10 Signs and Symptoms of an Inflamed and Leaky Gut

In this video, the speaker discusses the top 10 signs and symptoms of an inflamed and leaky gut. These symptoms include digestive problems, nutritional deficiencies, multiple allergies and sensitivities, skin rashes, a weakened immune system, autoimmune diseases, arthritis, cravings, cognitive issues, and chronic fatigue. The speaker explains how a leaky gut can lead to these symptoms by compromising the integrity of the gut and blood-brain barriers, allowing toxins and bacteria to leak into the bloodstream and brain. The video emphasizes the importance of addressing gut health for overall well-being.

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Key Insights:

  • Signs and symptoms of an inflamed and leaky gut may include digestive problems such as chronic diarrhea, constipation, gas, and bloating.
  • Leaky gut, also known as intestinal permeability, occurs when the cells in the lining of the gut weaken, allowing substances to leak through.
  • Lab tests for leaky gut are not always reliable, and the condition is so common that if you suspect you have it, you probably do.
  • Leaky gut can lead to nutritional deficiencies, as the damaged gut lining reduces proper absorption of essential fatty acids, amino acids, and carbohydrates.
  • Multiple allergies and sensitivities can develop due to leaky gut, as proteins and antigens leak through the intestinal membrane, causing immune reactions.
  • The gut acts as a barrier, allowing single molecules to pass through its cell layers into the bloodstream for absorption into cells.
  • Skin rashes and conditions such as acne, rosacea, and eczema can be a result of increased inflammation and waste buildup due to leaky gut.
  • A weakened immune system may occur as the body’s resources are focused on fighting off food reactions and inflammation instead of pathogens.
  • Autoimmune diseases, where the immune system mistakenly attacks the body’s own cells and tissues, can be associated with leaky gut.
  • Arthritis, including osteoarthritis, can be related to inflammation and lack of repair rather than simple wear and tear on the joints.
  • Cravings for sugar can arise from an unbalanced gut flora, as certain bacteria can influence reward and satiety pathways.
  • Leaky gut and inflammation can affect the brain, leading to cognitive issues, brain fog, memory loss, and even conditions like ADD and ADHD.
  • Chronic fatigue and chronic fatigue syndrome can result from decreased brain function, poor nutrition, increased inflammation, and the body’s expenditure of energy on digestion and the immune system.

Transcript

Hello Health champions. Today I want to go over the top 10 signs and symptoms that you may have an inflamed and leaky gut and if you stay with me and watch all the way to the end you’ll be amazed at how many of your signs and symptoms that may be associated with inflammation and leaky gut.

Number one is digestive problems and that’s no big surprise obviously you may have things like chronic diarrhea constipation may have gas or bloating and you can have things like IBS which is irritable bowel syndrome and that’s a broad descriptive term that covers just about anything but very often is associated with alternating between constipation and diarrhea. SIBO is something that’s been popularized in recent years which is small intestine bacterial overgrowth and one of the main symptoms of that is gas and bloating. What we want to understand is that these are just the tip of the iceberg that there’s so much more going on.

