#5 How To Heal 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.

Hey, guys.

This episode is from one of Dr. Donnie's live Facebook streams where she answered listeners questions live on Facebook.

Today we're going to talk about leaky gut. I want to go in depth about leaky gut and what it is and.

How to recognize it in your body and how to consider whether it's affecting your health and then how to address it. How best to address leaky gut? Because it's not something you're going to hear about usually in the regular doctor's appointment.

Doctors, you know, even though it's in the research, I mean, there's so many studies that mention they usually use the word intestinal permeability in the research when they're researching leaky gut, they refer to it as intestinal permeability. So if you ever like to look up stuff yourself, use that term, intestinal permeability.

But our kind of short way to say it is leaky gut, because that's essentially it's this microscopic little openings in the intestinal wall and we're going to talk more about exactly what it is. But you know, leaky gut is something that's very common. In fact, I would say that we all have some degree of leaky gut at any point in time. You know, is it a matter of, do you have 10%, 50%, 80% of leaky gut at any point in time in your life? And I wish there was a test that could show us exactly like that will be amazing when that test exists. That's a quick test you could do that just shows you, hey, what's the state of my leaky gut at this moment in time? And right now that doesn't exist. It's just I'm going to talk through what some of the tests are and you. And I'm happy to answer your questions too about leaky gut and how to test for it and how to address it. Leaky gut is something I've been helping people with for quite a long time. It's because I think my own health history involved a lot of food sensitivities and allergies and digestive issues. And so in my search to figure out my own health issues, this is, you know, 25 years ago, 20 years ago, I was searching and searching and reading everything I could. And then of course, I started helping patients who had a lot of food sensitivities and allergies. And so we were searching more. What is this? What's going on? And so along the way, figured out what a big player, what a big part of this is because of leakiness in the intestinal lining. And the more we can master it and heal it and learn how to maintain a healthy gut lining over time is really a major part of maintaining health over time in many ways. So that's what we're going to cover today. I'm going to be watching for your comments. I think I have it where hopefully I can see your comments a little easier. So feel free to post and then I'll hopefully be able to address them along the way or after. So leaky gut is actually pretty common. Like I mentioned, the thing is that a lot of people, when they hear the term leaky gut, they think, does this mean I'm going to have diarrhea? Does this mean I'm going to have digestive symptoms? How am I going to know if I have leaky gut? And the thing about it is that it doesn't necessarily cause diarrhea and it doesn't even necessarily cause digestive symptoms. So the studies show that at least 50% of people who have some degree of leaky gut don't have any digestive symptoms. So don't just think, oh, my stomach feels fine, I must not have leaky gut. That's a real. That could catch you. You know, that could be, you could be missing a major piece of your health issues. If you're thinking that you have to have gut symptoms to have leaky gut. Because 50% of people, patients I talk to, I'll say to them, this could be leaky gut. And they're like, say to me, I don't have any bloating, I don't have any heartburn, I don't have any diarrhea. I'll say to them, no, that doesn't matter. You can still have leaky gut. Some of the most common symptoms of leaky gut are the ones that I hear about the most I would say are sinus congestion. So even if you know you may or may not have still some bloating and gut issues, but if you have sinus congestion or allergies or recurrent sinus infections, which I used to have, that's a sign of leaky gut if you have joint pain. I mean, certainly if you have an injury that makes sense, you have joint pain. But if you have like chronic joint pain, muscle pain, that's quite likely you could have leaky gut happening. Or maybe it's even diagnosed as like fibromyalgia or another term for pain. If you have chronic pain anywhere in your body, head pain, neuralgia, neuropathy, pain anywhere, then think leaky gut. Also, weight gain has been very much associated with leaky gut. So if you're trying to figure out why you can't lose weight and you're like, I'm eating great, I'm exercising, why can't I lose weight? Well, it could be because there's some leaky gut going on that hasn't been addressed. Hi, everyone. Thank you for joining. I'm glad you're here.

Let's see. Also, things like that, a lot of times people think, how is that related to leaky gut? Like the studies, there's studies that show connection between the menstrual cycle, like pcos or irregular menstrual cycle, even fertility issues. So if you're having trouble getting pregnant, it can be leaky gut as an underlying cause that we need to address. Also hpv. I help a lot of men and women with hpv, helping them to fend off this virus and get it to leave them alone. And I find that many people who have HPV also have some degree of intestinal permeability or leaky gut. It's also been associated with fatty liver, other kinds of liver disease, kidney disease, even osteoporosis and dementia. So, you know, basically, like most all health issues can have some relationship back to the gut and leaky gut. And so this is why it's so big. Like I'm always looking for what are the things that if we address them, it's going to have a huge ripple effect and a positive ripple effect in terms of helping you get better faster. So, yes, we can go directly after and address any of these health issues I just mentioned. We can directly address the sinus infection, we can directly address allergies or joint pain. There's things we can do. There's anti inflammatory, even natural anti inflammatories. There's things we can do to directly address the issue. However, to me, I want to get to the deeper level. I want to understand what created it to begin with. Because instead of, you know, instead of just using a medication or a natural approach to help with the symptoms, we want to understand what caused it in the first place, so we can actually get it to go away. And the thing that's underlying this kind of like sneaky underlying cause that you can't see is often leaky gut. In fact, even if you do an endoscopy or colonoscopy, the doctor can't see it. It's microscopic in the intestinal lining, so you can't see it. It's not something you're gonna see on a report. It's not gonna show on the blood work. And so that's, I think, why doctors don't really talk about it is because it's not showing on their tests.

