to another episode of health hacks as I continue talking to you about your gut. This is episode four, and today I'm talking to you about leaky gut, what it is and why it matters. Now, leaky gut is when the gut lining becomes permeable. And what I mean by that is our gut lining, first of all, it's very, very thin, and it is what literally keeps the nutrients and all of our food coming into our entire digestive tract, within the tract, except for once, broken down, the nutrients that we want to get out to our cells can move through our gut lining and everything else continues on through our digestive tract to then into our colon and to be removed from the body through our stool and urine. And when that very thin lining becomes permeal, it becomes leaky, and think of it like a picket fence, and it should be nice and tightly together with no gaps in the fence, versus when it becomes leaky, then we start to have gaps in the fence that allow other things through and into our bloodstream, such as antibiotics and bacteria, etc, that are never supposed to get into our bloodstream. And so this then when this happens, it triggers inflammation. It triggers an immune response. In fact, leaky gut is the cause of all auto immune disease, among other things, it can also trigger food sensitivities and even brain fog. And so we definitely do not want to have leaky gut, and if you suspect that we have it that then we want to be looking to heal that using natural herbs that really help to build up and strengthen that lining again. So there's many things that can cause leaky gut, such as gluten and dairy, eating a lot of that can damage the intestinal wall, as well as inflammatory foods, like sugars are highly inflammatory, as are gluten and dairy that I've already mentioned. And food sensitivities can trigger leaky gut as well as leaky gut can trigger more food sensitivities. So it's kind of the chicken and the egg, the more unhealthy your gut is, the more food sensitivities you can develop. Use of NSAIDs, so non steroidal anti inflammatories such as ibuprofen, chemo drugs, antibiotics, alcohol, use birth control, use chronic stress and chlorine and fluorides can also all create intestinal wall damage, and those are some of the most common ones. And so we need to look at, okay, how do we heal leaky gut? And again, that comes down to some lifestyle changes, understanding the impact of stress and sleep on our gut health, as well as looking at foods that are going to support our gut health and making sure that we are rebalancing our good and our bad bacteria, and then using herbs that will strengthen the healing of our gut lining. So there are many things that we can do to support the health of our gut lining and overcome leaky gut from a holistic perspective. And if that's something that you would like to know more about, feel free to reach out to me. At Melissa, at your guided health journey.com.