#120 Solving the Mystery of Leaky Gut

The information provided in this podcast is educational and not intended to diagnose or treat medical conditions. Dr. Donnie Wilson struggled for decades to solve her numerous health issues and heal her body. But with focused determination, she healed herself, and in doing so, she discovered the Dr. Donnie stress recovery Protocol. On this show, you're going to hear from doctors, nutritionists and Experts along with Dr. Donnie, who will give practical advice and wisdom to help heal your body. This is how humans heal.

Hi, I'm Dr. Donni Wilson. Welcome to How Humans Heal. I'm so glad you're here, especially today, because I want to talk about leaky gut, what it is and how it's caused by stress and why it's such an unknown, a sneaky situation going on inside of us that most time we're not aware it's even there. Actually, what the research shows is that more than 50% of people who have leaky gut do not have any digestive symptoms. They might not be having any diarrhea or bloating or even constipation or reflux. So your digestion might feel completely fine, and yet you likely have some degree of leaky gut. Most practitioners. Well, first of all, most practitioners don't even talk about leaky gut. And if they do talk about leaky gut, they talk about it as one thing. And what I like to emphasize is that leaky gut is actually on a spectrum from mild to moderate to severe. And so, really, ultimately, and this is what I'm going to be sharing with you today, I think we should be asking not, do you have leaky gut? We should be asking, what degree of leaky gut do you have? How severe is mild, moderate, or severe? And so I encourage all of you to ask yourself that question, if you weren't already, what severity of leaky gut do you currently have? And then you might say to me, well, how would I know? Well, sometimes you do have symptoms, but it could be anywhere in your body. Leaky gut is linked to everything from anxiety, depression, dementia, or forgetfulness. Distractibility, as well as migraines. It's also linked to all kinds of different allergies and skin conditions, as well as autoimmunity and kidney disease, as well as change in menstrual cycle and fertility issues can also be linked to leaky gut, as well as, let's see, I think I said autoimmunity already. And also I have identified a link between the likelihood of having a positive HPV and abnormal Pap smear with having leaky gut. So there's things that aren't even yet connected. We don't even. The research may not exist to show it yet, but I see it clinically. Because I've been researching, identifying and helping patients with leaky gut for more than 22 years. I had to heal myself from leaky gut, which means bringing it from a severe state to as mild as possible. My goal, goal on a day to day basis is I want to be constantly aware of leaky gut, constantly taking action every day to prevent leaky gut from becoming more severe. Why is that? Because I've read the research, hundreds of studies that connect leaky gut with all kinds of major health issues, including diabetes, heart disease, cancer and dementia. So if we want to be preventing health issues, also osteoporosis is linked to leaky gut, then we need to be thinking about it on a daily basis and taking steps to prevent it and to heal it. Even if you're like wondering if it's there, you're like, my digestion feels fine to me, that doesn't mean anything. If you have any digestive, any kind of health issues in your body at all, including weight gain, is definitely associated with leaky gut. So we need to be thinking about this, and I encourage you all to start putting it at the top of your list. It's the underlying cause of so many other health issues. So we can't. I don't want you to be missing it. I don't want it to be sneaking under your radar anymore. It needs to be addressed. And here's the thing is we can. There's so much we can do about it. There's so much we can do to help our body heal leaky gut. In fact, our bodies grow new intestinal cells every day. We can grow new intestinal cells. And that's where the leaky gut exists. A lot of times my friends will joke with me, they're where is this leaky gut and what's leaking? Where? So leaky gut exists in the intestinal lining. It's where all the cells line up to make the walls of your intestines. If you think of your intestines as a tube and the tube is going to have a walls of the tube. Those are made up of little cells all lined up next to each other. And what happens is those cells turn over just like our skin cells. We slough off our skin cells and grow new skin all the time, right? We just don'.

Same thing happens in our intestines. So our body grows new intestinal cells. Now our intestines are as big as a tennis Court. That's a lot of surface area for our body to regrow on a continual basis. And then if you think about what damages those intestinal cells, well, they're damaged by stress of all kinds. From psycho emotional stress stress. Major stresses like a death in the family, a divorce, a moving your home, change in your job even could be minor stresses every day. Like stress of just having a job and being a parent and having deadlines and getting things done as a normal human. That stress actually stresses your intestinal cells and makes it harder for your body to grow new intestinal cells. Right. Also stresses from toxins like pesticides on non organic.