But we know it's there on a microscopic level. And it's. So if you just think through the intestinal cells and the intestines. The intestines are made up the walls. You know, if you think of it almost like a tube running through our whole body, right from our mouth to the other end is all a tube. And in this, this tube is made up the walls that are made up of little cells all lined up next to each other. It's like a tennis court size area of cells, if you can imagine, in the walls of your intestines. And these little cells are just lined up right up next to each other. And they, by doing, lining up one cell after the next, it makes up a wall, you know, and that those intestinal cells have such an important job because they have to prevent anything that comes through our intestines. It has to basically get, be able to get through that intestinal wall. And so really we only want our nutrients to get through, right? We want, we want water to be able to get through the intestinal wall. We want nutrients like our vitamins and minerals, we want glucose, amino acids, fats, our nutrients to get through. That's how when we eat and our food gets digested, that's how it gets into our body, is through these intestinal cells. Either through them, actually through the cell or between the cells. And so that's how it works. In fact, part of the job of those intestinal cells is to complete the digestion of our food. So if the food comes through, yes, we have stomach acid, we have pancreatic enzymes, we have all of which are helping to digest our food. But when it gets to the intestinal cells in the small intestine, their job is to make sure and finish the digestion of our food, down to glucose, amino acids and the smallest form of fat so it can get through the cell. But the thing is, these intestinal cells are also very susceptible to stress of various forms. Like there's studies to show that if, say, a person is under acute stress, or certainly under acute physical stress, like if you had injuries, an accident, and you had maybe fractures or infections, or certainly on certain medications, intestinal permeability or leaky gut increases. So if it happens when we're under extreme stress, just imagine what happens to our intestinal lining on their day to day stress. There's those intestinal cells, by the way, they replicate and turn over on a regular basis. So they don't just. It's not like you make one intestinal cell that lives your whole life or anything like that. It's the body's constantly making new intestinal cells and replacing this intestinal wall on a regular basis. It's just that when we're exposed to stresses, or we're exposed to pesticides in our foods, or we're exposed to gluten in our diet, gluten is also known to open up the spaces between the cells. And so when we're exposed to these substances, it damages those intestinal cells. And again, we need them to be healthy. So when those intestinal cells are damaged, then food is not going to get well digested because the intestinal cells are not able to complete that part of their job. And undigested food can leak through as undigested food. And so that's when food gets through this intestinal lining as a piece of, let's say egg or almond or what. And the immune system, in fact, more than 50% of our immune system is sitting right under the intestinal lining ready to protect us. And so as soon as something that comes through that looks foreign, you know it's not. It doesn't look like glucose, it doesn't look like amino acids. The immune system's like, what is this? And of course, it could be a virus, it could be piece of egg, it could be a piece of gluten. But something that our immune system is like, what is that? It's going to start to protect you from the food you're eating, because the food normally shouldn't get through to that area. And so then the immune system starts making antibodies and cytokines and histamine. And a full alarm fire of immune response is happening each time you eat because of the leaky intestinal lining and this immune response, yes, it's happening in your digestion, in your belly. However, it doesn't just stay there. Those immune cells, the cytokines, histamine, it can go anywhere at once. In your body. And I find that usually it goes to where you're most susceptible. So if you're most susceptible, like, if you tend to get joint pain, you're probably going to feel joint pain. If you tend to get sinus issues, that's probably where you're going to feel it. Or if you tend to get heartburn, you probably feel it there. So it's just knowing your body, where does that inflammation seem to land for you? And it might be multiple places, or it might be in the sort of like ovaries, uterus. And so you might be more likely to get menstrual cramps or fertility difficulties. It could be that it lands, you know, on your skin and you're getting more like eczema and other kind of rashes. And so this inflammation from the gut is landing in different places. And so I think of those symptoms as really like signals, indicators, saying, hey, there's trouble in here, there's inflammation coming in. And so I'm going to show you this symptom. So instead of just getting stuck on addressing the symptom or the health condition that's been diagnosed, we have to look deeper and go, oh, is there leaky gut that we need to address? And sure enough, as we help your body catch up and catch up in terms of new cell production, then you can get ahead of all of this. But it does take some time and strategy. It's not something that just gets fixed overnight. So it's good to know going in. In fact, I've just resolved that I think keeping ahead of leaky gut is just a daily. Something we just need to do as humans on a daily basis because you want to catch up and get your leaky gut healed as much as possible and then maintain it over time. So how to find out if you have leaky gut? There are tests. They've started developing tests like urine tests, blood tests, different ways to try to assess whether you have leaky gut. But here's the thing is, you might be spending 2 to 4 or $500 on a leaky gut test, and they're not that accurate. I find they are best at finding more severe leaky gut, but they might not pick up so much on mild or moderate leaky gut. So to me, if I'm going to spend money on a test, I'd rather do a food panel. And what I mean by that is an IgA and IgG antibody Food sensitivity panel. Because here's the thing, if you do an antibody panel, which is a blood test, and it shows that you're making antibodies to the foods you're eating. So say you've been avoiding dairy, but you're having almond milk all the time, or you're eating eggs because they're an easy protein. So those are coming through your digestion all the time. And you do the panel and it shows positive IgA, IgG, antibodies to the foods you're eating, then it's leaky. That means it's leaky. Otherwise you wouldn't be making antibodies IgA and IgG to the food you eat all the time, because the foods you eat should be getting digested, and your immune system should never have a problem with those foods. So doing a food panel is a way to both get a sense of, is there leaky gut? Am I reacting to the foods I eat? And which foods then should I decrease or take out of my diet for a little while? I don't believe that food panels should be used for avoiding foods forever. It should be that we're identifying foods to decrease or avoid for a period of time while we heal the leaky gut. Then when the leaky gut and the intestinal cells are doing much better, you can bring those foods back in and you shouldn't react anymore. I mean, there's some conditions, some situations where a person seems to continue to react, like, say, dairy is a common one, or gluten. If you have a genetic predisposition to react to a certain food, you might still have some reactivity even as leaky gut heals, in which case we have to take it to another level and figure out how to really calm down that genetic predisposition. Which, there are ways to do that too. But to begin with, I would just say don't get stressed out about thinking you have to avoid a food forever. That's not the point. The point is decrease your exposure so your immune system's not constantly reacting to the food you're eating. Allow the intestinal cells to heal, and then you'll be able to come back to those foods. So doing a food panel now, like this is example of a food panel we use, which is you just do it at home. You can order this online, and you can do it at home. It's just a finger poke, which, of course, is not everybody's favorite thing to do. But you poke your finger, you get the blood sample, you. You put it on the card, on the circles, send it in. And there's. There's so many different companies that do this kind of panel out there. I don't feel like they're all as accurate. I don't trust all of the companies. I've believe me, I've tested, I've tried, I've double checked, I submit my own and I always looking at what's available to find the best one and the most cost effective for the best information. My favorite is a panel that's 96 foods for both IGA and IGG. And because I find that 96 is a good number, sometimes people are tempted to do like a panel of 200 or 300 foods. But what I find is that knowing more foods is not necessarily better information because then you have more foods that you are trying to avoid. And really we can get adequate leaky gut healing by knowing the most important.