Leaky gut is also known as intestinal permeability and how do you know if you got it? Well there are lab tests but they’re not necessarily that reliable. They’re expensive There are lots of false positives so do you really need a lab test to figure out if you have it. Well not really because this is so common that if you think you got it then you probably do and the other thing is it’s just like a lot of other condition in the body it’s not necessarily that you have it or you don’t but the question is how much do you have it? what happens is you have these cells and there’s different layers you’re supposed to have a protective mucus layer on the inside of the lining of your gut and then on the top on the apex of these cells you have some hair cells and then this gray line which is enlarged here these the tight junctions and they are supposed to keep, to hold these cells really tightly together so that nothing can get through but if this loosens up if there is a poor nutrition or inflammation or auto immune attack then we can get a loosening a weakening of these tight junctions and things can start leaking through in severe cases you could also have leaking both through the tight junction and through the cell if these membranes have been damaged. We want to think about the gut a little differently than most people do because we think of it as putting food inside us when we eat something and goes inside but that’s not really how it works gut is really sort of outside of you cuz you put things in on one end and if your body didn’t do anything with it if it didn’t break it down and actively decide to use it and absorb it then it would come out the other end exactly the same way you put it in but the gut is a tube and out of this tube we’re only supposed to have single molecules cross and we’ll take another look at that to get a bigger picture of that and then these single molecules they don’t just happen to travel across it’s a very purposeful activity there are carriers there’s transport mechanisms to take these molecules across these cell layers from the gut into the bloodstream and then once they’re in the bloodstream then we can take them further into the cell and that’s really the whole purpose of this is to put things in the gut the blood is not really where it needs to be they need to be in the cell because that’s where we can do things with it that’s what we generate energy and we can reassemble these individual molecules into tissue and in the bloodstream is where the battle takes place this is where if some foreign particles if some unintended particles get into the blood now your immune system have to fight it out and make sure that we can neutralize them and that they just don’t get into the cells and if everything works the way it’s supposed to then what gets into the blood and into the cell intracellular that’s only the approved stuff the second thing that can happen with leaky guts and inflammation in the gut is nutritional deficiencies and what happens is we have these villi or fingers in the gut and then if we magnify this we see that on the surface of the cells we have something called microvilli which are hair cells these are also known as brush border and there’s something about this brush border that that is a home for bacteria beneficial bacteria and the production of enzymes that we need to break down the food and if we don’t have a healthy environment in the gut then this brush border gets damaged and we don’t have the proper bacteria and the proper production of enzymes now we can’t break down the food properly and then we can’t absorb it properly so now we get deficiencies in essential fatty acids we get deficiencies in essential amino acid and carbohydrates they’re not essential but to the extent that we eat them we still need to break them down in a proper way.

Number 3 is multiple allergies and sensitivity and this is unfortunately something that we’re seeing more and more of in recent years food intolerance and something called Universal Reactor is if you have a leaky gut and pretty much everything that you eat some of these proteins and antigens leak through your intestinal membrane now you’re going to get multiple allergies and they can get to the point where you are a universal reactor pretty much anything that you eat you’re going to have some kind of reaction to it.

Number 4 is skin rashes so when we have things like acne or rosacea were eczema it’s because when we have a lot of inflammation and we have a lot of immune reactions we also build up a whole lot more debris and waste products in the body we have certain organs of elimination and most people know about things like the liver and the kidney but we also eliminate a lot of stuff through the lungs and the largest organ of elimination is actually the skin Now we could argue depending on what waste product we look as and so forth which one of this is most important but these are the top four elimination organs that we have and your skin is super important to help your body in getting rid of waste and if you have more waste then it’s going to cause some problems on the way out.

The fifth sign of a leaky gut is a poor immune system and why does that happen because your body gets busy with other things so if your immune system has two jobs basically it can fight off pathogens or it can fight off toxins and foods that get into the wrong place that’s a toxin so when we have food reactions and the body starts making antigens and we have white blood cells that go after food that’s in the wrong place now it creates a lot of inflammation and again we’re using up resources on the food rather than the pathogens and foreign intruders.

Number 6 is autoimmune disease what is your immune system supposed to do? It is basically just telling the difference between your own cells your own tissue and those things that are not your own cells so like we talked about food particles and pathogens, virus, bacteria Etc and then it supposed to neutralize and eliminate and fight off those things that are not yourself but autoimmunity is when it gets confused and it can’t clearly tell the difference between self and foreign so in a war analogy it’s sort of like falling prey to Friendly Fire that the more chaos the more smoke the more stuff going on at the same the more difficult it is to tell the difference between self and foreign and some examples of this or SLE like systemic lupus erythematosus which is an autoimmune disease that start attacking a lot of your organs and systems. celiacs disease we have Crohn’s disease and I have Hashimoto’s thyroiditis are more examples of autoimmune diseases and these are becoming more and more prevalent in recent years and Hashimoto’s is probably the most common of all of them and very much under diagnosed because when people have thyroid problems we just give them a synthetic hormone we don’t necessarily go and look for the root cause but Hashimoto’s is an autoimmune attack of the thyroid Rheumatoid arthritis is a devastating attack on the joints on the synovial membranes in the joint so you get crippling arthritis multiple sclerosis is when the autoimmune attack happens to your nervous system and you have messages your brain is trying to send messages out by the electrical wires and if you have an attack to the insulation of those wires called myelin now you’re going to get short-circuiting you’re going to have signals jumping across at the wrong places causing multiple sclerosis and psoriatic arthritis is another example A lot of people think of psoriasis as just a skin issue but it’s actually an arthritis it can be as crippling as rheumatoid arthritis and one more is Vitiligo which is what this girl has it is when you’re losing in the skin.

