Many factors can lead to a leaky gut. These include a poor diet, chemicals used in our food supply, over-reliance on antibiotics, steroids, and more. One way to find out if you have a leaky gut is to do a functional stool analysis to assess your gut health. Bear in mind that a leaky gut can often be without digestive symptoms. When we see our clients in Tulsa, OK, with various symptoms, such as inflammation, we teach them about functional medicine principles when looking after their gut.
What does a leaky gut mean?
The medical terminology for leaky gut is “intestinal permeability” – harder to say, though! There is a cell layer called the endothelium, which divides the insides of the intestines. Everything you eat goes to your intestines, a protective tube between the food inside and the rest of your body. It acts as a filter and barrier, deciding what should go into your body and what shouldn’t. Think of it like a coffee filter that keeps all the nasty dregs out of your latte. When this filter and barrier stop working, things get into your body that can cause great harm to your health, and this is essentially a “leaky gut.”
But why is this a problem for your health?
Because things are leaking through your intestines that shouldn’t be. This could be some food particle you haven’t properly digested. It could also be fungus, bacteria, or a bug that shouldn’t be going into your body. Once these unwanted items get into your body, they can trigger many symptoms.
Your body is actually going into panic mode and causing the inflammation to protect your body from whatever is leaking into it. That’s when you start to feel unwell. Issues such as fatigue, joint pain, swelling in the body, suddenly holding onto water, asthma, and a host of health symptoms can occur.
Why are so many of us having gut issues like this?
In short, the reason we have a leaky gut can be the nasty chemicals used in our food supplies. It can also be pesticides and antibiotics, food emulsifiers, processed foods, diet, stress, and even hormones.
We believe that functional medicine is the best course of action for our clients in Tulsa, OK, for gut health. We think that gut health is at the center of our health, and by looking further into the symptoms and the why’s, we can determine the best course of action for your gut.
How can you heal your gut health?
Our functional medicine experts in Tulsa, OK, believe that the 5R program is the best way of healing your gut. And the various anti-inflammatory and chronic conditions that come along with it. The 5Rs are: remove, replace, reinoculate, repair, and rebalance. This may include removing inflammatory foods such as gluten, dairy, and sugar. There will need to be comprehensive testing depending on each patient, and replacing with anti-inflammatory foods such as green leafy vegetables, nuts, olive oil spices. We then reinoculate with prebiotics to put good bacteria into the gut.
Repair may mean giving the client good protein, amino acids, and zinc to repair the leaky gut. But each client will have an individual story and an individual functional medication program to suit their needs. Sometimes you won’t have any gut symptoms, but other symptoms will suggest that whatever you may be experiencing comes back to your gut health.