Probably even the most important, 50 foods, let alone the most important 96 foods, is when I get the best results and.

More information is not necessarily better. And so I focus on the 96 panel. I do now have a 48 food panel that does IGA and IGG. Remember, IGA is the more like over a few days after you eat the food, and IGG is if it's over, say even three weeks since you eat the food. So you want to look at both IgA and IgG antibodies to foods because they could show different foods and we don't want to miss something.

And then.

The 48 food panel.

Costs less. So the 48 food panel is about $300, whereas the 96 food panel is about $600.

And then you can get the information about which foods are you reacting to? And therefore is there leaky gut? If you're reacting, people say, well, why am I reacting to the foods I eat all the time? Well, the reason you're reacting to the foods you eat all the time is because it's leaky. That's the definition of it. That's giving us good information. So don't just disregard the test, go, oh, this is information I needed. Let me change up my diet, focus on the foods you're less reactive to and eventually be able to come back to those foods once a leaky gut healing. So those food panels can be so helpful. And then the next thing is, you know, you can start to add in nutrients and herbs and we can talk about what things to do to add in to help heal the leaky gut. But first I see a question about how often should you retest.

And thank you, Magdalena, for your question. You know, if you're first starting out and you're doing a process where you're basically identifying which foods to eliminate, like on an elimination Diet and you do at least three weeks of eliminating those foods. And while doing some leaky gut healing, I would usually even plan on two to three months of eliminating those foods and working on healing leaky gut. And then you could retest. I think the soonest I would retest would be three months. More often, I'll say six months. Because when we retest, we want to make sure you've made enough progress to see a difference. And then definitely some people will retest at a year because they want to look back and go, how much progress? Kind of confirm the progress and see if there's some food you can add back in. If it's been a while and you're wondering if you're still having some health issues come up, I would, you could definitely retest even every year. Sometimes I've retested myself every year or every, depending if I'm feeling okay with my health, I might wait and do it in a, in say a two year period or say if I feel like I'm stable with my diet, I might do it every two to three years. But certainly if I start to feel like I'm having new symptoms or health issues, or I start to just wonder, hey, am I reacting to that food that I've been eating more often? Then it's a good time to redo the test because it, and people will question, what is it accurate? If it can change. Yes, this is not ige. You know, ige food allergies tend to stay the same. Like a person will react to, let's say, peanuts. And so we're used to thinking of a peanut allergy as being a lifetime thing. To me, I'm not even convinced of that because I've seen patients where as we heal leaky gut and help balance their immune system, even their IGE allergies can go away. And so doing a retest even of those could make sense, but definitely of IGA and igg. It's a shifting thing. Our diet, our bodies are not set in stone and we don't want them to be set in stone. Right. We want our bodies to be responsive. We want to be able to change our diet and change our lifestyle and add in supplements and have our body actually respond to that and feel better. So. So of course retesting can be really helpful because then you can see. So, yeah, definitely. If it's been a little while since you've done a food panel and you're wondering, how's my leaky gut doing? It could be a good time to do a New panel. And again you can maybe if you did a 96 food panel in the past, maybe you want to do a 48 food panel and this way you get the most common. What I included in the 48 food panel is the foods I see most common, often reactive. So it has the most common 48 foods like it does include dairy, gluten, eggs, almonds, you know, and, and if you but we'll give you a link so you can see the rest of the foods that are included.

