In this interview segment, Kiran Krishnan discusses findings from his human clinical trials on intestinal permeability, commonly known as leaky gut. He explains that leaky gut cannot be identified through symptoms or visual assessment; even asymptomatic, young, healthy adults often exhibit severe permeability. In a study of 22‑year‑old participants meeting FDA “healthy” criteria, 55% showed dramatic inflammatory responses due to leaky gut. Krishnan describes the gut as a dynamic system where portions of the intestine are constantly somewhat permeable. Clinical relevance emerges only when the cumulative leakiness exceeds a threshold, overwhelming the body’s repair mechanisms, especially in the context of dysbiosis. The conversation reframes leaky gut from a static condition to a fluctuating state that becomes pathological when repair cannot keep pace.
Bulletproof radio, a state of high performance. So one of the things I like about your work, Karen, is that you're not just kind of in, in the lab looking at stuff. You're doing human clinical trials, and you've done dozens of them, but you've done some really cool stuff around leaky gut.
Yeah.
And I take that personally because leaky gut was a major part of unwrapping was going on with me, and I have a lot less and usually none, but I mean, none is a very fine thing to say. And all of us have some degree of stuff that passes through or we probably wouldn't have very functioning guts. So what have you learned about leaky gut in the trials you've done? Now that's very different than what we would have known 10 or 20 years ago.
Yeah, so a couple of really interesting things. One of the interesting things is that you cannot tell who has leaky gut. Right? Right. So you would think that people are somewhat symptomatic of it. You would think that you could look at somebody and predict how healthy their gut is and how healthy their intestinal lining is, but it's impossible to tell. I mean, one of the studies we did and we published, we use young, healthy, normal individuals. Right. And of course, healthy normal is a very gray definition, but the way the FDA defines it is really people with. Without any diagnosed chronic illness not being managed for anything, not on any medications, no reported symptoms or issues at all. The average age is about 22, and they were all of normal body weight. So, you know, within, within the spectrum of just having normal composition, and 55% of them had very severe leaky gut, you know, to a point where it was, it was very dramatic on the inflammatory response that the leaky gut created. So my. So the way we understand it as we've progressed through the different research that we've done, is that you likely have some degree of leaky gut all the time. Right. We have, of course, 20 something feet of intestines. So any portion of your intestines can be leaky at any given time. That the moment you start exceeding a certain limitation on the, on the, on the amount of your intestines that are leaky, then that's when it starts becoming really clinically relevant. Right. So as your intestine becomes leaky for whatever reason, you know, a bad meal, a toxin, you got exposed to, whatever it may be, your. Your system is designed to fix that. And then some other part gets a little bit leaky, and then it fixes it. Another part gets leaky and it fixes it. But as the repair slows down with dysbiosis and more and more of the intestinal lining becomes leaky, or over time, that becomes clinically relevant. And so it's not a. People think of leaky gut as like a, as a, as a static state, like my gut is leaky or my gut is not leaky. It's a dynamic state. It's constantly somewhat leaky. But if the net result is a significant leakiness in the gut, then that's going to become clinically relevant.
