Before the Diagnosis of Hashimoto’s or Rheumatoid Arthritis, did you have a Leaky Gut?

What is “leaky gut”?

The formal name for this is called intestinal permeability and all the action happens in the small intestine.  Here lie the villi and microvilli, likened in an analogy to “shag carpet”.  These connect to the cells at the base where nutrients flow into the body through the bloodstream.

Things like gluten, food intolerances, antibiotics, drugs, stress, over the counter pain meds, aspirin, environmental chemicals and many other assaults can cause these shags of loosen and open up. In a healthy state they are supposed to create a “brush barrier” between you and all the bad things hitting your gut everyday. (20 million toxic particles +/_ a few).  This barrier is supposed to selectively take in nutrients and keep out the looters, but when compromised,  the bad stuff gets into your body, causing a cascade of unfortunate events for your health.

This is why “leaky gut” is considered in functional medicine one of the leading triggers in starting any autoimmune disease. These toxins leaking into the bloodstream through holes in this lining trigger immune responses/inflammation in far sites of the body.  When a person has a genetic predisposition toward a particular autoimmune disease, these environmental triggers/toxins leaking through, turn on the genes and voila, your first autoimmune disease. Genes can just lie there dormant. It requires environmental triggers to cause the genes to express their activity. This is why they are at the most 10-20% involved in disease/health and everything else, especially lifestyle (what you eat, how you sleep, what you are exposed to, how you move, where you live, how you think) is the other 80% that contributes to health/disease.

So, here is the sequence:

Develop over time a leaky gut through environmental gut assault (see above):

Have predisposing genes for a particular disease.

The genes begin expressing that disease in particular tissues (inflammation/immune disregulation).

You can heal leaky gut and thus by default can begin to reverse auto-immune diseases. The goal is to lower the antibody counts that cause tissue destruction in the body. This is why it is so important to catch them in the early stages, so natural interventions can be applied to the body, environmental assault can be stopped and the body stops being destroyed. Once a certain amount of tissue destruction occurs, you can’t get it back. Cyrex Labs has Array #     that screens all major areas of the body for antibodies to those tissue. It can take 10+ years for an autoimmune disease to arrive with symptoms.  Cyrex Array #2    is in my opinion, the best lab test available today to diagnose whether you have leaky gut. It tests three antibodies that would indicate a leaky gut process is occurring. To use this lab, you must be connected to a licensed health care professional that uses this lab.