Higher amounts of caffeine and alcohol intake. Definitely gluten. And so even people who do not have celiac disease or gluten sensitivity, Gluten itself is known to damage intestinal cells for all humans. So it's important for everyone to know that if you're consuming something with gluten, which is in barley, rice, spelt and wheat grains, then you're going to have some damage to your intestinal lining. It's just the way it is. If you're getting exposed to pestic. If you're getting exposed to stress. And so you start to realize we all are being exposed to these things pretty much on a daily basis. Unless we're being really, really, really careful. Even then we're getting. I'm getting some exposure anyway because I have stress even doing things to help all of you with your health. And I have stress just from being a human in my life. So we're gonna have stress. It's not about the illusion of thinking we're not gonna be stressed, we're gonna have stress. Like I. Sometimes people joke with me like, Dr. Donnie, are you like stress free? And I say, no, I'm not stress free. I'm a mom. I run businesses. I love to challenge myself with new things. I love to travel. I'm gonna have some stress exposure, including some toxin exposure, even when I try to minimize it as best I can. So. So it's not about trying to avoid all the stress. To me, the focus needs to be on how do we help ourselves recover from stress. And one of the key aspects of stress recovery is healing leaky gut and preventing leaky gut. That's why I'm putting such an emphasis on it, because it's a domino effect once the stress happens, which of course, again, we just all came through a pandemic which was stressful even just if we use that example and stress causes our cortisol levels and Adrenaline levels to respond. We end up with too high or too low adrenaline. Either way, too high or too low affects our intestinal cells and their ability to regrow. But not only that, but stress also decreases our ability to digest our food. We know that when we are in a fight or flight, sympathetic nervous system response, it's not going to help our digestion digest our food. So we end up we're eating, of course we need to eat, but we might not be digesting the food well because our bodies are not making as many pancreatic enzymes or digestive enzymes to digest our food. So if the food is not as well digested, that means we have food that's partially digested going through our digestive tract. And when that happens, that undigested food can also be inflammatory and damage the intestinal cells. Then if those intestinal cells are not healthy. This is why we call it leaky. Because it's on a microscopic level. They can't see this on an endoscopy or colonoscopy. The gastroenterologist cannot see leaky gut, which is why they never report it on their on your reports from the gastroenterologist. You also can't see it on a regular blood test. So it goes sneaking by under the radar, right?

Something a lot of people don't know is that too much stress can actually create an abundance of health problems like high blood pressure, high BL sugar, anxiety, migraines, insomnia, even fertility issues. This is because high stress puts your adrenal glands on overload. They release cortisol and adrenaline which controls your digestion, hormones, immune system, energy, focus and even your emotional response. So how can you beat stress when you don't know where to start? That's why we have a free 7 day stress reset program. It's designed to help support weight loss, digestive healing and hormone balancing. It includes support for integrating self care Daily tips come to you by email and video. Gluten free dairy free meal plans as well as grocery shopping lists, journal pages and more. This free program will help you beat stress and put you on the path to wholeness in your body. Get your plan now for free@drdani.com but.