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So once you get a sense of how severe is leaky gut for you right now, then you want to add in supplements that can help like I like to right away help with digestion. Yes, it helps if you can eat in a less stressful way. Chew your food well. You know you want to give your body a chance to make digestive enzymes and help digest your food better. But if you know you're under a lot of stress, then.

You may want to actually use some digestive enzymes. Like I use pancreatic enzymes. Because the thing with pancreatic enzymes, this is like protease, lipase, amylase, anything that ends with A's is an enzyme. And these enzymes are made by the pancreas. But when we're stressed, our pancreas can't do a good job. And so we need we just filling in. It doesn't suppress taking enzymes, doesn't suppress your pancreas, it just adds to what your pancreas is doing. And so if your body starts to recover and your pancreas does a better job, it's going to make more enzymes on its own and then you won't need as much external source of enzymes. But if you have leaky gut, especially if it's moderate to severe leaky gut, taking enzymes is going to help because now you're helping out your body, you're helping to make sure the food got digested. So you take them with your food or like at the end of a meal to help make sure the food gets digested so that you can absorb the nutrients and instead of undigested food triggering an immune response and then you also want to use. There's nutrients and herbs that have quite a lot of research showing to help these intestinal cells. Like one that's really common is.

Glutamine, like G L U T A M I N E. Glutamine is an amino acid. It's just that particular amino acid is necessary for those small intestinal cells to be healthy. So and glutamine, interestingly, when we're stressed, what happens is the body diverts glutamine for other purposes. And so these intestinal cells are like, hey, what about us? They're lower down on the list when we're stressed. So no wonder the intestinal cells have a hard time keeping up when we're stressed. They don't have enough glutamine and you don't need. We're not talking high amounts of glutamine. We're talking like, you know, I usually start with 500 milligrams, 1,000 milligrams, maybe 2,000 milligrams per day. We don't need to be doing 5 or 10 milligrams unless you have some other major situation going on where that's indicated. You know, of course with everything you got to check with your practitioner and your health issue. I'm just talking in general. But for healing week, again, you don't need high doses of glutamine. Just 500-2,000mg a day can make a big difference. That's how much those intestinal cells can absorb and use and. Hi Jennifer, thanks for joining. So you're just using some glutamine. You could get glutamine by itself in a powder. I usually use a powder. You can get capsules. You can also. My other next favorite on the list would be dgl, which is herbal licorice. And DGL is a form of herbal licorice that doesn't affect blood pressure, but it does work in the digestive tract as anti inflammatory and leaky gut healing. So you can either get plain DGL powder by itself or you could Get a product that has like the two together, glutamine and DGL together. This for example is a product that I use very, I recommend often because it has very simple ingredients, glutamine, dgl and then it has also aloe which is a plant based, you know, aloe that's anti inflammatory and it has some another thing called arabinogalactan which is Arabinogalactan is. Does a couple things. It helps with leaky gut, it helps with the immune system which you know, helping stabilize the immune system and make immune system more effective. But it also helps to feed the healthy bacteria. And so you know that's an important piece of healing leaky gut as well is to keep your gut bacteria healthy. So we'll talk about that more here in a second. But this type of product, now this one has stevia so it makes it taste. Sometimes that helps with the taste. Or you could throw it into a protein shake or you could put it in water. Or you can also get. There's different variations that have, that don't have stevia. There's some that have way more ingredients. Like you'll find leaky gut healing products that have like 10 different things. It can have cat's claw, it can have something called N acetylglucosamine, it can have quercetin, it can, you can make a big long list of anti inflammatory gut healing ingredients and those can be great too. All of these by the way if you are interested just you can look@drdonistore.com just d r d o n I-store.com and you can look at a lot of different examples of these products. The thing is, I want to warn you is when, if you have more severe symptoms. This is the paradox, I call it the paradox of leaky gut. If you have more severe symptoms and you have more food sensitivities and you're noticing you're reacting to everything, then you have to less is better. So just even as tempting as it is to want to jump in and just give your body as many things at once, it's not necessarily better. Actually sometimes people feel worse when they add in these more complex products because the system is sensitive, the intestinal cells are not healthy, the immune system's reactive. So you can actually start reacting to the ingredients, the different herbs and things in the products. So if you know you're sensitive or you think you may have pretty severely he got then I would start super simple. Sometimes I just start with just a teeny dose of glutamine. Or just a tiny dose of dgl, and then gradually be able to combine them into a combination product and gradually think about whether you could add more ingredients you don't want to. So if you feel worse, my rule is always, if you try anything on your own, or even if you're working with a practitioner, the rule is always, if you feel worse, then stop what you just started, back off and go more slowly. Because if you feel worse, it means your body's trying to tell you it's not ready yet. It needs to go more slowly. And with leaky gut, the thing is, often the more severe the leaky gut, the slower we have to go and we have to match our body speed. It doesn't make sense to try to make it go faster. It's actually going to backfire and make it worse. So pace yourself, be patient, and go gradually. Now, here's the thing with bacteria is that, and I'm happy to, if you have any other questions, feel free to post them for me. But the thing with bacteria is, of course, we love our healthy bacteria in our gut, right? Our microbiome. We know we need bacteria really all over our body, from head to toe, from top to bottom, we have these healthy bacteria. They're actually doing a lot of good stuff for us. They're helping our immune system, they're helping our metabolism. They're just, a lot of times even they're running the show more than we realize, these bacteria. The thing is that our bacteria can easily get thrown out of balance. Same with these intestinal cells. The bacteria get thrown off by stress. So just being exposed to stress or not getting enough sleep or over exercising, over fasting, anything that's just too much stress for your body is going to disrupt your gut bacteria overeating, too large of meals, it's going to overfeed the bacteria. A lot of times, too. I find that people start to get some, sometimes have bloating or digestive symptoms or think they have leaky gut, and they start to go, oh, I must need more fermented foods or more probiotics. And actually, a lot of times it's not the case.

