Leaky gut is highly correlated with autoimmunity. If you have autoimmunity, it’s pretty likely you also have leaky gut. Your gut lining is only one cell layer thick like a nice thin layer of cheesecloth. It’s a thin, clean, beautiful construct until it is penetrated.
Leaky gut is when the lining starts to open up and foreign matter passes through to the gut. The gut lining protects you from things like undigested food proteins, toxins, and bacteria. Add in that your immune system exists to protect you and react to all invaders. So anything that permeates the gut lining is seen as an invader.
And, the amazing thing about the immune system is that it has an immune memory. Your immune system remembers these invaders, and begins to react to them, attacking them.
This is what leads to food sensitivities. It’s like we’re eating non-digested proteins that are getting through. These proteins are larger than what the gut lining allows passing through. The immune system doesn’t like large proteins. (Larger proteins that get through tend to be from things like bacteria, viruses, fungi, and parasites.)
The immune system creates a memory cell for these proteins. Then the immune system starts to attack those proteins. Unfortunately, it can start to attack healthy things like broccoli, thinking that it is a dangerous threat.
So, you need to figure out what your food sensitivities are. Elimination diets cut the foods that cause the most common food sensitivities.
Gluten is a very common culprit for Leaky Gut.
After a period of elimination of about three to four weeks, you add those foods back in one at a time. If you have any reaction to a particular food, then you know that you have a sensitivity to that food. It’s important to not eat these foods for at least three to four weeks. 21-23 days is a half-life of an antibody. If you have an antibody to a certain food you need to make sure you cut that antibody load in half. When you do this and halt the immune attack it allows you to heal leaky gut.
Then with the antibody load cut in half, when you reintroduce a food you may get an outward expression of symptoms (brain fog, joint pain, diarrhea, stomach discomfort, etc.) that you have not felt previously. This is from the ramp up effect which is the doubling of your antibodies.
Important to note – reactions can be delayed. It can take hours or up to days later to happen, so it’s important to only reintroduce one food every three days or so.
A Healthy Gut Solution
A main focus to solve leaky gut is to figure out what those causes are and what it takes to put the flames out. That’s how you are able to achieve remission, by addressing these issues. Identifying your unique triggers is the key to success when talking about remission. If you can’t identify where the sources of inflammation and stress are coming from it’s going to be hard to heal.
If you can’t give your body the necessary ingredients to work well, it’s going to have a harder time healing. And we know the medication approach isn’t actually addressing these underlying issues. It covers up the symptoms and people become reliant on that.
Our goal is to fix the problem and we do that by identifying what the causes are. The big takeaway on diet is being able to identify if there are any aspects of your diet that are actually inflaming your autoimmune condition.
There are many different and important aspects, so be patient as you move through options and be ready to stay motivated and try, try, try again.
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