Now you guys know from me, the intestinal cells get spaces between them. Now this undigested food can get sneaking. And when that undigested food gets through the intestines, intestinal wall, right? Because normally it should only be our nutrients and water and electrolytes that should get through. That's what needs to get into our body, right? We need glucose, we need amino acids, we need fatty acids, we need our vitamins and minerals. That's what we want to get through the intestinal wall. But when it's leaky, food that's not fully digested can get through. And what happens is on the other side, in on the other side of our intestinal wall, our IM system is ready to protect us from anything that's not nutrients. And so our immune system tries to protect us from this undigested food. That's why it's triggering food sensitivities and inflammatory responses to food like histamine, because the immune system saying, well, what's this? This doesn't look like glucose or amino acids, I better protect him or her from it. And so it makes these antibodies and other immune mediated responses to the food particles. Now this just perpetuates the damage to the intestinal lining and inflammation throughout your body. Also, what can happen when we're under stress is it disrupts our gut bacteria. We have, of course, bacteria living on us and within us, all around our body. And we depend on those healthy bacteria and other microbes to communicate to our immune system and our nervous system to keep us healthy and functioning well. But when we're under a lot of stress, again of different types, even stress could be from an injury or an infection. When we're under stress from injury, infection or psycho emotional stress or toxins, as a stress, it disrupts our gut bacteria, they show this over and over again in the research. Gluten, which causes leaky gut, also disrupts your gut bacteria. So now we have imbalanced gut bacteria and these imbalanced gut bacteria, which means you have too much of some and not enough of others, causes more inflammation and toxins, that causes more leaky gut. It also damages the intestinal lining. And then these toxins from the bacteria can leak through and get into your body and cause more issues. So there's multiple ways that stress ends up perpetuating leaky gut. And so it can be really hard to get ahead of it. Once you know it's there. You're like, how am I going to get this to stop? Because you can see the domino effect and you can see how each day we have more stress exposure and more, it makes it harder and harder to stay ahead of making healthy new intestinal cells and, and keeping a balance of good bacteria when we're continually bombarding our gut with all these different stresses. So what I had to figure out is how to solve leaky gut. How do we actually turn the current how do we turn the boat around so that instead of working against the current of leaky gut, we actually can start healing the intestines faster than we damage them? That's the way I look at it. We need to be healing, helping the body to grow new intestinal cells faster than we're damaging them. And that's how we solve it. That's the key to what I've found, the success of healing leaky gut and maintaining it over time. Now I'm going to go into so much more detail in my free masterclass about leaky gut and how to heal it. So if you're resonating with what I've already been sharing, then I definitely encourage you to sign up for the free masterclass on leaky gut. I'll put the link here so you can sign up and you're. I'm going to be sharing so much more detail because what I find is the more you understand your body and how your body is affected by stress and how to help it recover from stress, now you have this information and the tools at your fingertips to implement change in your life. And I believe you deserve to have that information. I believe you deserve, you deserve to understand what causes leaky gut and what helps heal leaky gut. This is not something we learn in elementary school. This is not something that practitioners learn in medical school. This is not even what most naturopathic doctors learn in naturopathic medical school. It's what I learned through 22 years of practice and healing my own leaky gut and helping my patients to heal leaky gut. So that's why I want to share it with you, is because I know this information is difficult to find, but I want you to have it and I want you to be successful addressing it. Because it completely helped me change my health and my life. It helped me to get rid of chronic migraines and digestive issues and anxiety. It helps my patients every day to turn autoimmunity off so that they actually no longer show signs of autoimmunity and no longer need to take medications for it. It helps patients with anxiety, depression, menstrual symptoms, pms, fertility, and HPV to get HPV to negative. So I see such a huge, huge transformation in my patients. I want you to be able to experience that, too. And there's things I learned along the way of helping patients with HD with leaky gut, which is that there is something I refer to as the paradox of leaky gut. And what this is, is as much as we want to do more to help leaky gut heal as much as we are willing to take more supplements and do make more strict diet changes. Actually, the paradox of leaky gut is that it heals better and faster if we do less. But we have to prioritize and use the most efficient and effective treatments in doing less, if that makes sense. So one thing I want you to know is healing leaky gut is not about taking more supplements or being more restrictive of your diet. Many people who come to see me have been on restrictive diets for years and they've been taking supplements for years and they still are not healing leaky gut. And that's because most practitioners do not understand the paradox of leaky gut, which is that the more severe the leaky gut, the less you can do. You have to start with the most simple ingredients and the most simple diet changes. And you have to start simple and gentle. And as the leaky gut heals, then you can add in more support to heal leaky gut. So you really need to be ready for a long term process. This is not something that heals in a week or two, although you can make a lot of progress in a week or two. I've had patients who told me within a month that they feel so much better already we can tell that leaky gut is healing and their body's improving. But if a person has long standing or severe leaky gut, it could take three to six months to make a big difference. And it's worth it, right? Wouldn't it be worth it to spend three to six months of doing the diet changes and supplements that you know are going to be able to transform your health for the rest of your life? And now you're going to know what to do to maintain it over time and prevent it from happening again. To me, that is so worth it. But again, it's important that you understand how to do it in the most strategic and efficient way. So. So join me for the free masterclass. You can sign up and listen in and then from there I'll tell you, I'll guide you everything else that I do along the way to successfully address leaky gut. And even though we're continually exposed to stress, doesn't mean that that stress is going to cause leaky gut over again. Because now you're going to know what to do to prevent it, right? We want you to become resilient to stress, not that you're going to be stress free, because that's never possible. And it's not just about giving you relief from stress. To me, that's not enough either. We need to be actually helping your body recover from the effects of stress and then become resilient so that even if you're exposed to stresses and different dietary changes, you should be able to prevent leaky gut from happening again. All right, well, I can't wait to teach you more and see you in the masterclass. And thanks for joining me today here at How Humans Heal. If you haven't already, please subscribe and like and share this episode. And make sure you sign up so that you receive subsequent episodes of How Humans Heal. Thanks for joining me. Talk to you soon.

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