When you have imbalanced gut bacteria. At first we thought this was years back, we thought, okay, the best way to fix it is to flood the body with a bunch of Lactobacillus and bifidobacteria. But when you think about it, that doesn't really make sense, because if you're just flooding your digestion with a whole bunch more bacteria, then it's just going to overwhelm it more. That's when, if you're having more fermented foods or more probiotics and you're feeling worse or more bloated, loaded, it's because you've got too many bacteria now. And so the solution is not necessarily more is better. It's not as more is not necessarily better. Basically, we have to. Instead, the analogy I use is we need to weed the garden. Like, if you think of your. The bacteria living in your intestines, almost like a garden, we want to have the right plants, that we want the healthy plants growing. We don't want overgrowing plants. We don't want. We don't want a whole bunch of weeds in the garden. We don't want, you know, we need to do some pruning and weeding so that we can have your healthy bacteria thriving. And so it's not about just pouring on more fertilizer or pouring on more seeds of plants, right? That's going to overwhelm the garden more. What we need to do is weed it out. Like, how do we.

Identify the overgrowing bacteria, help get rid of them, and then really help your good bacteria thrive. And the important thing to keep in mind is bacteria living in our gut require healthy cells. They kind of attach to our intestinal lining, and so they need this bacteria need help. So if there's leaky gut, very likely you're also going to disrupt your gut bacteria because they're not going to have a healthy environment to live in. And so very often the process of healing leaky gut also involves getting the bacteria back on track. And so if you're wondering, I see your question about how do you test for your bacteria? So if you're wondering, hey, do I have too much bacteria? What are my bacteria doing in there? Who's living in there, then there are tests we can do. The best one, I would say, for identifying bacteria is a stool test. Now, there's quite a few different stool tests out there, even some you can order on your own, that will identify the bacteria based on their DNA. See, here's the thing is, years back, we could only identify the bacteria if they actually grew in a culture in the lab, which is tricky because you may or may not get them to grow and you don't know what you're missing. But now we can do stool tests that identify the bacteria based on their DNA. So they can't.