Number seven is arthritis, or osteoarthritis that you often find with joint pain and this is so common that basically most people over 60 have this to some degree and it starts effecting the large joints of the body like the spine and the knees and hips and shoulders but also the joints of the fingers very common and unlike the autoimmune arthritises this one is usually looked upon as mechanical so people get over 50 or over 60 and they go to the doctor and they take some X-ray and they say you have arthritis in your joint have worn down but this is the wrong way to look at it because your body wears down every minute of every day but when it’s working it gets rebuilt so we don’t want to think of it as a breakdown we want to think of it as a lack of repair so for example most people are going to have if they have knee pain then they’re saying well your left knee wore out well you walked an equal number of steps on your right knee so why didn’t that one wear down Well the answer is they both wore down but one was better at repairing and this is because of multiple reasons like mechanical stability that we get from nervous system control but the other reason again is inflammation which unlike the arthritis with the autoimmunity this is not the erosive autoimmune kind this is more of a generalized type.

The 8th thing that can happen with a leaky gut and inflammation as you get cravings and this starts often with dysbiosis or an unbalanced gut flora and how does that work well the little creatures that you have living in your gut your microbiome you have about 40 trillion of them there is one bacteria roughly for every cell in your body and they sort of have a voice they have a say in the matter sounds strange because they’re kind of living down there but there’s a reason they call it your second brain and there’s a huge relationship between what happens in your gut and what happens in your brain and in the rest of the body so these bacteria in your gut actually signal they participate in your body over all communication and they can influence your reward and your satiety pathways and they can produce mood-altering toxins and basically hijack your vagus so the brain has cranial nerve outflow and the 10th cranial nerve is called the vagus nerve which is responsible for your parasympathetic nervous system or most of your digestion so the vagus nerve is what talks to your gut and to these bacteria and as part of that signaling system these bacteria can basically hijack the vagus nerve so if you have an unbalanced gut and they crave sugar than they can make you crave sugar as well.

Number 9 is brain issues, cognitive issues, mental issues and now you can see how it’s starting to incorporate every system in the body start being affected when you got isn’t working properly and we get things like headaches and brain fog and memory loss and what we have to understand is that there are two super important barriers in the body the first one we talked about that’s your intestinal membrane the second one is to your brain and this is known as the BBB that’s not the Better Business Bureau in this case it’s the blood-brain barrier and while the gut barrier is super selective the blood-brain barrier is supposed to be even more selective because some things that are allowed into the blood are still not allowed into the brain and the same things that start compromising the Integrity of your gut membrane those same factors also start compromising the blood-brain barrier and now if you understood what I was just saying that it pretty much means that if you have a leaky gut now we also will have a leaky brain and if you start having dysbiosis and the wrong kind of bacteria producing toxins in your gut and they leak through that leaky gut now they’re also going to be leaking into the brain and start causing brain fog and cognitive issues. But there’s even more to these cognitive issues much more far-reaching than talk to some videos about frontal lobe inhibition and when your brain starts to be affected when you get more inflammation and challenges to the brain now the frontal lobe also can’t produce the same amount of energy and have the same control that it normally does and the frontal lobe is supposed to turn things off 90% of what the frontal lobe does his to turn off distractions basically and some of these distractions are depressive thoughts and anxious thoughts and worry and so forth and when your brain is working properly when the frontal lobe is strong like a bright light bulb then it’s going to be able to turn off these depressive thoughts and turn off those anxious thoughts and put you in a stable mood when the frontal lobe is compromised now these things start to rise to the surface basically And the same exact mechanism happens with ADD and ADHD that your brain has to turn things off in order for you to be able to focus when your brain can’t turn things off now you don’t focus and you have attention deficit.

Number 10 consequence of leaky gut and inflamed gut is chronic fatigue chronic fatigue syndrome any time they call it a syndrome that means they can’t really pin it on anything cuz there’s so many different factors and it’s expressing itself in so many different ways and it’s very often associated with fibromyalgia because these kind of depend on the same factors things like decreased brain function overall poor nutrition and increased inflammation and like we talked about when all of this is going on now your body has to expend a lot of energy and resources on other things such as the digestion and immune system both of those things are extremely expensive they use up a lot of your fuel a lot of the energy produced in the body goes to digestion and immune system and if your body gets busy with those now you don’t have a lot of energy left over for the things you want to do.

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