Even if they die, we can still see their DNA. So we can actually see who's there. These DNA tests for gut Bacteria just have made a huge difference. So when you do a stool panel, you want to make sure it has what's called a DNA PCR analysis so that we can really identify the bacteria. But my preference is to do a panel that shows everybody that it's testing for. I don't want to just see who showed up. I want to see who did they test for. Even if it then shows me some are negative, some are positive, and even if it's a very sensitive test, at least we have the information now of who's living in your digestion. So the one I'm using right now is called a GI MAP stool panel by Diagnostic Solutions, and I use that with patients, and that can give us a lot of information. But remember, when you do a stool test, it's showing us the bacteria in the large intestine, which is where we're mostly interested in knowing them. But there are situations where the bacteria can overgrow in the small intestine, which is called sibo, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. And when the bacteria overgrow in the small intestine, it's not necessarily going to show a stool panel. So for that, we would do a breath test called a SIBO breath test, which is also available for home testing. And the SIBO breath test doesn't show us exactly the types of bacteria, but it shows us the gases that the bacteria produce. So we can see what happens is when bacteria ferment our food, they make gases, and certain bacteria make more gases or say, hydrogen versus, you know, methane gases. And so you can measure the type of gas that's being produced and the quantity of gas being produced by the bacteria. And that can show you if they're overgrowing, especially in the small intestine. And so then we can address it. But it's. This is also important to keep in mind in terms of if you notice that you eat and then you have a lot of gas, either burping or gas or gas cramping or any kind of extra bloating, then you know, the bacteria are over yet being overfed, and there's probably too many bacteria. And so we need to address. We need to weed the garden. We need to. And we can do that using. We don't have to use medications or antibiotics. We can use herbs. There's very effective herbal approaches to get the bacteria to back off sometimes. There's also overgrowing yeast. We need to address. So we can address bacteria, yeast that are overgrowing using herbal approaches. And we can use, in some cases we use Lactobacillus probiotic, depending on your. If your case needs it. But sometimes I'm using instead a probiotic that's not Lactobacillus bifido. That's more like a bacillus spore forming bacteria because they act as traffic directors. I call it a traffic director. They go in and they can usher out the bacteria that shouldn't be there and keep the bacteria that should be there. And so they kind of act as traffic directors. This is what the studies show, which is so amazing. And those same traffic directing bacteria help with leaky gut healing and help with decreasing inflammation in the gut. These traffic directing bacteria, there's a product, for example, called Megaspore can be so helpful because they can help us manage the bacteria without adding more and without triggering histamine too. Some bacteria can trigger histamine. Of course, if you're killing bacteria or yeast, it can trigger histamine. So you end up in this big inflammatory storm. And so we have to go through a very careful process. But it's doable. And I've helped a lot of people recover from this. I just want you to know it's possible because I know sometimes it can feel overwhelming and you're like, how am I going to do this? But it's possible. Here I see a question. Taking berberine for sibo, should I be staying away from fermented foods in general? So if you have sibo, if you have this is a bacterial overgrowth, the small intestine, I wouldn't add more bacteria right now. I wouldn't add fermented foods or Lactobacillus because you already have too many bacteria. What we need to do first with SIBO is we need to. Because sibo is going to have some leaky gut there. By the way, anybody who has sibo has leaky gut. It just goes hand in hand. And so think of sibo as actually probably you had the leaky gut first and then the sibo came along. So we really need to address both. We have to address the bacteria and we have to address the intestinal cells. The tricky thing with SIBO is sometimes you have to address the bacteria first and then the leaky gut. So you have to go in phases, I find to be most successful. And so with sibo, yes, we can use herbs to address the overgrowing bacteria. That would be. Berberine is a favorite. I do like to caution though, that berberine is so effective you have to be careful to not overdo it. Like I mentioned, if ever you go Too high on your doses, even of herbs, and you kill too many bacteria at once, then you can feel worse. And so you want to go slowly. I always start at the lowest doses and increase very slowly. And my rule is always, if you feel worse, back off. And so we sometimes use berberine, but I also like a product called Bioseedin, which you can find@drdonnystore.com that has Berberine in it, but also oregano, garlic, grapefruit seed extract. So it has a combination of herbs that are antimicrobial. So remember, if you have bacterial overgrowth, what you're doing is you're weeding out the garden. You're trying to kill the overgrowing bacteria. This is not the time to add more fermented foods. Or bifido or lactobacillus. This is not the time to add more. The only bacteria that you would potentially want to add would be a bacillus like megaspore, because megaspore is a traffic director, and it helps direct the bacteria to go to the right place. And so that. And fermented foods. By the way, the other thing that happens with fermented foods is they are highly triggering of histamine. And for a lot of people, when they have bacterial overgrowth and leaky gut, histamine is high, like your body's ready to protect you. It's going to send histamine out like crazy, which is going to make for runny nose and sneezing and heartburn and so many histamine symptoms. Right. We talked about MAST cell activation syndrome, which is all of this histamine. And so if you add fermented foods or other foods that trigger histamine, you're gonna feel worse. So for several reasons, I wouldn't do fermented foods if you have sibo. First thing is, let's weed out the garden, get rid of the overgrowing bacteria, and then we're gonna direct the traffic, make sure the food is moving through, because a lot of people with SIBO have constipation. So we gotta keep the bowels moving. Whether that's drinking enough water, getting enough exercise, using magnesium, like magnesium oxide. There's ways to keep the bowels moving, because you don't want it all just stuck in there. You want it moving through. You want the food getting digested. So you need digestive enzymes. And then we can add in the nice, gentle, leaky gut healing, like starting with glutamine, maybe a little DGL as you get rid of the overgrowing bacteria. It's a process. So it's a, it's a gut healing process. But it's possible. I'm just, first off, just, I'm. I think I had sibo back before we called it sibo and thank goodness figured it out. I know I had fructose intolerance. By the way. Fructose intolerance is when you don't digest a fructose well. And maybe some of you have heard of fodmap diet, right? So fodmap diet is a diet where you're avoiding fructose like in fruit, which is a fruit sugar, but there's also a lot of fructose in, in like onions and garlic and other, sometimes in other vegetables. And certainly there's fructans in beans and gluten. So when we say fodmap diet, it's really about trying to decrease your exposure to fructose and fructans and oligosaccharides in general, which is just basically carbs because your body's not digesting them well. Now when it comes to this fructose intolerance, part of it can be genetics. Like there's something like 25% of us that have just genetically, we can only digest so much fructose at one time. And I think I'm one of those people. Even now I can have a little bit of fructose, like I can have a quarter cup of berries, but if I eat too much fruit at one time, I'm not going to feel good. So it's good to just know your body's limits. When it comes to fructose digestion, it's kind of like lactose digestion, right? That's another sugar. The other thing to know is that, remember those intestinal cells, part of their job is to digest our food, part of their job is to digest fructose. So you're finding that you're more reactive to fodmap type foods. That's just because of leaky gut. Your intestinal cells can't keep up with the amount. And so you need to reduce the amount of fructose coming through at any one time. I find this is so the one really key thing with gut healing is a lot of times we tend to overload. We think, oh, my digestion should be able to handle it, or we're trying to do intermittent fasting. And so we have only a small window of time to get our calories in and we over consume at once. But our poor gut, it can't digest that much food. The Intestinal cells are already barely keeping up. They're overwhelmed. So then what happens is all this extra food. What happens with feeds the bacteria and you end up with bacterial overgrowth, small intestinal, large intestinal, or both. And it could overgrow yeast. So it's just because we're overfeeding them. It would be like having a pet that we're overfeeding. And it's, that's the symptoms we're getting. It's, it's. So we have to just go, wait a minute. I can only feed myself a certain amount at a time that I can actually digest. Take some digestive enzymes to make sure I can digest it well, heal those intestinal cells so they can actually help digest the food and absorb the nutrients. And that's going to be huge because the bacteria living in our gut are completely determined by what we're eating and how much we're eating at one time and how well we're digesting the food.

Let's see, here's a question. Foods like vinegar and wine bad for leaky gut. A lot of times people ask me about coffee too. There are some studies that show that coffee can increase leaky gut. I mean, I wouldn't say that. I don't like to make a blanket statement that everybody has to avoid coffee, although I'm super sensitive to coffee. So I, even though I love coffee, I can't drink it. I just, I end up feeling terrible. But coffee can increase leaky gut. So be careful about your quantities. If you, if you feel like you want to have a little bit, it's fine. But if you have severe leaky gut, you may need to take a break from coffee. And vinegar and wine, those first of all are two very highly histamine triggering foods. So if you have histamine issues, vinegar and wine could easily add to that and make symptoms worse. And alcohol in general can also increase leaky gut. So you need to be careful with the quantity of alcohol. I mean, if you, if you're having a little bit of alcohol and a homeopathic remedy, that's not too much. If you, you know, if you're having wine here and there, of course that's fine. But if you're having, if you have severe leaky gut, you may need to take a little while and decrease your alcohol consumption so you can catch up. And once you catch up, once your gut's feeling a lot better, you're going to be able to have these things without a problem. And vinegar is also would be considered fermented, I think Wine might be. I'm trying to think. Beer definitely would be fermented. So you can. I guess the question. It's good. I would say it really depends on your situation. If you're like, right now, I'm feeling pretty good in terms of my gut health and my health in general. So I can have a little vinegar, a little wine. I don't have it every day, but once a week or once every two weeks, and it's fine. But if you're having a lot of digestive issues, I think I would be careful with wine and vinegar. They're probably just going to add to the issue at this point, and it would be better to just say, hey, let me take a break. Let me get ahead of this. Let me get my body back. You got to win your body back is the way I think about it. Win your body back so you're the one in control of all this. And then you can come back to these things that are just, you know, just to enjoy, right? You just want to have some vinegar on your salad so it tastes good, or you just want to have a little bit of red wine, organic red wine, with your dinner here and there. You know, like, you want to be able to enjoy these things. Things. And that should be possible. Okay, let's see. I want to mention that I decided because, you know, sometimes people work with me one on one to help them with this. Especially, you know, if it's. If you've been just trying to solve this on your own and you feel really stuck, then, you know, you can reach out and I can work with you one on one, or we have programs where we do. Working with me one on one and doing a food panel and guiding you through the process. And so that's definitely possible. And then I also decided to create an opportunity where we could do this together as a group. So if some of you have been trying to figure this out, but you're not quite ready to invest, you know, over $1,000, there's a way where we could do it for less. And you would get a food panel. It would be the 48 food panel. And you would get groups. We would do two group sessions where we're gonna talk. I can explain to you how to interpret the food results, what to make of it, what does it mean for you, and how to address the leaky gut. And then we also have. You'll have time directly with me, so I can even answer some specific questions for your case and help you get on the right track for addressing this. So this Group online. I'm calling it a group online leaky gut course is basically $400, $397. And so we can do this. We're going to do this starting and I'm going to do the first one starting in a couple weeks and I'd love to have you join me. So if you're feeling. I just hate for any of you to feel lost and overwhelmed with this because I just know that there's solutions and there's a way through and maybe some of this information you're hearing here is going to help you and maybe that's enough and that's great. But if you feel overwhelmed and you just feel like you need more help, then just definitely know that help is available.

And we can again, either do it one on one or we can do it in the group course. In the leaky gut group course. Let's see. Here's another question. Okay, you've done a lot of killing of bacteria and also lots of antibiotics. Is it also possible to rebuild the good bacteria? I love this question because it can really, you can feel like, what am I going to do? Am I doomed now? You know, like, what the heck? How do I get these back? And of course, we have access to probiotics, which most of the probiotics are out there are really Lactobacillus and bifido, which are two types of bacteria, mainly because it was easiest to produce those two. So that's why we can sell them as probiotics. But there's trillions of bacteria supposed to be living in our gut. So your question is really, how do I get my trillions of bacteria back? Now, of course, they've researched something called fecal transplants, which is basically where you go into a clinic and you can do either. You know, they can basically they give you bacteria from somebody else's intestines.

It can work. They studied it especially for severe issues like C. Diff, which is a bacterial infection. They've shown it to be helpful. But here's the thing. See here, just theoretically, what the idea is, is you're gonna flood your digestion with a brand new population of bacteria. And the thing I find is that when patients have gone through a fecal transplant, what happens is they end up with back to overgrowing bacteria that we have to manage. So it goes from, you might go from a situation where you have very few bacteria or the wrong bacteria to now having a whole lot of bacteria. And so still you're in a situation of needing to weed the garden act back out again. So I just like to mention that because it can. Sometimes we're just so hopeful that something's going to be the fix, the best fix ever. And it's important to go into it knowing that you're still going to have to manage a bacteria even with a fecal transplant. And so to me, what I found more effective is instead of trying to just fix it in one fell swoop, we need to fix it gradually over time. And it's definitely possible, you know, so let me answer that part of the question. Yes, it's possible to rebuild your good bacteria. I've seen it. Patients have proved it to me over and over again over the years. I've been so inspired and impressed by patients because they show me the gut bacteria can come back to balance. We can get the good guys back. We can get rid of the overgrowing guys. It's possible, but it really is a process over time. So I would want to get you ready for a strategy over time and again. That strategy has to do with. Yes, first testing. Find out, what kind of situation are we dealing with? Is there leaky gut? How severe is a leaky gut? Is there overgrowing bacteria or yeast or any other kind of organisms that we need to address?

Sometimes, even if you've been taking antibiotics and different treatments, there still might be some imbalances. So even if you think you've been treating it, I would want to know, hey, where are we now with your gut population? And once we know that, then.

We got to make sure we heal the leaky gut. I think that's a missing piece. A lot of times people will address overgrowing bacteria, but if you never address a leaky gut, the situation is going to redevelop again. And that's why so many people with SIBO and bacterial overgrowth, they treat it and then it comes back, and it comes back and it comes back. The studies show this. To me, it's like, what's the point if you just have to keep treating it over and over? That's not really solving it. So the problem is the leaky gut's not being addressed. And so we have to get to that underlying cause. The other big piece, of course, to leaky gut is even deeper, is that we have to address the stress. If we don't look at how stress is affecting your body, what's your cortisol level, what's your adrenaline, what's your lifestyle? How are you sleeping? How is the stress affecting you? What are the stresses in your life? How can we address them? We have to address the cortisol and the stress, because otherwise this leaky gut is going to just keep on happening and the imbalanced bacteria is going to keep on happening. It just is. That's just what happens to us as humans. So, yes, you can take some antibiotics and kill the bacterial overgrowth. That's going to be a temporary fix. But if the environment, if you're not addressing the whole environment, not just the environment in your gut, Right, So we got to heal the leaky gut environment. But if we don't heal your whole body in terms of stress recovery, it's going to happen again. It's just you're going to keep repeating the same process. And so I really would say the key to getting your good bacteria back on track is not just swallowing a bunch of probiotic. I mean, sometimes we use some different probiotic products, like I mentioned, but we have to get the leaky gut healed and we have to address the stress because otherwise it'll just happen again. And, and even then, even once we get to what I call like a resiliency phase, where you're feeling better, you're ahead of this. It's not recurring, but say a big stress happens, because we never know when stress is going to happen, right? Then it might come back a little bit, but now you're going to know, you're going to be like, oh, okay, I'm under more stress. I need to do more leaky gut healing. Oh, I'm starting to feel those bacteria overgrowing. I need to make these changes in my diet or take these products to help address them. So you're going to become more aware of what you need when stress happens. And that's what makes you resilient. That's what's going to help you stay ahead of this. And the cool thing is, when I hear from patients who have these various health issues go away based on this, like hpv, we address the leaky gut and we address the gut bacteria. The HPV goes away.

That's not something usually you're going to hear in the medical office, why did it happen? Or pregnancy. All of a sudden, a patient gets pregnant. And the only thing we did differently was address leaky gut in the gut bacteria. Why? Because leaky gut was the underlying issue.

Or, you know, joint pain, autoimmunity, fibromyalgia, insomnia, migraines.

Even bones. Patients who come in with osteoporosis, we work on the leaky gut and the gut bacteria and their bones improve without Having to take medications, I mean, this is to me, like, amazing. But it's because we looked at the studies, we see, this is the issue. We know how important our gut health is. We know how important those bacteria are, and we know how important the intestinal lining is. We have to address it order to get ahead of it. And so I think it's about just realizing this is part of being human. I wish we would have known from the beginning, but at least we know now, at least we know now that being human means we have to pay attention to how we're eating, what we're eating, how well are we digesting it, how are we taking care of our intestinal cells, how are we taking care of the bacteria living in our gut? And to the extent that we can do that, it's going to make a big difference in our health. Thank you so much for being here. I appreciate it and I'm so glad to get to share this information with you. I hope it was helpful. And please join me again. And if you're. Again, if you're wanting to look for more information, you can look at my website@drdonnie.com d r d o-n I.com where I have lots of blog posts and articles about this. And then the store, Dr. Donnie store, where we have the food panels and these different products I'm mentioning. I always feel it's important for you to find the best match for you. Like, there's no one size fits all with any of this. It's got to be what's right for you. So please don't take any of this as, like, definitely any kind of, you know, specifics. It's more like, I just want you to have the information so you can start to learn and know your body better and see what you need to do from there.

All right, well, thank you all for joining me and I look forward to talking to you again soon.

Thanks for listening to how humans heal. If you liked this episode, leave a rating and a review. And for more resources, visit drdonnie. Com.